Judy Chciago "ReViewing PowerPlay"

Judy Chicago ReViewing PowerPlay

Judy Chicago ReViewing PowerPlay

David Richard Gallery 544 South Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501 | p (505) 983-9555 www.DavidRichardGallery.com | info@DavidRichardGallery.com

ISBN: 978-0-9839312-3-2 Price $25.00

FRONT COVER Judy Chicago, Crippled By the Need to Control/Blind Individuality, 1983 Sprayed Acrylic and oil on canvas (primed with rabbit’s skin glue and matte media), 108" x 72" TITLE PAGE Judy Chicago, Driving the World to Destruction, 1985 Acrylic and oil on Belgian Linen, 108" x 168"

REFERENCES Edward Lucie-Smith references from: Lucie-Smith, Edward. Judy Chicago: An American Vision.

New York: Watson-Guptill Publication, 2000, p 112, 113.

Paula Harper references from: ACA Galleries. Judy Chicago, POWERPLAY [Essay by Paula Harper].

New York, ACA Galleries, 1986, p 2.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS THREE FACES OF MAN, 1985, Sprayed acrylic and oil, 54" x 108" Collection of Ruth Lambert and Henry Harrison POWER HEADACHE, 1986, modified Aubusson Tapestry, 24" x 20" Collection of Camille and David Lyons WOE/MAN 1, 1986, Lost wax cast bronze bas-relief with multi-colored patinas, 48" x 36" x 5" Collection of Elizabeth A. Sackler

Published on the occasion of the exhibition: Judy Chicago, ReViewing PowerPlay June 29 – August 11, 2012, David Richard Gallery, Santa Fe, NM Published by: David Richard Gallery, LLC, Santa Fe, NM Catalogue ©2012 David Richard Gallery, LLC, Santa Fe, NM Essay ©2012 Jonathan D. Katz, Buffalo, NY Art ©1982-1986 Judy Chicago, Belen, NM Photos of Judy Chicago art by: Donald Woodman, Belen, NM Photos of Motorcycle with Rider 25 and Three Faces of Man Composite by: Herb Lotz Design by: Julie Meridy, NY and David Eichholtz, Santa Fe, NM Printed by: GHP Media, West Haven, CT Special thanks to: Jonathan D. Katz for writing such a terrific essay that provides both historic reflections and contemporary context to Judy Chicago’s series, PowerPlay.

Donald Woodman for beautiful photography, organization, management and above all, patience, support and love.

Elizabeth A. Sackler, NY for lending from her collection Woe/Man 1, 1986.

Julie Meridy Design, NY for embracing this project with such passion and enthusiasm.

In memory of Paula Harper who wrote the first catalogue essay for PowerPlay

Judy Chicago’s PowerPlay and the Irony of Masculinity

BY Jonathan D. Katz

Judy Chicago had lousy timing when she first exhibited her

antiquity that the male nude had reemerged as the

monumental series PowerPlay in 1986. By this point, she

dominant subject in Western art, but also, and perhaps of

could claim perhaps the most sustained and committed

greater import, this reemergence thus at least temporarily

practice of an art of social protest in all of American art. Yet

spared the traditional female subject the allegorical,

the series was greeted with something that was entirely

erotic and emotional weight it had largely been forced to

new to Chicago’s very public career: silence. As the artist

bare solo throughout the long centuries of the Western

herself noted in the second volume of her autobiography,

tradition. In PowerPlay, men are not only vested with

following the opening of the PowerPlay (circa 1982-86)

the allegorical import long the province of the female

series at New York’s ACA gallery, she was chagrined “to

nude, they are equally made over into representative

discover that there had been almost no sales at the gallery

figures, for these paintings are never of specific men, but

and, curiously, a near-total silence in terms of articles and

of masculinity as typology. Deploying variations on the

reviews, the first time such a thing had ever happened

Renaissance’s heroically-scaled male nude, she began

to me.” For the creator of The Dinner Party, a work that

work on a series of over-life size paintings that would

catalyzed—and was catalyzed by—feminism, perhaps the

cast a critical eye on the construction of masculinity as

dominant US social movement of its time, critical and

a defensive posture, one conceived in order to mark out

popular silence was a foreign territory. But in restoring

the obverse from what was taken as feminine, marking

Chicago’s PowerPlay to the context of its creation and

gender out as performative almost a decade before the

first exhibition in the 1980s, we can better understand not

early works of queer theory began to advance similar

only why this work failed to produce its expected impact,

claims. For Chicago, the fact that men were born of, and

but also follow its lead into a broader understanding of

in an indicative relationship to, the feminine was at the

defining shifts in the profile and purpose of an art of social

root of much male repressive violence.3 Thus in one fell

protest in the United States—shifts we now, with the

swoop, Chicago inverted that familiar Biblical genealogy

arrogance of the present, wrongly assume to have always

in which the female, Eve, was born of the male, of Adam’s

characterized a dissident American art.

rib, and reconceived that relation of priority such that it

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was now masculinity born out of the feminine—literally PowerPlay, though more or less coterminous with Chicago’s

and symbolically—and thus always haunted by the

better-known Birth Project, represents an unprecedented

prospect of the feminine within it.

departure in her work. Its most obvious difference, the emergence of men as the denoted subject (denoted,

There is not better evidence of this than those works

because all of Chicago’s work connotatively address men

from PowerPlay that directly reference the feminine, as

as the necessary pole of a gendered binary) is wedded to

in Trying to Kill the Woman Inside Him or Struggling with

another significant variation in her usual working method—

the Womanly Feelings in His Heart. In working to blur any

many of the images have roots in Italian Renaissance

definitive outline between the male and female, on both

painting. Chicago traveled to Italy for the first time in 1982,

a formal and ideological level, these paintings and their

and extensively studied major works in Rome, Florence,

related drawings notably swim against the modernist

Venice, Naples and Ravenna—an art lover’s standard

elevation of form over content by making form and

first trip to Italy itinerary. The emergence of PowerPlay

content one. In PowerPlay, the crook of a man’s elbow

was keyed to that Italian trip not only because the Italian

can become a woman’s breast, his hand metamorphoses

Renaissance represented the first time since classical

into her head, his hands become hers. Everything is

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Trying to Kill the Woman Inside Him, 1983 Prismacolor on paper, 26" x 19"

Curiously, despite the structural and thematic ambiguity

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that animates these works, they still fell flat when they were initially shown. The first half of the 1980s—when Chicago conceived and executed PowerPlay—would emerge as ground zero for a seismic shift in the profile of protest in the American art world, and she unwittingly got caught in the middle of a changing of the guard.

What changed? In a word, it was the return of irony as the favored mode of political dissent in art. By virtue of its indirect, equivocal nature, irony proved increasingly more palatable as a means of resistance in the Reaganite 1980s. Remember that this was the time that engineered the advent of what both sides would call the culture wars, when a revolutionary social and political art and the most phobic vision of social change retailed by conservative politics were about to become sworn enemies, and antiavant-garde antipathy would become deployed as an instrument of state.4 dynamic change, unstable distinctions, a constant flipping

In contrast, the 1970s, with its manifold social upheavals

back and forth between opposing gendered signifiers so

from feminism, to lesbian and gay liberation (and lesbian

as to finally underscore their fundamental imbrication.

separatism) to incendiary protests over our invasions

Chicago furthers this conceptual and formal merging

of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and our clandestine

of male and female through the careful shading of

support of right-wing dictatorships in Latin America such

boundary lines to minimize any sharp transitions or clear

as Pinochet’s brutal rule in Chile, assured that irony could

demarcations. In the prismacolor pencil on paper 1983

scarcely register among the manifold explosions of the

Trying to Kill the Woman Inside Him legs, arms, bodies,

decade. As yet unnoticed by social conservatives, the art

breasts shuffle back and forth until the man and woman

world in the 1970s moved unchecked, blissfully unaware

reveal yet a third figure, a woman in profile composed of

of any overlords save money and fame. It was hardly

the shadowed negative space between his legs. Chicago

uniformly progressive­—the conjunction of big money and

found she could even meld male and female through

high value commodities in a market economy mitigated

careful manipulation of simple outline drawing. In It Hurt

against that—but it had also not yet become colonized

So Much It Made a Coward Out of Him the elbows of a

by a tendency to recast non-conformity from a social or

man grasping his head in anguish does double duty as

political term to a purely formal or aesthetic phenomenon.

pendulous breasts, turning a man into a woman and back

Most centrally for my purposes, until the early 1980s

with minimal sleight of hand. Even the title of the series

identity politics were in full swing and a host of newly

cultivates ambiguity, for PowerPlay connotes both the

audible voices opened the art world to differences in race,

definitive, brutal exercise of power and, at the same time,

sexuality and gender. As a result, social protest as a form

a performative, anxious relation to it.

of art making was in no way unusual or remarkable, and

even big, powerful institutions tied to the establishment

Whereas an art of social protest accurately echoed the

got into the act. Chicago first showed The Dinner Party

tumultuous disturbances and dislocations of the 1970s,

at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Hans

by the beginning of the 1980s, this newly conservative

Haacke even got MoMA to agree to his 1970 installation

ethic sweeping the country fueled ever more vicious

MoMA Poll, in which he asked museum visitors to vote

attacks on an art of aggressive dissent, culminating, in

whether then NY Governor—and powerful MoMA Board

the late 80s, with Republican attempts to defund the

member—Nelson Rockefeller’s refusal to denounce Nixon

National Endowment for the Arts and instrumentalize the

over the invasion of Vietnam would cause them not to

posthumous Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition The Perfect

vote for the Governor in his coming re-election. (Though

Moment to go after any art that addressed social protest.

by a two to one margin museum visitors said they would

Senator Jesse Helms’ rhetoric is indicative, as in this

not vote for him, he was re-elected anyway, evidence that

typically unnuanced bit of his Senate floor oratory: “It is

the split between the art loving public and mainstream

an issue of soaking the taxpayer to fund the homosexual

politics was in evidence even then.) I doubt whether either

pornography of Robert Mapplethorpe, who died of

work would have made it out of any curatorial committee

AIDS while spending the last years of his life promoting

in the land during the 1980s.

homosexuality.”5 As a result of these strong-arm tactics, the art of the 1980s moved increasingly towards forms of indirect resistance through sarcasm and a performative insincerity—the cultivation of an ironic mien. A quick review of other high watermarks for the deployment of irony in the art of the 20th Century reveals a similar advance at moments of rising conservative reaction, as evinced in the cultivation of Dada as the Third Reich consolidated power or the rise of that closeted post Abstract Expressionist generation of so called Neo-Dadaist—figures like John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns—amidst the excesses of the McCarthy era. This revalidation of a strategically deployed irony would adversely affect the reception of PowerPlay, and to a lesser extent, Chicago’s work as whole.

In contrast to much art, even feminist art, of the 1980s, PowerPlay, despite its careful cultivation of multiple forms of ambiguity, seemed almost embarrassingly earnest, declarative and filled with conviction. A new generation of feminist artists in the early 1980s, figures such as Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Jenny Holzer, would instead

It HURT SO MUCH IT MADE A COWARD OUT OF HIM, 1983 Prismacolor and acrylic, 28.5" x 22.5"

prove more in synch with the times in their archly ironic appropriation of aspects of male dominance. Of course,

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one of the dangers of irony is its resemblance to that which

and in some sense have since the eighties, routinely finds

it opposes, and thus its potential for misreadings—and in

a 1970’s style incitement to political collectivity (not least

fact, some early critics didn’t at all register the feminist

as accomplished in Chicago’s work) to be mere illusion—a

content of Sherman, Kruger and Holzer’s work, reading it

nostalgia ridden exercise in papering over our manifold

as more fundamentally concerned with the operations of

distinctions in an endlessly lengthening list of our smaller

meaning-making in general than any particular meanings

and smaller differences—it can’t supply any new model

made.6 Nonetheless, whatever their success or failure

or alternative for collective action. In place of a once

politically, a more ironic feminist art certainly caught the

rock solid collective identification, be it feminist, queer,

mood of the times. Judy Chicago, though only six years

working class, whatever, we now wade in the swamp of

older than the oldest of the three seemed instead to be

small differences, our identities diffused, but still longing

of a different generation and even today, her work is

for that once coherent collectivity that made our sense

rarely addressed in the same context as theirs. It’s just

of otherness at least useful, active and powerful. Our

too different; hers is a protest art, a message art, with an

response to our own patent nostalgia for what we tell

emphasis on communicating directly to the viewer without

ourselves was a mistake in the first place is irony.

need of an apprenticeship in the theoretical byways of contemporary practice: there is nothing that seems arch

This tendency to favor the ironic as a means of dissent has

or ironic about it.

thus proven enduring; even today, decades later, we continue to prefer our art of protest lightened with irony,

And yet Chicago’s art was the necessary ground for this

with the seductive prospect that whatever is meant is, in

latter, ironic generation to work its charge. Without her

the final analysis, up to us to name. Forms of direct and

feminist example, the ironic performances of Sherman

un-ironic protest art necessarily seem now to carry the

or the underlined clichés of Kruger would have not have

whiff of that earlier social moment—a markedly un-

been visible as in some powerful way other to what they

contemporary one consisting of faded images of pickets

literally denoted, which is to say they would not have

and rallies in black and white. These earlier images now

registered as ironic. Their irony is made visible qua irony in

speak in terms of adherence to a unifying creed, of mass

part against the presumption born of artists like Chicago,

marches, and unions and strikes, perhaps even, for older

that femininity isn’t a natural state, but a policed one. Had

Americans, of clandestine Communist party meetings and

we not already “known” this to one extant or another,

an all-together too earnest sense of rectitude. By contrast,

Sherman’s careful catalog of feminine postures wouldn’t

we postmoderns feel more comfortable defying the

have registered as dissident, but merely have been made

collective than working within it. In our art, we cultivate an

an artifact of, and transparent to, her gender. In some

ironic take on power, seeking dominance but never using

sense then, irony is enabled by a larger, constantly shifting

its terms. To forthrightly protest, to counter power with

socio-historical perspective that allows us to understand

power, seems to make a categorical error, for it reinscribes

that what we once believed to be merely “natural” is

a dynamic of dominance at precisely the place where it

in fact not natural at all, but the product of changing

should be most challenged. Rather than figure power’s

historical forces. In this sense, irony is every bit as much

game of musical chairs, in which the only thing that

an historical artifact—a product of its times—as Chicago’s

changes are the butts in the seats, not the seats themselves,

style of straight-out, confrontational protest art in the

we’d do better, we hold, to recast the representation of

1970s. But whereas the historical moment we now occupy,

power under the sign of irony.

And the trope par excellence for the abandonment of a

work today as if they were seeing the artifacts of an

collective power politics is irony. Irony sidles up to domi-

older, more powerful civilization, one that perhaps knew

nation, allowing you to address it while not talking to it,

itself better—or was at least more honest about what it

about it, or against it. As a consequence, irony is funda-

knew—and had as a result canons of representation for

mentally geared to the individual not the collective—irony

showing what we can only indicate through meaningful,

is what I read, what I see, not what we, as united front,

sidelong glances.

want or believe. As a result of its spectral individualism, irony is seductive and narcissistic, a trope of seeming

The fact remains that feminism as a social movement

complicity: it offers the viewer the gratification not only of

wasn’t born of irony, nor propelled by it. Fueled instead

determining the final or “real” meaning of the artwork,

by anger, it was a mass pressure group akin to earlier

but moreover of doing so in tacit sympathy with the artist.

resistance movements, a contest of opposing interest

Irony invites us in, claims we’re special, gifted with unusual

and creeds far less concerned with the dynamics of power

powers of discernment. How seductive, we think, to arrive

than with who had it and how it was to be used. Nor was

at a sophisticated understanding that we’ve made fully

irony in any way a useful response to organizing for real

our own, as opposed to the banality of reading a message,

and permanent social change, what we used to mean

which anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of the

when we said, without irony, “the revolution.” But a few

alphabet can do! So flattered are we, that we forget that

years prior to Chicago’s first development of what would

the work was not authored by us, but by another, one

become PowerPlay, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)

who truly deserves the name author, and we have just

went down in flames, scuttled by three states’ refusal to

danced to a tune we didn’t call, nonetheless thinking the

ratify what seemed to many a purely logical extension of

music our own.

constitutional protections to women but which quickly became embroiled in an early version of the dissimulating

Yet, protest as a social act is hardly dead in America, for all

scare tactics now routinely employed by the radical right

its rarity in our art. The art world may sniff at images born

(in this instance, the ERA, it was said, would eliminate

of committed resistance and find ideology representable

sex-segregated bathrooms). With the receding prospect

only at the brink of parody, but as I write this the Occupy

of revolution, irony became the means through which we

Protest has spilled thousands onto streets, parks and

could feel powerful and autonomous—even when we

plazas from one coast to the other, major state battles are

knew we weren’t.

being fought over immigration and same sex marriage, as warmongers, anti-choice zealots, and Tea Party extremists

Irony does not, perhaps cannot, seed social change—the

threaten the meager social gains of the last few years.

best it can do is confirm an internal dialog, but internal

That there is a profound disconnect between our culture

dialogs are, by dint of being internal, rarely productive

of protest and the suave unflappability of our art world is

of social change. Thus a gulf has sprung up between

obvious, but of course it’s hardly new: even as the decade

collective social movements like feminism and the art

of protest art dawned, Andy Warhol was producing his

that addresses or thematizes these social movements.

now famous Flower Paintings as the dead from the Kent

To protest male dominance directly and unambiguously

State Massacre on May 4, 1970 were being buried. But

has become so complicated and fraught that when the

this disconnect has grown over the intervening years to

feminist collective The Guerrilla Girls have sought to do

the point that my college-age students view Chicago’s

so, they don gorilla suits, obscuring their identities not

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only lest their protest seem too nakedly self-interested—

terms. Towards making sense of these diverging accounts

on behalf of their careers, rather than women in general—

of her art, PowerPlay is indicative, in part for being so

and thus too enamored of power for its own sake, but

exceptional. And the first thing to notice about it is how

also because the act of protest itself is just so outré that

curiously misunderstood it has been. Here is a work that

anonymity protects them from any negative repercussions

in fact places at least several forms of irony, including

in the art world itself.

ambiguity and appropriation, at the very center of its project. It takes the transcendental Renaissance male

Thus, it is through the lens of irony that we can finally

nude, the one who lives outside of time and the social, and

square Chicago’s reputation as the outstanding feminist

disfigures him, giving him the red eyes of a man crying (as

artist of our time with the fact that her mode of art

in Study for Disfigured Head 2) or contorting his face with

making is distinctly out of favor in the art world today.

emotional extremes, as in Really Sad/Power Mad where

Not only is it probable that more people have seen her

these ostensibly polar emotions are instead expressively

Dinner Party than any other single work of feminist art,

linked, such that only a rivulet of tears distinguishes

but of all the feminist artists at work, her oeuvre is the one

sadness from fury. Man becomes suddenly men, and there

most identified with the politics of social change, most

is a world of difference between the two. In the Shadow

resonant and moving as an account of what happens

of the Handgun, Chicago even appropriates perhaps the

when women seek to figure their perceptions in collective

most defining of all Renaissance nudes, Michelangelo’s

REALLY SAD/POWER MAD, 1986, Prismacolor and pastel, 27.5" x 39.25"

STUDY FOR DISFIGURED HEAD 2, 1984 Prismacolor and graphite on paper, 12" x 9"

the pectoral muscles hangs slack and feminine—thereby reintroducing at least the shadow of the female into the scene. Tellingly, in her Beyond the Flower autobiography Chicago recalls wielding a borrowed handgun in order to frighten a persistent, masturbating peeping tom, and thus comes to recognize that the gun’s power isn’t necessarily always gendered male. In the final large-scale painting, the negative space bordering the “handgun’s” eruption also coalesces into Chicago’s signature upturned female face in profile, a face literally forged by the handgun’s eruption into violence.

New, too, in these works is the use of oil paint (perhaps the defining Renaissance technique) over Chicago’s more familiar airbrushed surface. Whereas a fully hand brushed and expressive surface would work to index the artist, to make her hand expressive, a striking aspect of In the Shadow of the Handgun is the way the expressive brush and the literally mechanical spray painting cancel each other out. This is significant because one of the defining difficulties with Chicago’s work in the era of irony is its assumed declarative, authorial or expressive character, and thus her long engagement with airbrushing, and PowerPlay’s flirtation with oil, have not been given their due as a self-conscious attempt to make more complex and open-ended the question of the autographic touch.

In Crippled by the Need to Control/Blind Individuality, numerous authors have noted the male figure riding the female and gripping her hair like a horse’s bridle.

But again, the work is much more ambiguous than has IN THE SHADOW OF THE HANDGUN 2, 1983 Prismacolor and acrylic on rag paper, 22" x 30"

been generally credited, since the woman’s profile is not only indistinguishable from the man’s but he is moreover depicted as missing the upper half of his face. Is she, in

famed Creation on the Sistine Ceiling (a work which, rather

short, a distinct and autonomous figure he’s riding, or is

counter-intuitively, succeeds in eliminating the female

she an aspect of the male, even his very eyes, and one,

from the act of creation) and turns that famously poised

which he desperately seeks to master? She is opened

finger into a visual pun on the term handgun. But note

mouthed, nearly horizontal and her breasts radiate

how even here, the shadow of the arm betrays, beneath

generative potential like a beneficent hovering angel,

the figure’s armpit, yet another elbow/breast—and one of

while he is close mouthed, constrained and vertical. It

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Crippled by the Need to Control/Blind Individuality, 1983 Sprayed acrylic and oil on canvas, 108" x 72"

itself that proved relevant. The second wave feminist

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movement, begun in the 1960s, succeeded in making the outlines of feminism as an ideology and a political program broadly familiar, if still misunderstood. In its wake, major legal and legislative victories like Title IX and Roe vs Wade permanently changed the face of this country.

But despite its victories, by the mid 1980s a growing discomfort with second wave feminism was common in university circles, spurred in part by the publication in 1981 of the anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, a feminist anthology edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa. The book’s critique of second wave feminism centered on what it argued were universalizing or essentalizing tropes of a feminine identity too indebted to the experience of middle-class white women, with correspondingly little to no attention to the intersectional identities of women of color, women for whom gender, race and/or ethnicity and class were inseparable categories. From this theoretical and social historical grounding, a new, third wave of feminism developed, offering a sustained critique of what seems in no way clear, at least to me, why this can’t in

it deemed to be too reductive categories of identity,

fact be a scene of a self divided. The abrasions evident on

beginning with the most basic ones—like man and woman.

his bloodied riding leg amplify this reading, suggesting

Instead this third wave posited that neither man nor

that his attempts at self-control are wounding. And the

woman was a useful category except in polemical terms,

title, Crippled by the Need to Control/Blind Individuality,

for the two terms are locked in a necessary mutuality,

perhaps underscores that the necessary analog of mastery,

defined against the other, constituted as the sum of what

whether mastery of the self or of another, is a profound

the other is not.

loneliness, a failure to grasp the web of connections through which most of us realize ourselves, for identity is

By the last years of the 1980s, this third wave critique

always relational; a self elaborated only through a relation

had spawned a corresponding recognition that gay and

to itself—one uninterested in the cold bath of otherness

straight were similarly locked in an unyielding polarity—

cannot leave the orbit of its own limitations and hence

one that, paradoxically, like the terms man and woman,

becomes blind.

reinscribed and reinforced the dominance of the first term of the binary, i.e., “straight” and “man,” every

So far, I’ve emphasized how factors more or less external

time its devalued polar opposite sought to challenge its

to feminist politics help us understand why and how

secondary status. In short, under a third wave critique,

PowerPlay has been misunderstood, but there were

queer theory, following feminism, came to realize that to

also some notable shifts in the construction of feminism

rally under the label female or gay was to win the battle

but lose the war, for the binaries male/female or straight/

side, but doesn’t color the image as a whole. Chicago,

gay left unchallenged the real oppression, which is the

again echoing the terms of what would be a subsequent

very idea that male and straightness can only achieve

queer theory, thereby implicates sexuality in any account

coherence against the devalued other, that we can only

of gender, such that fear of gayness become the border

describe what we are by reference to what we are not.

patrol on the gender divide, quick to police and prevent any crossing of that putative border through the merest

I hope the final irony of PowerPlay’s critical inattention in

insinuation that to do so would be read as gay. The result

an era of ironic resistance is now obvious. For Chicago, a

for the figure is the pure pathos of his subconscious plea.

product of second wave feminism, had in fact anticipated

In the bronze relief Woe/Man a heavily muscled, bull-like

the defining critique of third wave feminism, namely that

neck, the fortified neck of macho performance, is tilted up

the easy binarizing of identification through reference to

in a gesture of openness and offering, but the figure’s tight

a devalued other will never escape the ominous contest,

grimace and wary eyes suggest that this performance of

the ceaseless push and pull, that the two terms, locked

vulnerability is not entirely easy nor comfortable. Chicago

in battle, reproduce again and again. Woman alone, as

suggests the potential consequences of this vulnerability

a term, an ideology or a politics, can’t free us from male

in making the rope-like muscles of the neck do double

domination, for woman necessarily cites man every time it

duty as labial folds.

seeks to describe itself. The defining terms of PowerPlay therefore aren’t simply “male,” despite the obvious gendering of its protagonists, but rather how man, as a category, achieves coherence and significance only in and through its self-repression of qualities it has devalued as female. Thus Chicago’s men are always caught at some point in the act of defending themselves against a threatening other that is, they know, actually themselves; they are caught in the act of freezing out one part of themselves as an act of self-preservation, only to find the process leaves them cold.

Thus we see in PowerPlay repeated evocations of the twinned identities that a masculine performance requires.

From Really Sad/Power Mad to the punning Woe/Man, Chicago excavates a masculinity at war with itself and even the doubled titling echoes the terms of this conflict.

With one eye staring out in an expression of preemptory challenge and the other eye tearing up, Lavender Double Head/Hold Me #5 further places the words “hold me” in the figure’s mouth. The color lavender, long associated with effeminacy and thus marked out as gay, shades the far outlines of the figure’s face and predominates in his crying

Lavender Doublehead/Hold Me 5, 1986 Sprayed acrylic and oil on hand cast paper, 51" x 39.5" x 3"

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Woe/Man 1, 1986, Lost wax cast bronze bas-relief with multi-colored patinas, 48" x 36" x 5"

this anti-essentializing tide. But here Chicago, having lived

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this theoretical perspective, offers a useful corrective or middle path. Masculinity, as Chicago knows well, may be a gender performance adopted by any biological sex, but only those disinherited by masculinity—women, children, queers, the effeminate of all genders—understand the performance of masculinity as just that, a performance.

And understanding masculinity as a performance entails understanding the difference between a performance and a natural attribute. Attributes are permanent, but performances, as any performer knows, constantly change.

I put my hope in performers.

1 Judy Chicago, Beyond the Flower: 198.

2 In 1979, the year the Dinner Party premiered in San Franscico’s

In appropriating a tradition of heroic masculinity in order

Museum of Modern Art, the Equal Right Amendment failed ratification by three states.

to dissect and undercut a tradition of heroic masculinity,

3 This was also a perspective common to lesbian separatism of

Chicago thus makes irony her handmaiden, the very

the 1970s—see for example the December, 1973 issue of Cowrie,

irony that was, at the time these works were first shown,

which plays with the terms woman, women and wombman, and

increasingly in evidence as a means of resistance across

wombmen to drive home a similar claim.

4 In fact, in December of 1981, Nancy Reagan could be on the

the art world at large. Why then was PowerPlay not

cover of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, having granted that

viewed as a prime exemplar of this newly ironic critical

very queer publication her first in-depth interview since occupying

tradition, as opposed to the outlier it has since become?

the White House. She shared that issue’s pages with photographs

I think it’s because a third wave, newly deconstructive

of Robert Mapplethorpe out on the town, homoerotic photographs

feminism was wary of any attribution of gender coding as the property of one or the other biological sex. Following the anti-essentializing thrust of this theory of gender

by George Platt Lynes, Herbert List and an illustrated interview with Prince, the singer provocatively posed as an upright, full-length odalisque in the shower, dressed only in a low cut thong with his pubic hair curling over and a crucifix dominating the wall behind

performance to its logical conclusion, “maleness” and

him. Prince’s pubic hair and a crucifix, Nancy Reagan and Robert

“femaleness” as gender performances, and a male body

Mapplethorpe, all in Andy Warhol’s magazine—the battle lines for

and a female body, as biological entities, bear, it was said,

the coming culture wars had clearly not yet been definitively drawn.

no necessary relationship. A female could just as well engage the performance of masculinity as any man, with

See Interview, vol. 11, no. 12 (December 1981).

5 Senate Congressional Record, 101st Congress, 1st session, vol.

135, issue no 127, Proceedings of September 28, 1989.

similar symptoms and consequences. Judy Chicago, by her

6 See Hal Foster, Subversive Signs, in Recodings: Art, Spectacle

own admission in her autobiographies, did just that, early

and Cultural Politics. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1985).

on adopting a masculine swagger and tough guy persona to, as a female, make herself visible as a serious artist and run with the boys. Thus, the implication in PowerPlay that masculine performance is a male problem swims against

DETAIL: Rainbow Man, 1984, Sprayed acrylic and oil on Belgian Linen, Panel 2: 108" x 84"

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Rainbow Man, 1984, Sprayed acrylic and oil on Belgian Linen, 108" x 252" Three panels: 108" x 72", 108" x 84", 108" x 96"

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What happens if one tries to place these huge, ambitious compositions in the general context of 20th-century art? [ . . .] I have pointed to connections, especially among the preparatory drawings, with works by Picasso, Léger, and Gris—that is to say, with aspects of cubism. I think, however, that their most direct ancestry can be found in the work of the major Mexican and North American muralists of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. In particular one thinks of aspects of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949), and Thomas Hart Benton.

All of these artists looked for ways in which to democratize modernism and make it accessible to large audiences. [ . . . ] Edward Lucie-Smith, 2000

Pissing on Nature, 1984, Sprayed acrylic and oil on Belgian Linen, 108" x 72"

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Crippled by the Need to Control/Blind Individuality, 1983, Sprayed acrylic and oil on canvas, (primed with rabbit's skin glue and matte media), 108" x 72"

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[ . . . ] the title, Crippled by the Need to Control/Blind Individuality, perhaps underscores that the necessary analog of mastery, whether mastery of the self or of another, is a profound loneliness, a failure to grasp the web of connections through which most of us realize ourselves, for identity is always relational; a self elaborated only through a relation to itself— one uninterested in the cold bath of otherness—cannot leave the orbit of its own limitations and hence becomes blind.

Jonathan D. Katz, 2012

Driving the World to Destruction, 1985, Acrylic and oil on Belgian Linen, 108" x 168"

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Images of men as destructive or power mad are not new in the history of art. [ . . . ] But women artists have rarely painted men in an unflattering light. [ . . . ] The tradition seems to demonstrate that women are more willing to portray themselves as victims than men as perpetrators. [ . . . ] Chicago, in her determination to present her view of men in as forthright a way as men have depicted women, is an audacious innovator.

Paula Harper, 1986

In the Shadow of the Handgun, 1983, Sprayed acrylic and oil on canvas, 108" x 144"

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In the Shadow of the Handgun, Chicago even appropriates perhaps the most defining of all Renaissance nudes, Michelangelo’s famed Creation on the Sistine Ceiling (a work which, rather counter-intuitively, succeeds in eliminating the female from the act of creation) and turns that famously poised finger into a visual pun on the term handgun.

Jonathan D. Katz, 2012

The Three Faces of Man, 1985, Sprayed acrylic and oil, 54" x 108"

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Disfigured by Power 2, 1984, Oil on canvas, 10" x 14" Disfigured by Power 7/Goo-Gaa Disfigured Heads, 1984, Oil on canvas, Diptych, installed size: 15.75" x 21.75" x 2.5"

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Disfigured by Power 1, 1984, Oil on canvas, 14" x 10"

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Judy Chicago [ . . . ] treads dangerously close to what has been forbidden territory for women artists in these images of men; their faces are grotesque, distorted by anger or disfigured by powermania. They control women, distain nature, equate guns and sexuality, risk nuclear destruction of the planet, all in the name of manhood. [ . . . ] “Why do they act like this?”.

She answers herself—in these ultimately compassionate pictures—by depicting men helplessly imprisoned in their violence, dominance and despair.

Paula Harper, 1986

Disfigured by Power 3, 1984, Oil on canvas, 14" x 10"

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Disfigured by Power 5, 1984, Oil on canvas, 14" x 10"

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Woman alone, as a term, an ideology or a politics, can’t free us from male domination, for woman necessarily cites man every time it seeks to describe itself. The defining terms of PowerPlay therefore aren’t simply “male,” despite the obvious gendering of its protagonists, but rather how man, as a category, achieves coherence and significance only in and through its selfrepression of qualities it has devalued as female.

Jonathan D. Katz, 2012

Malehead 2, 1983, Sprayed acrylic and oil on canvas, 14" x 10"

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Malehead 9, 1983, Sprayed acrylic and oil on canvas, 14" x 10"

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Malehead 4, 1983, Sprayed acrylic and oil on canvas, 10" x 14" Malehead 5, 1983, Sprayed acrylic and oil on canvas, 14" x 10"

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Malehead 3, 1983, Sprayed acrylic and oil on canvas, 14" x 10"

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[ . . . ] hers is a protest art, a message art, with an emphasis on communicating directly to the viewer without need of an apprenticeship in the theoretical byways of contemporary practice: there is nothing that seems arch or ironic about it.

Jonathan D. Katz, 2012

Woe/Man 1, 1986, Lost wax cast bronze bas-relief with multi-colored patinas, 48" x 36" x 5"

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PowerPlay does not consist solely of allegorical compositions. A number of the works included in the series are of male heads seen close-up.

They are executed in a variety of materials [. . . ] They depict the faces members of the male sex present to the world, as well as the vulnerability that men will not or cannot allow themselves to show. Chicago locates the seat of vulnerability at the base of the throat, an observation supported by studies made by professional zoologists.

Edward Lucie-Smith, 2000

Woe/Man with Blue Eye 9, 1986, Sprayed acrylic and oil on hand cast paper, 51" x 39.5" x 5"

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DOUBLEHEAD 1, 1986, Lost wax cast bronze bas-relief with multi-colored patinas, 48" x 36" x 5"

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Lavender Double Head / Hold Me 5, 1986, Sprayed acrylic and oil on hand cast paper, 51" x 39.5" x 3"

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Power Headache, 1986, Modified Aubusson Tapestry, 24" x 20"

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Malehead 1, 1986, Lost wax cast bronze bas-relief with multi-colored patinas, 30" x 22" x 3"

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Study for Doublehead 3, 1986, Ink and pastel on paper, 29.5" x 21" Weeping Maleheads: If Only They Would/Could, 1985, Prismacolor on paper, 27.5" x 36.5"

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Four Studies for Driving the World to Destruction, 1985, Prismacolor on paper, 27.5" x 36.5" MOTORCYCLE WITH RIDER 25, photo, ca 1985

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Male Ness, 1983, Pastel and oil crayon on Arches, 30" x 22"

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In place of a once rock solid collective identification, be it feminist, queer, working class, whatever, we now wade in the swamp of small differences, our identities diffused, but still longing for that once coherent collectivity that made our sense of otherness at least useful, active and powerful.

Jonathan D. Katz, 2012

Study for Lights Out, To Donald, 1984, Pencil and pastel, 35" x 23"

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Chicago’s [ . . . ] oeuvre is the one most identified with the politics of social change, most resonant and moving as an account of what happens when women seek to figure their perceptions in collective terms. [ . . . ] PowerPlay is indicative, in part for being so exceptional. And the first thing to notice about it is how curiously misunderstood it has been.

Jonathan D. Katz, 2012

Study for Three Faces of Man: “Weeping is Womanly”, 1985, Mixed media, 26" x 36" MALEHEAD INSERT 5, photo, ca 1985

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Study for Three Faces of Man: “Real Feelings are Covered Up”, 1985, Mixed media, 26" x 36" THREE FACES OF MAN COMPOSITE, photo, ca 1985

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Rather Rage Than Tears, 2009, Landfall Press, Lithograph on paper, 24" x 24" STUDY FOR Malehead 3, 1984, Prismacolor and graphite on paper, 12" x 9"

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Masculinity, as Chicago knows well, may be a gender performance adopted by any biological sex, but only those disinherited by masculinity—women, children, queers, the effeminate of all genders­—understand the performance of masculinity as just that, a performance.

Jonathan D. Katz, 2012

PISSING ON NATURE 2, 1982, Mixed media on rag paper, 22" x 30" STUDY FOR PISSING ON NATURE, 1983, Mixed media, 22" x 14"

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HE COULDN'T STOP THE BLOOD HE'D SHED FROM SHOWING ALL OVER HIM, 1983, prismacolor and acrylic, 28.5" x 22.5"

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JUDY CHICAGO AT SHIDONI FOUNDARY, photo, 1986

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JUDY CHICAGO Born July 20, 1939 – Chicago, IL

46

Judy Chicago is an artist, author, feminist, educator,

Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist

and intellectual whose career now spans five decades.

Art History. Curated by Dr. Amelia Jones at the UCLA

Her influence both within and beyond the art

Armand Hammer Museum, this show was accom-

community is attested to by her inclusion in hundreds

panied by an extensive catalog published by the

of publications throughout the world. Her art has

University of California Press. In 2007, The Dinner Party

been frequently exhibited in the United States as

was permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum as

well as in Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New

the centerpiece of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for

Zealand. In addition, a number of the books she has

Feminist Art, thereby achieving Chicago’s long-held

authored have been published in foreign editions,

goal. In conjunction with the permanent location,

bringing her art and philosophy to thousands of

Chicago published a final and updated accounting,

readers worldwide.

The Dinner Party: From Creation to Preservation

In the early seventies after a decade of professional art

(Merrell, 2007).

practice, Chicago pioneered Feminist Art and art

From 1980 to 1985, Chicago worked on the Birth Project.

education through a unique program for women at

Having observed an absence of iconography about

California State University, Fresno, a pedagogical

the subject of birth in Western art, Chicago designed

approach that she has continued to develop over the

a series of birth and creation images for needlework

years. In 1974, Chicago turned her attention to the

which were executed under her supervision by 150

subject of women’s history to create her most well-

skilled needleworkers around the country. The Birth

known work, The Dinner Party, which was executed

Project, exhibited in more than 100 venues, employed

between 1974 and 1979 with the participation of

the collaborative methods and a similar merging of

hundreds of volunteers. This monumental multimedia

concept and media that characterized The Dinner

project, a symbolic history of women in Western Civi-

Party. Exhibition units from the Birth Project can be

lization, has been seen by more than one million

seen in numerous public collections around the country

viewers during its sixteen exhibitions held at venues

including the Albuquerque Museum where the core

spanning six countries.

collection of the Birth Project has been placed to be

The Dinner Party has been the subject of countless

made available for exhibition and study.

articles and art history texts and is included in innu-

While completing the Birth Project, Chicago also

merable publications in diverse fields. The impact of

focused on individual studio work to create PowerPlay.

The Dinner Party was examined in the 1996 exhibition,

In this unusual series of drawings, paintings, weavings,

47

cast paper, and bronze reliefs, Chicago brought a critical

In addition to a life of prodigious art making, Chicago

feminist gaze to the gender construct of masculinity,

is the author of numerous books: Through the Flower:

exploring how prevailing definitions of power have

My Struggle as a Woman Artist, 1975 (subsequently

affected the world in general — and men in particular.

published in England, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and

The thought processes involved in PowerPlay, the

China); The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage,

artist’s long concern with issues of power and power-

1979; Embroidering Our Heritage: The Dinner Party

lessness, and a growing interest in her Jewish heritage

Needlework, 1980 (also published in a combined

led Chicago to her next body of art.

edition in Germany); the Birth Project, 1985 (Anchor/

The Holocaust Project: From Darkness Into Light, which premiered in October 1993 at the Spertus Museum in Chicago, traveled to museums around the United States until 2002, and selections from the project continue to be exhibited. The Holocaust Project involved eight years of inquiry, travel, study, and artistic creation; it is comprised of a series of images merging Chicago’s painting with the innovative photography of Donald Woodman, as well as works in stained glass and tapestry designed by Chicago

Doubleday); Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light, 1993; The Dinner Party / Judy Chicago, 1996; Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist, 1996 (Viking Penguin); Fragments from the Delta of Venus, 2004 (powerHouse Books) and Kitty City: A Feline Book of Hours, 2005 (Harper Design International). She published a final book on The Dinner Party: From Creation to Preservation, 2007 (Merrell Publishers) in conjunction with the permanent housing of this icon of twentieth century art, now

and executed by skilled artisans.

featured in Janson’s, A Basic History of Western Art.

Resolutions: A Stitch in Time was Judy Chicago’s last

For over five decades, Chicago has remained steadfast

collaborative project. Begun in 1994 with skilled needle

in her commitment to the power of art as a vehicle

workers with whom she had worked for many years,

for intellectual transformation and social change and

Resolutions combines painting and needlework in a

to women’s right to engage in the highest level of

series of exquisitely crafted and inspiring images

art production. As a result, she has become a symbol

which—with an eye to the future—playfully reinterpret

for people everywhere, known and respected as an

traditional adages and proverbs. The exhibition opened

artist, writer, teacher, feminist and humanist whose

in June 2000 at the Museum of Art and Design, New

work and life are models for an enlarged definition

York, NY, and toured to seven other venues around

of art, an expanded role for the artist, and women’s

the United States and Canada.

right to freedom of expression.

Jonathan D. Katz 48

Jonathan D. Katz is co-curator with David Ward of

Fellow at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art. As an

Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American

associate professor at Yale University (2002-06), he

Portraiture, the first queer exhibition ever mounted

was founding director of its Lesbian and Gay Studies

at a major US museum. Hide/Seek received the 2011

Program, the first in the Ivy League. A pioneering

Best National Museum Show award from the U.S

scholar, in 1990, he was the first full-time American

section of the International Association of Art Critics

academic to be tenured in the field of gay and lesbian

and a Stonewall Award from the American Library

studies and founded and chaired both the Harvey

Association for its accompanying book. He directs the

Milk Institute, the largest queer studies institute in

doctoral program in Visual Studies at the University at

the world, and the Queer Caucus for Art of the

Buffalo and is presently completing a new book, The

College Art Association. He also co-founded Queer

Silent Camp: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and

Nation, San Francisco, and the Gay and Lesbian Town

the Cold War, to be published by the University of

Meeting, the organization that successfully lobbied

Chicago Press. His next major exhibition, entitled

for queer anti-discrimination statutes in the city of

ArtAIDSAmerica, will travel to four museums nation-

Chicago. He is the president and chief curator of the

ally in 2015-16, funded in part by a Warhol Foundation

new Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art

grant. Previously, Katz was a Terra Foundation Senior

in New York City.

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