I’m talking about the “smoke sculptures” that Chicago, 84, made at the end of the 1960s and into the early ’70s. The best of these performances, which she called “Atmospheres” and which she thought of in terms of “feminizing the landscape,” were staged in the California desert.
Video footage shows naked women covered in paint. They wield smoke flares billowing rich colors. The colored smoke spreads like ink in a fishbowl, filling the camera frame and veiling the women before dispersing. You feel like you’re watching a sacred and mysterious rite.
In the catalogue to “Judy Chicago: Herstory,” a retrospective now at the New Museum, writer Jennifer Higgie describes the “Atmospheres” performances as “fleeting, as if an abstract painting had drifted off the canvas and into the sky.” I think of them extending a tradition running from the impressionist Berthe Morisot to the abstract expressionists Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell.
At the outset of her career, Chicago was alert and courageous. The obstacles she overcame — striving not just for herself, but also for other female artists, present and past — were daunting.
Still, her art, as demonstrated by this show, her first comprehensive New York museum survey, has been wildly uneven. At times brilliant and inspired, it has also been clumsy and crass. I would love to not say that second part: Chicago has been so heroic in her fight against sexism that voicing more criticism (she has received so much of it already) feels like an affront to justice. But she’s an artist, and I would feel fraudulent if I didn’t say that this exhibition contains some of the worst art I’ve seen in a museum show — most of it from the 1980s on.
Filling the galleries on three floors of the New Museum, “Judy Chicago: Herstory” contains work from every stage of the artist’s career. Only “The Dinner Party” is missing (it remains in situ in Brooklyn).
The exhibition culminates, on the fourth floor, in a remarkable presentation titled “City of Ladies,” works by more than 80 female artists that resonate with Chicago’s. The loans, from such museums as the Uffizi in Florence, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress and the Jewish Museum in New York, are reason enough to visit the show.
Among the artists represented are Artemisia Gentileschi, Hilma af Klint, Maria Sibylla Merian, Dora Maar, Käthe Kollwitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, Louise Nevelson, Sojourner Truth and Remedios Varo. The works are displayed on pale yellow walls above a plush, burgundy floral carpet. Above them are large banners (originally designed by Chicago for a 2020 Dior fashion show) embroidered with questions that derive from a central speculation: “What if women ruled the world?” The questions include: “Would both men and women be gentle?”; “Would old women be revered?”; “Would there be private property?”; and “Would buildings resemble wombs?”
You can answer them for yourself on the museum’s top level, where a participatory work, designed by Chicago in collaboration with Nadya Tolokonnikova of the activist feminist artist collective Pussy Riot, invites responses from visitors. It makes for fascinating reading. Aligning Chicago, whose feminism can sometimes look dated, with Tolokonnikova — a younger artist whose performances landed her in Russian prison — is genius.
Chicago was born Judy Cohen in 1939. She was brought up in Chicago, the daughter of liberal Jewish parents, and studied art at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her early work was made under the influence of minimalism and its West Coast siblings, the “Light and Space” and “Finish Fetish” movements.
These were cool, formalist movements that left little room for self-expression. Chicago felt obliged, she said, to “mask that [her work] was made by a woman.” Yet she used candy colors and gliding tonal shifts to achieve a distinct kind of optical dissolve and shiver. She also painted car hoods in organic, Rorschach-like designs that sometimes suggest the female form.
To learn how to paint car hoods, Chicago enrolled in an auto-body school for spray painting. She was the only woman among 250 men. At the time, the early 1970s, the museum world was little better than the auto industry. Of the 1,000-odd solo shows mounted at the Museum of Modern Art over its 43-year existence, only five had been by women.
But Chicago and other female artists were up against much worse than gender imbalances. Suffocating condescension and sexual harassment were rife. Chicago told Higgie that she “was often dismissed with the words ‘You can’t be an artist and a woman too,’ which she heard … especially from John Coplans, who ran Artforum” — a highly influential art magazine.
In 1970, under the influence of second-wave feminism, Chicago’s politics became overt. She changed her married name, Gerowitz, to Chicago (after her hometown), announcing the decision with two advertisements in Artforum. Throughout this period, she projected great strength. But as she said in an interview in a 1974 issue of Artforum, she also wanted to make her work more “vulnerable” and “open.”
Like many of her female contemporaries, Chicago was looking for specifically female imagery. She wanted to counter the phallic fixations she saw in so much male art and architecture. In 1968 she had made colored acrylic sculptures called “Domes,” their forms suggesting female bellies and breasts. In the mid-1970s, she turned to vaginas.
“To be a woman,” she explained in “Female Imagery,” a 1973 essay for Womanspace Journal co-written with Miriam Schapiro, “is to be an object of contempt, and the vagina, stamp of femaleness, is devalued. The woman artist, seeing herself as loathed, takes that very mark of her otherness and by asserting it as the hallmark of her iconography, establishes a vehicle by which to state the truth and beauty of her identity.”
This kind of thinking explains the triangular shape of “The Dinner Party.” It also explains the bold collective experiment that was Chicago’s “Womanhouse,” a month-long exhibition staged in a decaying building on Mariposa Avenue in Hollywood.
In 1972, Chicago, Schapiro and more than 20 of their students refurbished the house, filling it with installations and artwork that commented (often ironically) on women’s experiences in a patriarchal society. They painted the kitchen pink, decorating it with eggs and breasts. They staged sarcastic performances (floor scrubbing, ironing, mock sex). They installed a naked female mannequin in a linen cupboard. And in a work called “Menstruation Bathroom,” they filled an open trash receptacle with used tampons. “Womanhouse” was seen by more than 10,000 people.
During this time, when Chicago was also educating herself and her audience about the history of great women, she was committed to the 1970s idea of “consciousness-raising.” But in a culture that became more and more ironic and street savvy, and less inclined to the kinds of gender essentialism Chicago promoted, her work’s almost painful sincerity began to count against her.
After “The Dinner Party” — a massive success — Chicago developed forms of figurative imagery about, for instance, birth and motherhood (“The Birth Project”), toxic masculinity (“Powerplay”) and the Holocaust (“The Holocaust Project,” a collaboration with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman). She continued to collaborate, sometimes with hundreds of women at a time. And she experimented with all kinds of techniques, from embroidery and ceramics to appliqué, screen printing and spray paint.
Her work, which could be spectacularly ugly, was repeatedly criticized for tastelessness. “Taste is not Judy Chicago’s forte,” the critic Hilton Kramer wrote in his review of “The Dinner Party.” It would be easy (and probably true) to say that critics were made uncomfortable by Chicago’s imagery, politics and crafty techniques, which they associated with kitsch.
But there was also a deeper problem. Take “The Holocaust Project,” which combines upsetting archival photographs of the concentration camps with stiff, expressive figurative imagery. The two just don’t go together. The shocking, evidentiary truth of one kind of imagery clashes with the cartoony stylization of the other. Everything in you recoils.
Taste, of course, is a social concept, not an artistic one. But Chicago’s apparent eagerness to bludgeon our sensibilities with the broadest generalizations, her lack of subtlety and her desire to amplify, to deafening levels, the expression of feelings we mostly already have (about the Holocaust, for instance) don’t do her any favors.
Never mind. I still loved this show. I found parts of it stirring. Elsewhere it’s even (intentionally) funny. If Chicago sometimes falls into obviousness and vulgarity, it shouldn’t blind us to all her brave and lasting contributions.
Judy Chicago: Herstory Through Jan. 14 at the New Museum, New York. newmuseum.org.