Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's "Dinner Party" in Feminist Art History

University of California Press 264 pp.

Reviewed by Marcy Sheiner

Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in Feminist Art History is a combination coffee-table art book/feminist theory treatise. It was published in conjunction with an exhibit of the same name shown at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center in Los Angeles during the spring and summer of 1996.

For those who don't remember or weren't around, Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, which premiered in San Francisco in 1979 before touring the country and Europe, was comprised of a triangular table set for 39 notable women from history, resting on a porcelain floor inscribed with the names of 999 others. The place settings were lush and elaborate, with exquisitely hand-stitched runners setting off hand-painted china plates. The women represented were chronologically named, from "Primordial Goddess" to Hiawatha to Mary Wollstonecraft to Georgia O'Keefe, and as history progressed around the table, the sculptured plates rose higher and higher. Though the audiocassette guide chirped merrily about the "butterfly" designs, they were frankly meant to represent female genitalia. Notes Amelia Jones in one of the essays in Sexual Politics, "Through the muscular three-dimensionality of the plates representing modern women, Chicago aimed to subvert the patriarchal obsession with phallic forms by developing 'an active vaginal form.'" Naturally, the show drew the usual barrage of hell-and-damnation rhetoric from mainstream critics and politicians--as well as from some feminists.

More than two decades after its inception, The Dinner Party continues to raise important issues about feminism, art, and female representation--hence this book and exhibit. As Henry Hopkins, director of the Armand Hammer Museum, says in his introduction, "By placing Chicago's piece alongside other important feminist works that address similar issues...Sexual Politics illuminates the questions that have been central to feminist art practice and theory."

The essays in the collection address feminist dialogue around The Dinner Party and place it in the context of art history; other topics include a Jewish perspective; Europe reactions; lesbian analysis, and, most importantly and frequently, the significance and meaning of "cunt art."

It wasn't only mainstream art critics like Hilton Kramer who were offended by the vulvar imagery of The Dinner Party; some feminists were put off, afraid that representing women by their genitals was nothing new and radical, but reactionary and "essentialist," that is, it reduced women to their sexual and reproductive functions. But as Amelia Jones points out, "Female sexuality became an obvious focus of exploration since sexuality has historically been the site of women's oppression."

Though The Dinner Party may have been the most ambitious display of cunt art, it was not the first. Sexual Politics documents--in words and in photos-- a tradition of cunt art, including the work of Tee Corinne and Chicago's earlier project "Womanhouse," in which sculptured breasts adorned the walls of the "Nurturing Kitchen" and the "Menstruation Bathroom" left little to the imagination. In fact, 1866 is cited as the date of the first work of cunt art--Gustave Courbet's painting "The origin of the world."

Still, I, like many women, had never seen cunt art prior to my viewing of The Dinner Party, and I was dazzled, not only by the blatancy of the plates, but by the brilliance of the entire work. In a review I said that seeing The Dinner Party was "one of the peak artistic pleasures in my life," and years later I made a number of collages from Dinner Party calendars; to this day one hangs on my wall.

Thus, revisiting this cherished work was for me both nostalgic and illuminating. It brought back my emotional response to the piece, while at the same time forcing me to reexamine the work through the lens of nearly two decades of evolving feminist theory. Sexual Politics puts a 90s spin on 70s feminism, and for once this spin is neither trivializing nor nostalgic. Because of the high level of the writing, I was able to really 'get' the anti-essentialist point of view, as well as concerns about goddess-worship, and continuing criticisms from women of color.

A few aspects of the book are, however, frustrating. For instance, no contributor's bio's are included, leaving general readers (as opposed to art aficionados) in the dark about the possible biases or credentials of the writers. Even more disturbing is the "feminist chronology" tacked on to the end, a highly subjective list that includes events with no obvious connection to feminism, such as the Bay of Pigs invasion and a stock market plunge, as well as developments in the art world, but while including a host of "feminist firsts,' quite a few important ones--like the first women's bookstore, coffeehouse and theater group--are omitted. And, ironically, this collection of cunt art analysis makes not a mention of important sex conferences like the one held at Barnard in the early 80s or the heated sex debates of that decade. There also seems to be a West Coast bias--San Francisco's 1978 Take Back the Night march is mentioned while New York's, held a year or two earlier, is not.

The contribution and achievement of this book, though, is to bridge some gaps between generations. As Amelia Jones says, "Today there appears to be little understanding of the complexities of 1970s feminism and its historical contexts...younger generations of feminists have little access to the wealth of insights that were painfully developed in the art and theory of this period and waste time reinventing what has already been extensively theorized."

Judy Chicago once said that her goal in creating The Dinner Party--which, by the way, involved the labor of over 200 artisans--was to produce something "so far beyond judgment that it will enter the cultural pool and never be erased from history, as women's work has been erased before." Beyond judgment The Dinner Party has emphatically not been, but, as this book proves, it's still far from being erased.