Because I am a Woman
This blog is about sex-positivity, sex-ed, feminism, reproductive rights and activism.
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Kara Walker installing Gone… in 1994.
An amazing and incredible artist. You should check out here work. Really. Do it.
So today in art history, we watched a short clippette about Judy Chicago, a blooming (heh, you’ll soon understand this pun) artist in the mid to late 20th century who attracted a grand amount of controversy, particularly over the most famous of her works, The Dinner Party. Most in fact would not so much as humor it as art. Why was so so widely detested you might ask? Because there, sculpted and painted and slapped on dinner plates, were vaginas for all to see. Oh right, and they weren’t just vaginas but those of specific women, those who had been omitted from history when they had quite obviously earned their places there. THERE WAS UPROAR. Not only at the public level, but at that of politics and people of power. Grotesque they called it.
So what was Judy Chicago trying to portray? At first I thought the piece a little carelessly thought-out, and in fact my first thought was that it was anti-feminist as it seemed to offer the vaginas, symbols of womanhood, not only to the taking but to the consumption as part of the lavish lay. Turning this thought over in my head once or twice I realized that The Dinner Table was indeed doing just that, but rather than endorse this mindset it mocked it through submission to its ridiculous ideals in a sort of sarcasm. The second thing it did was to show the beauty and uniqueness of each vagina. If you’ve ever seen a vagina, you know that they’re fucking ugly, but what they represent (female sexuality and….I suppose…childbirth) is rather spectacular. I think what I love most about it though is the brashness of it, the seeming pomp and splendor of a feast with each course something so shocking placed in that context. WHICH IS ALSO WHY I LOVELOVELOVE DUCHAMP’S FOUNTAIN. Brilliant stuff.
Ok, ranting and bubbling and babbling and such over with.
There is nothing ugly about genitals, but this is a really cool piece!
Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1918
Marilyn Monroe I - James Rosenquist, 1962
Self-portrait - Eva Hesse, 1961. Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 in. (91.4 x 91.4 cm)
“It was my friendship with Eva that made me aware of the problems that women artists face in a world dominated by a male hierarchy (critics, editors, museum, and gallery administrators). There seems to be an implicit rule (even among female critics, etc.) that a woman can never be considered the dominant practitioner of a style or idea. When the time came for the type of work that Eva Hesse was doing (a reaction to Minimalism, it was called “anti-form,” whatever that may be) to be officially recognized, she was relegated to a minor role. Only later did the mistake become evident. But even now, women artists face the same intellectual blindness and sexist ‘put-down.’”
Sol LeWitt, 1978
A father-figure for many of the artists associated with the early stages of minimalism, LeWitt was one of Hesse’s closest personal friends. The catalogue for his first major retrospective, which opened at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague less than two months after Hesse died, is dedicated to her.
From Eva Hesse: A Retrospective by Yale University Art Gallery, 1992.
(Scanned and submitted by jon-garcia)
Click through to read about feminist art! Who is your favorite female artist, (mine is Helen Frankenthaler)?
