The Chicago Resolutions

Art in America, June, 2000 by Paula Harper

Chicago's pattern of alternating between private and public work makes her conscious of their differing demands. She also participated in the ideological and esthetic shift from modernism to postmodernism and has experience with the strategies of both. She began as a member of the California modernist vanguard of the 1960s after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from UCLA and taking an MA there. In 1966, her Rainbow Picket (1965) was included in the landmark exhibition "Primary Structures" at the Jewish Museum in New York. The sculpture shows an early interest in shaded, spectral color which has remained a constant in her work. With the "Pasadena Lifesavers" series of 1969-70, in which she sprayed acrylic lacquer on large acrylic panels, she remained in tune with the Los Angeles Minimalists who favored pristine, often plastic, finishes. Her break with this group, and the beginning of what she calls her "in-your-face period," was signaled by a combative announcement designed by her L.A. dealer Jack Glenn and published as a full-page ad in Artforum in December 1970. The ad parodied the macho exhibition posters popular with male artists who showed at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, and the photo was taken in the L.A. gym where the fighter then known as Cassius Clay trained. The artist (formerly Judy Gerowitz/nee Cohen) appears as a truculent boxer with a new name, chosen for her birthplace, on her jersey. That image preceded Lynda Benglis's better-known 1974 Artforum ad featuring a photo of the nude artist grasping a double dildo.

Judy Chicago became a mover and shaker in the feminist art movement of the early '70s, playing an influential role in challenging the top-down imposition of taste validated by established art institutions and based on the assumption of a universal esthetic standard. She and the other early feminist artists paved the way for subsequent challenges from minority artists in the postmodern period.

Set in a new direction, Chicago explored alternative materials and developed a personal iconography (the butterfly-vagina image, for example) in both private and public formats. In 1974 she did a series of china paintings on small, round porcelain medallions, among them The Butterfly Goddess as a Flowering Shrub. That same year she produced a series of large public-art events, which she calls "atmospheres," such as constructing a butterfly image with magnesium flares and fireworks on the shores of Lake Merritt in Oakland (A Butterfly for Oakland, 1974). These events required complex organization and many assistants.

Chicago recalls that at this time of transition she didn't know how to express her new content visually, which is one of the reasons she started writing. Yet she did achieve a significant and iconic image, a large, sprayed acrylic painting on canvas titled Through the Rower (1973), in which a radiant centralized form (vaginal, though as if viewed from the inside out) expresses an intense sexuality, both personal and universal.(12) In hindsight, the elements of Chicago's imagery and process that appeared in the early '70s make The Dinner Party seem almost inevitable.