The Dinner Party

Margaret Bauman 7/10/05

I begin today with three stories from my college days. As I tell you each story, feel free to let your mind wander if something I say triggers your senses or your memory. I am confident that my stories have parallels in your lives.

I was in college. I was invited to a classmate’s house. She was a few years older than I; married, had a house. She was having a brunch. It was a day in late winter; brisk and overcast—not a gray day, not a sunny day…it was a white day. The brunch served was toast points, pickled herring, hard-boiled eggs, and a bowl of oranges—both the eggs and the oranges were served intact and had to be peeled. There may have been other items, but that is what I remember. I remember the light was white, the food was white—the only a splash of color were the orange peels left on people’s plates. I get a sense of complete gratification and satisfaction when I conjure up that experience. It was one of those serendipitous happenstances that probably wasn’t planned, but had an impact that touched the depths of me. I went back to my dorm room, got out my pastels and tried to re-create that chalky whiteness with a splash of color. In the studio I tried to paint the experience and the sensations.

After graduation, when I moved to D.C., I would have ’White Brunches’ every year in late winter, trying to re-create the experience, but in the end my memory is the only thing that I can trust to bring back the vivid sensation.

My second story is also from my college years. I was a freshmen art student and I was not at all self-assured. We had a project assigned called ‘Metamorphosis’ in which we were to do a series of drawings that illustrated some kind of metamorphosis. We would be graded on conceptual and technical execution. I decided to take some photographs of my infant niece that I had taken the previous summer and draw images of her emerging from a rag doll. When I think back on it, it was a pretty lame concept and while the rendering was technically proficient, I really didn’t manipulate the images or push the concept. In my opinion, it was the work of a naive unworldly youth. Unfortunately, my professor was a male artist with a big ego and really catered to the male students. His attitude was that the male students were “serious” artists making a great sacrifice to embrace the harsh poverty ridden world of being an artist, and the women were just there to find a husband in the engineering school. I got a tough critique on my work and as I left class that day I overheard the professor chatting with his little male entourage, saying-‘Well, what do you expect—making babies is all they are interested in.’ OUCH! It took me till my senior year to really come into my own and prove to myself and others that not only was I talented—but that I really had a message to share. I was developing my world view and my place within it and I could communicate and touch people through my art. But it was tough and it left bitterness within me that I am sure you can still hear in my words today.

My third story also comes from my early college years. We were required to take art history every semester and as a freshman we had an overview called ‘Varieties of Visual Experience’. We were to keep a journal which was also supposed to be a research and idea depository. We were urged to draw, collage, paint and manipulate materials in the book as well as enter data gleaned from research. I did some research on Maxfield Parrish and his incredibly complicated process of layering and glazing pigments to achieve depth and translucency. (SHOW EXAMPLE) He was primarily considered an illustrator and many of his images were, in the 70’s art world, considered ‘kitsch’. It was then that I first learned the concept of ‘high art’ vs. ‘low art’ and how critical the art world can be if you step outside the current acceptable vanguard.

I learned more technique from that experience than I did from any of the studio instruction I received that year. But it further helped to calcify my place in my class as a non-serious artist.

MEDITATION

SERMON

I told the three stories in my reading today to illustrate three issues and/or values that have parallels in our discussion of our focus piece today, The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago.

The table—but more specifically, the dinner table is a wonderful metaphor isn’t it? It speaks of covenant around breaking bread and coming together to be present in the moment with others. The community that occurs is an example of our Universalist principals of joy, belonging and generating possibility.

We Unitarian Universalists know about that—and we know how to do the dinner party. Our potlucks are exquisite; none of those dreamwhip and jello concoctions I remember from the church potlucks of my youth! Rarely does a committee meeting commence without first partaking of libation and sustenance! We love the metaphor!

Our closing hymn, We’re Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table, was sung at a service I participated in back in 1998 regarding the Place at the Table for Gay Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered persons in America and in our church. The theme was borrowed from the 1994 March on Washington, at which Tori Osborne proclaimed to America that we gay, lesbian, bi and transgendered persons were coming home to America, to take our take a place at the table. We had a huge colorful harvest table set up at the front of the sanctuary, and at the end of the service, our minister, Joan Gelbein, invited all G.L.B.T persons sitting in the sanctuary to come up as they felt able and sit at the Welcome table. The applause of acknowledgement and welcoming roared throughout the hall. It was really powerful!

Being invited to anyone’s table is an honor and inherently an experience not to be under-rated or taken for granted. And across all continents, across all historical eras, the theme is universal. How do we know this? We know it because of the arts. We know it from the written word and the visual depictions. We have DaVinci’s ‘The Last Supper’ the most famous of mealtime themes, but we also have great feasts depicted on Ancient Egyption and Greek tableaus, tiles and pottery. We have the impressionist bustling cafes of Renoir, Degas and Lautrec, and the humble potato meals of Van Gogh’s Dutch countrymen. And at the height of the feminist movement in 1979 came The Dinner Party, by Judy Chicago and legions of unnamed women. This is the piece that is the inspiration for my talk today. Not just because of the universal theme, but because of the intense criticism that surrounded and still surrounds it.

The following are the words of Maureen Mullarkey, an artist and art critic with a keen intellect and an acerbic tongue, and Judy Chicago, who conceived the Dinner Party and was the main creative and inspirational source for the piece.

CRITICAL DAILOGUE

Judy: The Dinner Party is a work of art, triangular in configuration, that employs numerous media, including ceramics, china-painting and needlework to honor women’s achievements. An immense open table covered with fine white cloths is set with 39 place settings, thirteen on each side, each commemorating a goddess, historic personage, or important woman. Though most are largely unknown, their names should in my estimation, be as familiar to us as the male heroes whose exploits we absorb from childhood through art, myth, literature, history and popular entertainment.

Maureen: The format of the exhibition is a triangular table covering one thousand square feet and laid with thirty-nine place settings representing thirty-nine women from the mythical past to the present. The dinner guests range from Ishtar (“Great Goddess of Mesopotamia, the female as giver of life, whose power is infinite) and Amazon (“Embodiment of Warrior Women who fought to preserve gynocratic societies”), through Aspasia (“Scholar, philosopher, and leader of women after the eclipse of female power”) and onto Virginia Wolfe and Georgia O’Keefe.

Judy: The imagery on the plates incorporates both vulval and butterfly motifs, the latter chosen in part because the butterfly is an ancient symbol of liberation. The butterfly forms undergo a metamorphosis as the painted and sculpted abstract portraits become increasingly dimensional, a metaphor for women’s intensifying struggle for freedom. This form is occasionally submerged in other designs that I deemed more appropriate for a particular woman because of her life experience or because I discovered particularly fitting symbols.

Maureen: The attributes of each woman, real or imaginary, are summarized by a serving-platter-sized porcelain vulva more or less suggestive of an open flower. Each plate has its own flatware, embroidered runner, chalice (Chicago’s Term), and napkin. The plate rests on custom-designed platforms which tilt them toward the viewer at…well, a pelvic angle. This is what Chicago refers to as her “butterfly-vagina” imagery, developed in response to women’s “deep cultural hunger “ for affirmative symbols. After the fundamentalism of the cross and the flag, we now have the fundamentalism of the vagina.

Judy: The Dinner Party visually describes the historic struggle of women to participate in all aspects of society; its aim is to end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women’s hard-earned achievements are repeatedly written out of the historic record…This process results in generation after generation of women struggling for insights and freedoms that, even when fiercely won, are too often quickly forgotten or erased again.

Maureen: The Dinner Party purports to be a serious statement on the history of women in western civilization (“…with the additional meaning of a re-interpretation of the Last Supper). In reality, it is a crude rehash of some very traditional notions served up with the enthusiasm of a religious crusade. The combination of opportunism, evangelical intent, and entrepreneurial drive and technique that marks the production and merchandising of the piece make it as American as Billy Sunday.

Judy: In my “Last Supper”, these women are the honored guests and featured heroes. However, instead of being seated at the dinner table, their symbolic portraits are presented on plates as a metaphor for the fact that their accomplishments—rather than being appropriately commemorated and memorialized—have been “consumed” by a historical process that far too often has left us out.

Maureen: Substituting titillation for discernment, The Dinner Party distorts the women it pretends to commemorate… Emily Dickinson ("Embodiment of women's struggle to find their own voice") is honored with a flirtatious, multi-tiered pink lace crotch. The very woman whose disappointment over critical rejection led her deeper into mortal privacy is here turned bottoms-up for the public to gape at. The ruthlessness and stark angularity of her observations, the sheer granite of her inventiveness, the anguish of her isolation–all of it reduced to a frothy Victorian teacake.

Judy: While working on the image depicting Dickinson, I kept thinking about the contrast between the stereotypes of typical Victorian lady and the poet’s fierce statement, “I took my power in my hand and went out against the world.” The strong though delicate center of the plate is imprisoned within layers of immobile lace.

Maureen: Virginia Woolf ("Pioneer in creating a female form language in literature'"), a woman with a profound and imperious genius for making distinctions, is just one more floral orifice in Chicago's line-up. Either Chicago doesn't know or doesn't care that Woolf insisted repeatedly: "Any emphasis, either of pride or of shame, laid consciously on the sex of a writer is not only irritating but superfluous."

Judy: Like the beacon emanating from the lighthouse in To the Lighthouse, her most famous book, Woolf illuminated a path toward a new literary language. This historic step is symbolized by the plate. This image, almost fully dimensional, is trying to open up and break away from the containment of the plate form. Its glowing petals reveal a bursting center, a metaphor for Woolf’s creative genius.

Maureen: Georgia O'Keeffe ("Pioneer in creating a female form language in art") is equally misrepresented by tendrilar pastels that bear little relation to the span and vigor of the woman's work. O'Keeffe ransacks the spectrum, using black the way Matisse used it–as pure color. In addition to flowers, she has painted buildings and badlands, skulls, rocks, fossils and abstractions refusing to acknowledge narrowly sexual interpretations of her work. O'Keeffe set aside an entire page of her autobiography for the single sentence: "I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you wrote about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower– and I don't."

Judy: The plate honoring O’Keefe is a sculptural translation of one of her paintings, Black Iris. It is an acknowledgement of my own aesthetic debt to her, for despite her disclaimer, I consider her work to be pivotal in the development of an authentically female iconography.

Maureen: The essential labor stratagem remains a scandal in view of its stated feminist purpose. It was built by a pool of transient, volunteer females who traveled to Chicago's workshop at their own expense. It was a kind of high-minded piecework that exploited cheap labor in much the same way that clothing manufacturers and micro-component plants utilize unskilled women. There was a core of salaried expertise that oversaw the creation of the work: three out of four were men. A project purporting to celebrate the abilities of women couldn't find a live female potter or industrial designer or tapestry expert with sufficient know-how to justify a salary (?!).

Judy: At the beginning, I provided all the funds from my own earnings which came primarily from art sales, book royalties and lectures. Then Diane Gelon, an art historian and research member of the primary team took on fundraising. In addition to Diane-A WOMAN, the primary team included Susan Hill-ANOTHER WOMAN, as the needlework supervisor, Leonard Skuro, as ceramicist supervisor, and Ken Gilliam, the industrial designer who devised the structural foundation of the piece rounded out the team. Almost everyone, including myself worked as a volunteer, except for a few members of the primary team. We tried to raise enough money to pay those individuals small salaries so that they could be free to work full time on the project.

Maureen: Chicago’s 39 box lunches-each a ceramic vulva -circumnavigated the globe a quarter century ago…They have slept in merciful storage for the last twenty years. But thanks to the relentless efforts of Through the Flower, Chicago’s non-profit foundation, it has finally found a resting place. The Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation was moved to open the crypt and place the mummy on permanent wake in the Brooklyn Museum. It will be with us forever, like the corpse of Lenin.

END DIALOGUE

The exhibit opened in March 1979 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It remained for three months with a total audience of 100,000 viewers. Through not only admission fees, but books and documentation of the exhibit SFMOMA made money. So it was a shock when, inexplicably, the subsequent exhibition venues cancelled. A year later the exhibit began a voyage which took it to alternative art spaces (but not the world-class museums used to handling fragile works of art). The project traveled to Houston, Boston, New York and onto other cities including Montreal, Frankfurt, and Melbourne. In ten years it toured 14 venues in six countries to a total viewing audience of nearly one million people. Then, due to wear and tear it came back to America in search of a permanent home. It was gifted to University of the District of Columbia to be the centerpiece in a planned multi-cultural art center, but days before the gifting ceremony was to take place Congress (which controls the budget for UDC) debated the exhibit on the floor of the Senate and subsequently withheld $1.6 million from UDC’s, budget making the plans unobtainable.

In Chicago’s eyes, the intensely hostile reception by the art world and the organized efforts of conservative politicians as well as people in the university and art community knocked her down over and over like a punching bag. Left with a blind-sided sense of unbelievability that that which she and countless others fought so hard to amend—namely the erasure of women’s efforts throughout history, was once again working it’s magic to undo what they had created. All that effort, only to be added to the long list of names of women achievers throughout history whose works were undervalued, underappreciated, and, ultimately for many, unretained in the annals of civilization and the collections that captured civilizations’ existence. It was a harsh irony indeed!

But so too, was the irony that years of work produced a piece, that indeed was created from exploited labor—albeit voluntary as women blinded by the vision and purpose gladly gave of their talents, their time and their resources. Further still is the irony that none of their names were inscribed into the work they created—an injustice, the likes of which Judy Chicago criticized so vehemently in her writings when discussing the painstaking ecclesiastical needlework at an exquisite exhibition of needlework-past and the present.

But I would fall well short of dismissing the significance of this piece —both for the historical data it presents—her book is a veritable encyclopedia of famous women throughout history—and the sociological unfolding of events surrounding the entire project. No doubt the concept and execution of Chicago’s piece was a touchstone in the late 20^th century. In the intervening 25+ years since The Dinner Party was first exhibited, countless schools, community groups and artists have taken the theme and created their own ‘dinner parties’. One only need search the internet to find groups contributing to projects that mirror this theme creating place settings in homage to Personal Heroes, African Americans and Women’s Literature, (One website I found was actually a series of link to works of a multitude of women writers. They set the site up in a triangular theme which was borrowed along with some of the graphics (with permission) from Through the Flower, Chicago’s non-profit association. They called the compilation a veritable ‘Progressive Dinner Party’ as you traveled from site to site to “consume” what was written at each stop!

Regardless of the controversy over choice of imagery, the final product is so powerful and so attractive that feminists, curiosity seekers, artists and their critics, and students of culture in the late 20th century flock to see the piece whenever possible. Some may try to ignore its’ significance--but still can’t help taking a peek. But titillation aside, the craftsmanship is exquisite! I hope you all take the time to flip through the marked color inserts in the book on display to see the close-ups of the incredible needlework and design. If (arguably) execution is 75% of success, this piece needs no defense!

Certainly there is room at the welcome table for all whose creative vision would serve to celebrate and uplift a culture. Sharing one’s creative output takes a generous and courageous heart, so to Judy Chicago and all the women who worked on the project, I say thank you.

Peace, Salam and Shalom!