"The dinner party" revisited: with the Brooklyn Museum's acquisition of Judy Chicago's 1970s feminist icon, the author gives the piece a new critical look - Art & Politics II - Critical Essay

It's not yet 30 years since Judy Chicago started working--alone--on The Dinner Party, a monumental labor that came to involve 400 people producing a symbolic representation of the history of significant women in Western civilization. (1) How times have changed! The Dinner Party, which initially met with an unenthusiastic artworld reception and hostility from Congress, has become an icon of feminist art. The work was recently on view at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (BMA), where it has at last found a home through trustee Elizabeth Sackler's purchase and donation. Beginning in 2004, it will be permanently housed in the Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the BMA. (2)

How does it look now? Both dated and relevant. Both disappointing and engrossing. It's still impossible to see the piece without looking through sociopolitical glasses. The Dinner Party (1974-79) centers on a triangular table measuring 48 feet on each side with place settings for 39 identified mythical and historical individuals, 13 to a side. Each setting consists of a decorated ceramic plate and an elaborate textile runner, accompanied by a bland iridescent goblet, a doughy fork, knife and spoon set, and a gold-edged napkin. The names of another 999 women are written on a white-tile "Heritage Floor" supporting the table. To create the whole, Chicago orchestrated a variety of volunteers--researchers, needleworkers, ceramists and other specialists, including several men, over a period of years.

As a process of creation, the work remains an exemplar of artistic ambition. However, as an art work, The Dinner Party is not altogether satisfying. Although it occupies a large room, the installation is undeveloped sculpturally, and as a didactic program, meant to communicate information and to provoke viewers to seek further information, it remains dependent upon written information to fill out its visual expression. Chicago herself seems to have come to this conclusion, writing in a 1996 commemorative volume published by Penguin Books that, "By the time The Dinner Party was completed, it was probably better described as a project than a work of art." (3)

It is best appreciated as a tightly related chronological sequence of "pictures," starting with mythical fertility goddesses of prehistory and ending in the mid-20th century with Virginia Woolf and Georgia O'Keeffe. The individual place settings proceed like a group of illustrations in a book.

Taken individually, Chicago's symbolic compositions are often compelling. The abstracted vaginal imagery china-painted onto the plates is pictorially powerful in its central organization and symmetry; the butterfly and flower motifs work the same way but somewhat diffuse the effect with the attractions of the noncentral wings or petals. The plates with other motifs, such as Sojourner Truth's masks and Ethyl Smyth's piano, are letdowns. This work surely must be acknowledged as a major precedent for the many sexual images and themes offered by women artists in recent years. Chicago had a leading role not just in the push to acknowledge the achievements of women but also to actively express female sexuality. In the plates, she exploited the exquisite colors and luscious surfaces available in the ceramic medium. The purple-red going to grays of the Kali plate is one of the outstanding examples; the central slit pours open with the heat of magma. The Saint Bridget motif, which blends flame and flower, also burns with radiance.

The majority of the plates are graphic and two-dimensional. As forms, most of them are merely circular blanks made to serve as "canvases." The classic goblets offer vertical punctuation only, while the standardized flatware is historically incorrect early on and culturally skewed. The settings would be stronger as plates and runners alone. Near the present in the chronological sequence, plates are built up in relief meant to symbolize modern women breaking out of convention. These more sculptural forms recall works by leading ceramists of the '70s.

In making the runners for the place settings, Chicago capitalized on many capacities of textiles--the intense colors of dyes, the linear and pointillist optical effects attainable through stitching, a wide variety of textures. The textiles are effective as both picture and form. The Dinner Party makes use of an astonishing variety of techniques, including crewel and many other types of embroidery, weaving, couching, applique and reverse applique, braiding, knotting, lacing, beading, felting, knitting, drawn thread work, trapunto and other types of quilting, laidwork, bargello, blackwork, whitework, crossstitch, ribbon work, petit point, cutwork and crochet. The extraordinary expressive qualities are best appreciated up close.

Boadaceia's runner employs felt in muscular curves that recall Viking motifs. Trotula's is active, with quilted diamond shapes, a tree of life motif, flowers and birds; concentric mounds pile up at the bottom edge like a landscape. Eleanor of Aquitaine's cloth includes tapestry depicting irises and roses, as well as a fence that contains her plate and its breast-and-clit-like fleur-de-lis. Petronilla de Meath's runner suggests eroticism and strength with coursing curves inspired by Celtic interlace. On Artemisia Gentileschi's setting, a representation of gathered cloth makes a three-dimensional drapery around a dramatically black "stage."