Judy Chicago

Hello exhibitionisters, Joanna here. It's so good to welcome you to a new episode. So this time we discussed Judy Chicago's exhibition revelations at the Serpentine Gallery, which is a somewhat intimate building off the road crossing Hyde Park. Chicago is a trailblazer, a pioneer of feminist and female gender-specific art. And you probably know this, she is mostly famous for her seminal piece the dinner party, but there is so much more to her, and I'm happy to say that I discovered a lot more about her thanks to this episode, thanks to the exhibition, and so will you. You may be aware of how divisive Chicago's art is, and our episode is no exception. For the second time in a row, Emily and I do not see eye to eye. If anything, I think this makes for an even more exciting episode. And I do appreciate Emily's instincts here because they not only pertain to the art, but I think they also pertain to the exhibition and the choices that were made, and we do discuss them. Before that, we got a bit bookish and we may have some recommendations for you. So without further ado, let's dig in. Enjoy the episode. For those who aren't in London, it's actually a really good way to get some visuals of the show we focus on. Although we talk a lot about the artists and the artist's life and work. It's always good to have some visuals going. So, you know. So we also ask you questions there sometimes. And this time we asked you what was the first exhibition you loved, and a bit of nostalgia here, because at Sean replied The Weather Project by Olifor Elierson, which was 21 years ago. For some reason, I came to London at that time, and I remember being so blown away by the idea of showing things at the turbine hall at the Tate Modern, because this was a project for you know that big area on ground level at the Tate. And uh it was a sort of a sunset, a misty, eternal sunset. And I remember being really conflicted about it because I thought, oh my gosh, so much energy into something that is atmospheric and kind of creates a sort of an artificial, stagnant moment of the day that is so ephemeral and so quick. But at the same time, I really loved being there and seeing people kind of disappear into the mist and coming back from it again. It was, yeah. Thank you, Sean, for reminding me of that. You did you experience that, Emily?

No, so I I hadn't been living in London then, and so I I didn't remember that. But there's a link to Judy Chicago there and some of her work for sure. Yeah, yeah, sound that sounds incredible. I I wish I had seen it. The turbine hall is miraculous, it's such a cool space. The Tate was one of the first places I came to when I came to London for the first time.

Same. So I am Joanna Pierre Nevis. I'm an independent writer and curator, artistic director of drawing now, art fair, and this is Exhibitionistus. And welcome to the 12th episode.

Great, and I'm Emily Harding, an art lover and an exhibition goer, and keep the ideas coming. I just, you know, again, I don't know half of anything about art. So I mean it's so cool to hear what is lighting other people's fires and you know the wonderful rabbit holes that that you can go down on that. So before we get going, how is your week in culture, Joanna?

Oh, well, um, it was full on. It's very strange because sometimes you have these very busy weeks and you just can't do anything really. You're not watching series, you're not doing anything but work and then rest a little bit and take care of the family. I had the busiest weeks in the history of my weeks, and yet I did a lot of stuff. I don't know. So maybe I was a bit hectic and frantic. So I finished uh Maggie Nelson's book on freedom, which I'm still digesting, I'm still kind of going back. So in it she talks about how we went from a punk attitude, kind of revolutionary attitude, and how this was now replaced by notions of care in curating and exhibitions. I think that's really interesting.

So I I can imagine what you know the idea of revolution and in curating means. I can imagine what that means. What does care mean? What does what does that describe in terms of curating?

I think, well, she conflates that with freedom. So she wanted to write a book about freedom for a long time and what it means and what it means for whom as well. And she ended up realizing that recently in theories of curating, but also theories of activism, there's been a lot of focus on care through feminism, through eco-feminism, through intersectional feminism, through um LGBTQA plus uh sensibilities, queer culture, queer activism, and this idea that there's groups of people who have been overlooked, who don't have a seat at the table, and who are nevertheless not wanting to replicate patriarchal systems and wanting to replace patriarchal systems with notions of care, notions of slowing down, um, anti-capitalist notions of growth, for example, so degrowth. Um, and all of this um means that in exhibitions, it's not about shock value, it's more about embracing the audiences and bringing them in through their own identities as well. So connecting and caring for, and curating curare, it is argued that it might have something to do with the notion of caring as well etymologically. Curating is a sort of barbaric words, it's kind of comes from nowhere. Um, and there's also this idea really of just caring. And I personally, as a curator, I I kind of identify with that notion. Uh when I was studying curating, it was all about the big men, you know, the big names like Harold Zemann, Hans-Ulrich Obris, who is the curator of the show we're talking about today, the globe-drotting male uh curators who were changing the course of history. So it's all about leaving your mark. And I remember thinking that's not how I see things when I go to artist studios, it's more about embracing, framing, we care for each other, you know, that's the thing. And Maggie Nelson is very on board with that notion, but also very not wanting to lose some aspects of the previous um attitude towards exhibitions and towards creating. And she's incredibly nuanced, and I think that's why it's interesting to read her because I didn't agree with everything she said, some things she wants to preserve, and I'm thinking maybe not, but I think it's a good, nuanced, very knowledgeable, very well read and researched um book. Really loved it.

That reminds me of Trisha Hershey's Rest is Resistance. Yeah, you mentioned that before. Yeah, I have, haven't I?

I have to read that book, Emily.

I mean, you know, who is centered in the approach that you're taking is the question. And it sounds like uh that's a big theme in this in this book on freedom as well. I started reading this book by Philip Hook, who worked at Sotheby's for many years, and fun fact, appeared on the Antiques Roadshow. I kind of liked that little string to his bow.

Um listen, we're not just academics, we just live in our brains.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's called Art of the Extreme, 1905 to 1914, and it plunges you into uh the artists of that decade. And according to Hook, like the argument he's making is that that was a pivotal decade that effectively gave birth to modernism. So, you know, following on from impressionists Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and then this is who came immediately after that, and it was a more instinctual direction. So thank Matisse, Daran, Roseau, and loads of others that you know, people are using these people are using color and line in a in a new way at the time. And so, yeah, it's great. Like I have to say, it's really well written, and he you know, kind of brings you into it, you know, for somebody who isn't of the art world, like he's bringing me in. So it might not be for people who are super steeped in this history already. But I mean, as an art art historian, do you would you agree that that was sort of a pivotal period of time?

You know, I'm always very wary of simplifying artistic eras, but I mean, for sure. I mean, the artists at the time were really redefining what a canvas was, what that surface was. Cinema is now what doing what painting did for a long, long time. So, what is that surface? What are colours? What are they doing to us? You know, it's really a crucial time. That said, um, I'm always worried that it might be a bit patriarchal and white. So I just, you know, urge you. Yeah, I urge you and our listeners to read a book that I'm just starting to read now and I'm completely in it. Again, super accessible. Personalized assessment of a time. So it's not only about talking about a time, but also your place as an art historian writer in that time. So this is Jennifer Hagee's book called The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World. And boy, does that she redefine that decade, even way before in the 19th century. Just a tidbit, like the invention of abstraction by Kandinsky, and how brazenly he stated, you know, I was the first person to do an abstract painting when you had, you know, Georgina Horton in the 19th century doing that, and Ilma Hafklint and so many other people, Aboriginal art for decades and centuries, doing that, you know, and she just states that in such a such a clear, calm way. This is not about professing superiority from any corner or any perspective of the art world. It's just saying, like, let's add on to that story, you know, let's just put some more people in there. And then, of course, you know that's Katie Hassel's The Story of Art Without Men, which I think is really interesting. And I think that one's great, but Lauren Elkin's book, Art Monsters, I am thoroughly enjoying, maybe quoting from it at some point about the way women and other uh ethnicities or disabled bodies are seen as monstrous as soon as they come out of their prescribed roles as creative beings.

On Netflix, I watched Stand Out. You would love this. It's about queer stand-up comedians. I found out a lot about people I wasn't aware of. And it's not a super in-depth documentary, but it does a great job of, you know, kind of outlining some of the key people and key themes in, you know, it didn't all just start with Ellen. Yeah. I mean, it's like, which I think in the, you know, in the modern cultural framework, that's for me anyway, that's sort of what you think of. And obviously, Lily Tumlin, you know, has been out there and for a long time. Yeah, doing how could you not? She is and she's also her smile is incredible. Lights up the world. You can't be sad when you see like her megawatt kind of you know, full face smile. She's so wonderful.

Um, yeah, well, this brings us to the theme completely, you know, feminists art. We I have read a lot for this podcast, and Judith Chicago. So we're talking about Judith Chicago, right? She has a unique thing that I've never seen anywhere else in my life, where she writes a lot. She published a lot of books about her specific projects, but she has been writing autobiographies for a long time. Oh, right. And she rewrites them regularly. So I read her feminist autobiography when she was in her late 40s, I think, or maybe early 50s, which was a crucial time for her where she was almost giving up on art. And then I wrote I read her autobiography, published in 2021, that goes back to the beginning again. So she kind of takes the same text but then adds on little things. Um, and she says something that's really interesting. So she is a pioneer of feminist art, and she says in the beginning of her 2021 autobiography called The Flowering that she was fighting for women in a very specific time and she saw gender as a binary, and now she has learned that gender is a spectrum. But that was her battle, and that was her time. And she also realizes in the book that she didn't fight a lot for um non-white women, for example. She included in you know the very famous dinner party piece only one black woman, and she comes to terms with it. She's very upfront and she's very honest and she's very direct, and she's not afraid of putting herself out there. She really does not sugarcoat anything. And she talks about the dreadful, you know, darkness you go into, the economical difficulties. She talks a lot about money, she talks a lot about sex and pleasure.

I love that she's that she's putting in the practical with the visionary stuff, though. I think that's so important. Right. You know, it's kind of like how do you actually live in this life that you're in, and how do you make the decisions about how to feed yourself and clothe yourself and have a roof over your head alongside, I want to do something really important in feminist art, rather than just having sort of the quote unquote inspirational stuff. I mean, because figuring out how to weave that solemn course of life and keep yourself fed and housed, etc., while doing that is just as inspirational. What is your vocation, you know? But but how are you gonna breadwin to get that? You know, and sometimes they are enmeshed and it's great, but sometimes they are split apart where your vocation will not keep the lights on, you know. So how are you gonna keep the lights on and have your vocation? And I love that she gets into that. I think that's so important.

It's interesting that you're saying that because she says that her art life has been more real than her real life, and she always enmeshed her creativity, her creative output with her breadwinning, which doesn't mean, as you might think, that she became very, very rich. It means that she made a lot of sacrifices. So she lived a very uncommon, unconventional life, and she sometimes had really, really difficult times in her life because of that. It really makes you, I think, as a person, when you read that, think I can do that, or maybe I should have a plan B and be an artist. It doesn't mean that you have to be an artist like her, she's not prescribing anything, but she's telling you how it is, and if you're not ready for that, maybe just have a plan B. So, I mean, Judah Chicago, I'm already getting excited. She is such an incredible person, a flawed, you know, interesting person. So, and to start with her biography now, I am happy to report that for once we are talking about an artist who had a stable family life and loving parents. Nice who supported her. For once. Lovely. So when her teacher told her parents that she had an unusual drawing skill at the ripe age of five, her parents took her immediately to the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied from ages five to eighteen. So she had an incredible preparation, a technical knowledge that was, you know, that took her places, you know, and and also made her develop from a very young age what her vocation was and what she wanted to do. So she says everywhere that she wanted to be an artist, that's what she wanted to be. So despite the financial troubles, uh, her parents always make sure that she could take her courses there at the Arts Institute. So Judy Cohen, who would later become Judy Chicago, was born in 1939 in a Chicago second-generation immigrant Jewish family. So her mother May and her father Arthur had another child, Ben, younger than Judy. So that was the family household. However, her family was quite unconventional. Uh, they didn't practice Judaism apart from the notion of tikkun olam, which Judy Chicago describes as the healing and repairing of the world. And this will make a lot of sense, not only for her, but also for her family. Because Arthur, so her father, was a Marxist and a labor organizer. And as you can imagine, in the epitome of McCarthyism, he was forced out of his union and his job, uh, his health declined progressively, and he eventually passed away when Chicago was 13 years old. And so she explains that at the time she had to choose between believing in what the world was telling her, which was that communism was evil, they were taught that at school, literally, or believing the values that were upheld at home, which were equality for men and women, and equality between races, and the right of access to um comfort for everyone on the planet. So she often says that her parents gave her an incredible education, but forgot to tell her that the world was not on par with their values.

So yeah, I mean, yeah, that must have been a heck of a shock for her to come out and be like, wow, well, I'm valued and my opinion matters, and I'm gonna share it and have that be so roundly shut down. So I went to a small liberal arts school in Minnesota. And I mean, I grew up in a reasonably patriarchal family, but uh, you know, had a real awakening through uh women's history courses and you know, gender politics. And I had this really wonderful advisor, Karen Vogel, who was just so wonderful and just you know, exposing us to questions that we might not have considered before. And and I I think the dinner party actually, when I saw it, I was like, oh gosh, I have a flickering recollection of seeing that through one of Karen's courses, actually. But and then, you know, fast forward to the end of my you know four years at university, and I and I don't know why, Joanna, but I took a graduate scheme position at an investment firm. It was like investment and insurance. I know, I know. I just don't know. I don't know why I did that. It was like this is the coveted thing to do. So this is this is the space you want to get. So go ahead and take it. It's being offered, and it lasted four months, and then I moved to New York City. But um, but I remember on the first day they walked us through, and you get off the elevator, and there's this enormous sculpture on the wall hanging on the wall. It has about 16 different tiles, and it was called men, and it was like men hunting, men building, men protecting. I mean, it was and my my my you know newly formed, my newly bloomed sort of feminist spirit was just like what? You know, I mean absolutely, absolutely. I was like, wow, so this shit is real out there in the real world.

That awakening for her started at 13, but continued until 1969, basically. She had a um a very interesting development in terms of when they st when she studied, how she studied, what she realized while she was studying. So she goes to study in California when she's 18. And there she's again, you know, struck by the gender differences between men and women, and joins the group of male sculpture students who seemed to be the most determined to experiment, but also because she made sure that a woman could be taken into that course. So at the time when women went into university and they didn't or to art school and they weren't sure they were going to be allowed. But for example, in the painting sector, women weren't allowed many times. You know, um, I think it's Gada Ama who says that at the Villarson in the south of France, she asked to go into the painting studio and she was refused entrance because women couldn't be painters. So this is this was the reality, and I think it's really important to go back to that time for us now in 2024 and realize how little access we had ever since Virginia Wolf wrote about having a room of one's own. And she's there like a sort of a spy because she's not like other women, which is a whole trope that we're not gonna go into, but you know what that means. So she uh started making her own imagery, which is immediately criticized because it was feminine, and she felt that she had to move to abstraction and keep out of any form that could even be remotely associated with the female body. So during this period, she goes on to explore colour, so it wasn't a complete waste of time. Her colours are bright and sunny, almost neon, such as lime green, bright pinks, yellows. So in the exhibition, you can see the passage from one kind of work to the other. So she worked on drawings that were circular at times, other square, but then started incorporating organic forms around a sort of longitudinal hole or a darker center or a circle. One thing you need to know about her is that she draws a lot and is also a storyteller. She's a myth builder. And in the in the exhibition, there is um some text, but also on the drawings, there's some text, and around them. She was animated by a need to tell other stories, particularly the story of women. As you know, just as simple as that, and and that was much needed at the time. So you can imagine that in the end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s, there weren't many stories about women, and therefore she decided to dedicate her time to find out or what women history was hiding. Where were they? That was kind of the question. Yeah.

Dripping in children, and you know, they were dripping in children at home, and probably and making art as well. But yeah, kind of doing the domestic. I mean, it's just you just think of like all of the creativity that is possible for women had they had an avenue to actually actually express it and actually have that, you know, we were talking about that legitimacy that you feel when you're even even in small ways, people are noticing what you're doing, or maybe buying what you're doing in a small way. All of that that was possible that just went into, you know, domesticity. Not that that's a bad thing.

So, firstly, she arrived at school and she started doing colorful sculptures, which reminded one of both male and female genitalia, but very fixated on the central, center, a longitudinal hole or a passage. So her sculptures before she turned to more kind of minimal sculptures were really interesting. They had these um very bright colors, and she painted one of my favorites is on the sort of a hood of a detached hood of a car. And so she uses the center, there's a kind of like bulging center like line, and she uses that line to create a sort of fallopian uh phallic clitoridian shape, and then from that shape, kind of creates a sort of a almost like a butterfly look, almost like a sort of um symmetrical imagery around it, and it's really beautiful. And when you think about it, you kind of think this was pretty abstract. How patriarchal do you need to be to reject that and say this is not good? Like, don't do this. You know, you you may not like it, but it it's as valid as whatever the minimalists were doing. So then she moved to abstraction, but managed to draw back to rounder shapes and a very specific color palette, as well as work with fireworks, which uh, according to her, was unprecedented. And that is when she managed to have a show. So this was after 1969. So when she moves out of school, she manages to create a sort of um an atmosphere to be in the art world as herself, as uh Judy Cohen in before 1970. So uh she had a show of her Pasadena Lifesavers drawings, dome sculptures, and what a series that she called Atmospheres, so the works with fireworks in uh and smoke in photo and film form. So this is in the exhibition, but this took place at the Jacqueline Gallery. Because she wanted to assert herself as an independent woman, she decided to change her name from Judy Gerwitz to Judy Chicago, and Gerwitz, you may ask? Well, yes, because this is was the name of her dead husband. So Judy was at a very young age in 1970.

So she was a widow, yeah.

So she was now alone with a patriarchal change in her identity as a woman. So one of the very first public gestures that she did as a feminist was to announce on art forum, which was kind of a big deal, like big magazine, a famous art magazine, in and out paid by the gallery. It was their idea, to change her name to Judy Chicago, which was what she was called anyway. You know, that old way of reducing people to their accents or to a physical thing that you had, you know, they called her Chicago because she had kept her Chicago accent. So she anyway, she was called Judy Chicago, so she went with it. She completely embraced that new identity or that kind of self-formed identity, and up to this, up to today she's still uh Judy Chicago.

So can you imagine yourself as Joanna Lisbon? Has a nice ring to it now? But yeah, so my my hometown is White Bear Lake, so it'd be Emily White Bear Lake.

White, that's an amazing that's where you should have gone with, especially once you when you went into that investment uh thingy job that you had. That you know, Emily Whitebear Lake rolls off the tongue. Power. But you know, speaking of changing your name and doing that kind of thing, I mean for me, Judith Chicago as has a sort of the hubris of the male rapper. She constant she constantly writes her own story because no one will write it for her. She territorializes herself because she is not claimed by the places she has worked in. She also talks a lot about sex and self-pleasure. So for me, she kind of has that rapper thing going on, you know. She overtly states in many parts of her books that she has always sought self-satisfaction in sex, which I love, you know. And and she says that that was something most male partners were not keen on, or even the web again. Kind of see the times.

Hold on, time out, time out. You want to enjoy this too? Is that what you were saying? Yeah.

I thought this was about me.

Wild.

I think some of her initial colorful sculptures celebrate this pleasurable union between opposite sexes. I mean, for me, it's quite clear that she a lot of her work is about sexuality. So while her work was not accepted, when she was she finally incorporated shapes that were deemed calvacious, vaginal, evoking organic bodies, she was realizing something really important, which was that there were no women artists and thinkers validated by history, nor were there women being revered for their work. She wrote that even when there were women artists, their work was associated with other male artists, but not with other women's. Think Georgia O'Keefe, for example. So women were isolated, like she had so instinctively done herself. You know, she isolated herself from the her female peers in the male world. Therefore, when she finished her studies, she relocated to Fresno, which will be one of the many times she moves to a surrounding area of a big city. She has a big trend of moving to places. She's she's really a restless person uh to teach at the art school there. But she decided to do a women's studies group, which she claims is an all-time first, and I think she's right. Later, when she'll focus on masculinity, she says that she looked up the word gender. So this was before gender studies in the 90s, right? And everything that came up was related to women as if men were universal and therefore not gendered. And this is why I have a very ingrained suspicion of the notion of the universal in arts. So now there's a group of women gathering in an abandoned building and doing performance, which again is something that is not a female thing to do. So if you read um the testimonies of women who worked with her students, they they were very adamant in saying, especially in California, because New York maybe was a a bit of a different beast. In California, it was women were not doing performance, like women were not showing their bodies. Uh, Judy Chicago even says that one day uh a Nart uh critic or curator, I I forget, was doing studio visits where she had her studio and he kind of looked in and looked away and didn't go in, and she asked him why later, and he said, Going into your studio was like watching you undress. You know, there was this idea of the female body as being too much, it was too much to handle. So what she was making these ladies do was very outside of the box at the time for women. For that reason, I think Judy Chicago is really perfect to understand the very good intentions of second wave feminism. So when she brought these women in, she was teaching them about art, obviously, but art was history was written by men, for men, about men. So she was also teaching them how to behave in a man's world. And when she describes this, it's kind of mind-blowing. So she told them not to diminish themselves with practical advice, such as go confidently towards people, say your name while offering your hand for a handshake. Don't do the tiny voice and bend your head when you're introducing yourself or talking about your work or talking about yourself. Be assertive, take up space, and she would provide techniques for women to do that. God love her. She taught them about, she gave them like money advice, yeah, everything that men didn't have to learn all this comes to them naturally.

Well, I don't even know if it comes to them naturally, but it's like they are encouraged to think about it, and it is their you know, their domain, you know. So it's like, and for women, I mean, that that smallness is so encouraged. I mean, smallness and voice, smallness and attitude, smallness and physical body, you know. I mean, just be small. Skinny. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. I mean, this this was also pre-90s when skinny was like, you know, took an absurd turn. But um, but yeah, but uh just be small. And she's saying, look, you know, you're here, you're doing this thing. Yeah, believe in it. And this is how you demonstrate your belief in what you're doing in this world. It's just so valuable. I love it. Again, it's like that practical with the aspirational and the creativity. I mean, like in her autobiographies, it's so important. That's great.

It's really important. She kind of articulates everything, and so I think for me, it was a really good read because there's a lot of things that I don't agree with. This idea of like becoming the patriarch or behaving like the patriarch is now something that we're a time where we're rejecting that, you know. Speaking of care, like Maggie Nelson is doing, so we're kind of rejecting these patriarchal values and we're going into this notion of care, you know, for instances of kinship seeking, community, making orientations for society, including plants, animals, and minerals. So we're kind of moving away from that replication of patriarchal systems. We are now introducing these uh these non-patriarchal values, but back in the day, I mean, if you came up talking about animals, you'd just be rejected. I mean, no one would you'd be mocked, basically. So you had to take that space like men did, you know, and and and that kind of makes a lot of sense to me in context. It's I would also like to highlight something, which is the fact that some of Chicago's students became artists in their own right. Suzanne Lacey, for instance, who became a really famous performance artist. And in 1972, Chicago encouraged the students. So there's one particular project that I'd like to talk about. So she encouraged them to improvise with materials found and installed along Highway 126. So they would have to go out there and perform, construct, build whatever. And Lacey, Suzanne Lacey, painted a car wreck, so like a car that was completely dismantled, in sort of a flesh pink color and placed it toward the road with the hood open, containing a red heart. And I can tell you that the car had been there for quite a while, according to Suzanne Lacey. And as soon as she did that sculpture, that sculpture was removed within the week.

Oh, I love it.

Talk about infiltrating land art and uh, you know, patriarchal spaces, even nature, you know, even a car wreck. So something that kind of brings us to the exhibition. So during this time, Judy Chicago was also working on the manuscript Revelations, which is a big deal for this exhibition. So she says in her book, The Flowering, so that we understand also what this project was and how it articulates storytelling and um drawing. Uh, so, quote, I continued with my self-guided research project. I was amazed to realize that nuns had often worked on medieval manuscript illuminations side by side with monks, but of course, this wasn't even mentioned in my college class on medieval art. I also learned that in numerous historical periods, women artists I had never heard of had flourished, often in the face of overwhelming difficulties, only to have their work forgotten. End of quote. So the second part of this quote announces one of Chicago's major projects, the dinner party, but the first part resonates with the exhibition at the Serpentine, her book titled Revelations, which she doesn't even mention in her autobiographies, and which the curator dug up from her archives. So this gives us an opening, maybe to stop going into the biography and maybe describe the exhibition before the break. Do you want to go for it?

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So, as you say, this book that she put together, this text, this uh illuminated manuscript, Revelations, is the sort of linchpin for the exhibition itself. So the exhibition, you know, is retrospective in the sense that it takes uh work of hers from, you know, when she was uh in Southern California as an art student up until works that were created last year, maybe even this year. Um and it's it's so there's like sort of a chronological thing to it, but it's also thematic. So there's kind of five themes that it covers, uh, five chapters, as it were, in the exhibition that display her art in various media, so drawing, painting, spray painting, sculpture, performance, needlework, and audio video. So the show is really widely varied. The five chapters are revelations of the goddess, myths, legends, and silhouettes, the yearning, the calling of the apostles and disciples, and visions of the apocalypse. And there's a couple of other hung pieces that aren't part of the chapters, as it were, that we'll talk about as well. The space is basically a huge square that you can walk around the outside in a giant loop with two smaller rectangle spaces right in the middle that are sort of mini subsections of the gallery. Revelations of the goddess showcases a lot of Judy's earliest work as a student when she was putting up with the sexism that she had at university. So there's a lot of those colorful pencil drawings of prisms and circles and grids. You talked about that earlier, really bright colors. Uh, throughout her work, she uses color to convey emotion, and you can see that starting here. And then in the first kind of rectangular section in the middle is myths, legends, and silhouettes. And this area is dedicated to her seminal work, The Dinner Party, which was created between 1974 and 1979. So you don't see, obviously, the dinner party is not here. I mean, it's it's still in Bublin, you know, but you're seeing sort of pieces of it that built the work itself. So, you know, here she's paying tribute to pioneering contemporary and historical female figures as well as mythical women of the past with 39 individual place names and settings.

If I may interject, the the the dinner party is a huge installation, huge, which is now permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum since 2007. And it has been a cross to bear for Judish Cargo because the storage of that piece, as you can imagine, especially you artists out there who are listening to listening to the podcast, it was an absolute nightmare. And each time it was shown, it kind of made it made the press go crazy about how horrible it was, about how pornographic it was, about how silly and and and ugly and nonesthetic it was, and who did she think she was. And at the same time, it was a blockbuster each time. The museums earned loads of money from the dinner from showing the dinner party. But the directors of the institutions who decided to show it sometimes lost their jobs, you know, it was to the point of really being um ostracized because of it. So the dinner party is a is a big deal, and obviously there was no space at the serpentine to show it. But another thing that Judy Chicago said about this exhibition is that Hans Ulrich Oebris, who is the curator of the show, wanted to show something she had never shown. So Revelations was a manuscript that she kind of dug up and kind of became the sort of blueprint of the exhibition, let's say. But there was also another aspect of it, is that they wanted to make the exhibition a sustainable exhibition. So Judish Cargo has lots of very monumental works against the grain of feminism at the time that was proclaiming that monumental was akin to patriarchal, so women should do small works, but she was having none of that, and her thing was to really work very long time in projects that became quite big and substantial. Uh, so none of those works are in London, and the idea was to show mainly drawings and works on paper and video work and documents and documentaries about the pieces.

Yeah, yeah. So in this in this bit of the exhibition, you see, you know, you don't obviously see the 39 dinner plates, but you see the sketches. Because yeah, it's enormous. I mean, there's you know, obviously 39 people around a triangular table, and then there's all the tiles as well that just are the name.

999 other women.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the Brooklyn Museum says that this attracts 100,000 visitors a year, so definitely still blockbustering. Still blockbustering. I mean, I would be tempted to go see it if I were in um if I were in in Brooklyn. And then in the room beyond, so this is the next uh rectangular room in the center of the space, is the yearning. And we have Uh, Judy Chicago's investigations into pyrotechnics. So these were atmospheric uh performances. So you see lots of videos of women in the desert landscape with these unbelievable plumes of colorful smoke, which it was said is non-toxic, which is good. Those poor women, I can imagine the state of their lungs right now if it weren't. But um, so she did these between 68 and 74. And so she talked about them as drawings in smoke, which she called a gesture of liberation. So releasing color from the grid, from the rigid confines of the page or the canvas, which I loved that notion. I mean, this was my personally, this was my favorite bit. I mean, to see one of those performances, I think would have been incredible. She she recreated some of these in COVID times. Um, so she did some smoke installations outside, but it was in a very urban environment. And I I watched some of those videos, it didn't have the same sort of beauty and grandeur and subtlety. Yeah, absolutely. I admire her doing it because it's like for crying out loud, it's COVID. We need some, you know, we need some art in our lives. You can't get it from going inside anywhere.

I think maybe being there would have been really helpful. But as a video, because the the the the work you're referring to, the women are painted in different colors. Yeah. And they're naked, and they are working really slowly or sitting uh cross-legged, um, and they're manipulating these um smoke color smokes, and they're dancing. There's one of them is dress is painted in yellow, and she's dancing frantically, like really beautifully, and you can see they kind of are empowered by what they're doing, and it's uh in and it's in the um in the desert in California. It's really beautiful thing to see.

Yeah, absolutely. And and so at the show, you could download a free app and generate your own smoke drawings. Did you do that?

I did not, I did not because I thought the QR codes were to listen to Judy's voice reading revelations or talking about the and because I've listened to 500,000 podcasts uh about her with her and read her a bunch of biographies. I was like, maybe I'm good now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I I'm at full saturation of Judy Chicago, so I'm good, yeah. So you mentioned uh the kind of male-dominated land art movement, um, where gestures or structures were imposed on the landscape, and she was basically trying to do the opposite, something that was really ephemeral, um, something that didn't leave a trace, which I just love that so much. Like the, you know, the kind of the ephemeral nature of any performance is the best bit about it, and the fact that you could only see it there. And I mean, the the the photos are super striking. Uh, and yeah, I thought that this for me, this was the favorite part of you know, the work that she'd done. So in visions of the apocalypse, so this is the third section kind of in the back corner. Uh, mostly work from the 80s. You see Chicago's work on patriarchy with works like power play images that reflect her environmental advocacy as well. Uh, this is probably the down, this is the low point of the exhibition for me. For me, it was it was just very, it felt reductive. It was very on the nose. So you see man's genitalia having, you know, urinating on nature. You know, you see a polar bear, you know, a lone polar bear on a tiny little ice flow. It left to me no room for imagination, like the like the smoke works absolutely did, and the women's body, all of that was like beautiful, ephemeral. And this was just like, I didn't feel like there was any room for me in what she was trying to do.

Most of the works that you see are drawings that uh were used to create other much bigger installation slash paintingslash drawings. So the idea of the exhibition, which succeeded in some points for me and for me personally also failed in others, was to maybe not bring those works, but maybe bring the ideas behind the works. And she's a very, very skilled draftswoman. I mean, really, she is very good. Um, at you know, she she I mean, she drew all her life, and it's true that some of the works that were chosen were there more to illustrate the different stages of her life as opposed to the major works she did in terms of quality. I really love the power play drawings. Um, yeah, I mean, I think maybe the series you're referring to, which is about all the animals, so she gathered a few words like stranded, um stamped out or yeah, yeah, and she illustrated them with um animals that are being affected by climate change and their surroundings, and yeah, they were not my favorite.

Yeah, yeah, sure. Oops, you know, I just realized that the what I've just been calling the visions of the apocalypse is actually the calling of apostles and disciples. So that section which makes more sense. Yeah, it does, it does indeed. So then um visions of the the apocalypse, the actual section that's called that, is in the kind of far left-hand side of the gallery. It gives us the end, which is a meditation on death and extinction. This is a work she did from 2012 to 2018. This is a powerful series of drawings depicting plants and animals in crisis. So they're intense, they're dark, they're kind of outlined kind of drawings, handwritten messages on them. So equally powerful is a section of drawings and tapestries showing women giving birth, uh, an act that should surely, as Chicago declares, be celebrated and venerated for its crucial role in human existence rather than hidden away as messy and unseemly or diminished to a mere mechanical act. So there's sort of a sectionless part, so a part that isn't isn't included in one of the chapters, as it were. One of them is a huge quilt called What If Women Rule the World? And I have to say, I despise this notion. But yeah, it's just binary, it's reductive. So you have pictures of women with little descriptions underneath, and there's also men. There's also men in there. That's true, that's true. There's also men in there, that's true. But then it has questions woven in that are like, you know, so if the question is, what if women ruled the world? Would buildings resemble wombs? Would there be violence? And I would say no and yes. That's my thought. But uh Yeah.

It's funny because the the project inside, so in inside the shop, so you go out through the you go in through the main door and then you go out through the shop, and they have a video booth where you can answer one of those questions. And also, this is uh a project that was um built with um one of the Pussy Riot members. Oh, right, yeah. And so it is kind of framed in a way that is not too gender specific, but still talks about the female role in society or lack thereof. I agree with you. In the beginning, I was kind of thinking, oh no, come on, I don't want a matriarchy, but Judith Shago says that very clearly in her books. She's not interested in matriarchal societies, her feminism is inclusive, so she talked to men as well. And I ended up really enjoying the exercise of thinking about that. I do think that architecture would be different. I do think that the structure of a day, the 24-hour day, would be different. I think that medicine would be different. There's a lot of things that would be different if women ruled the world, but I think that the question asked is not great because it bears the power question of ruling onto another gender. So it kind of reverses like the same thing second generation feminism. It reverses the thing, but it's still the same power issue that we're not addressing, which is the power structure of society. Something we didn't say is that this was a project for Dior.

I know. I was just I was just about to say that, yeah.

So feminism has now become a staple of pop culture, and uh it's kind of is becoming a sort of a sticker thing. I'm more open to it because I feel that in there there's something. And I visited the exhibition with Diogo, so my husband, who's an artist, and he kept saying, I feel like I am the only one here. And I was like, What do you mean you're the only one? Look around you. And there were so many women because the show's been on for a while. When I went the first time, that not many people, there were families, you know, your usual tourists and art lovers. And this second time, which was two days ago, the gallery was filled with women, and you can see that there were mothers, there were um friends together, there were lesbians, there were non-binary people, there were um queer people. I mean, you know, in London people are very identifiable because people are very eccentric sometimes. And you can see kind of where, you know, in the inn now you have it's Pride Month, so you have all the stickers coming out and all the badges and pins and whatever. And uh Diogo listened to the Birth Project documentary quite a bit because I had l again, I had read so much about it that I was like, okay, I know what these people and he told me about stuff there. Uh it moved him quite a bit. It it messed it it it made it did things to him, really. And that was interesting. That was really interesting to see how they react there. Yeah. So I think we still need those one-liners. Somehow, somewhere they're activism sometimes reduces stuff a lot, and sometimes is a bit extreme, but maybe we need the bull to go to that extreme to then come back and construct something else, you know.

Like usually when I leave an exhibition I've really enjoyed, it's like more often than not, you know, it's sort of a slow walk to the tube. You know, it's kind of like there's a lot to ponder, you know, it's really, you know, it's sort of given you this whole basket full of things to think about and reflect on. And I just didn't feel that, you know, I'm I'm glad she is alive and I'm so glad that she's doing the work that she's doing and she is important. And but yeah, I don't know, this exhibition, it didn't give me the food for thought I I thought I would have, you know, given someone who has had such a long body of work, such a big body of work, and who has been working for a long time. But yeah, I mean, I should so the final piece or the beginning piece, depending on how you think about it, is uh a huge sort of panoramic multi-panel piece that goes across uh the front. And that is called In the Beginning from Birth, and it's a piece that she created in 1982, and it's you sort of traverse from one side to the other, and it's uh the the background is mainly black, and then it's sort of these outline drawings that she does in uh colors that kind of morph into one another throughout it, and there's sort of you know, birthing images again, and you know, hands kind of reaching through to other hands to kind of bring through and uh you know ultimately give birth to woman on earth. And I just feel I just felt unmoved, you know. I I I sort of wished I had had uh an experience like Diogo did. You know, that's you know, that that's exhibitions at their best, and that just goes to show that not everything is for everybody.

And listen, it's the second time that we're having this moment where we both had different relationships to the exhibition, and that's great. I I'm loving that, you know. We've been we've agreed so many times, and now it's not that I don't agree with you. I meet I meet you in the middle, but I was a bit more excited about the exhibition than you, and maybe I can explain why, and also I can explain why I wasn't that excited about the exhibition and and really kind of uh meet you there after the break. I think we we need to to give our listeners some time to you know do whatever nature calls, drink a glass of water or urinate on nature, yeah.

You know, whatever kills like yeah, because I want to know what what what your slow walk was back to the tube and what was going on in your mind, what was in your basket when you left. Sure. Great, sure. Back in a moment.

See you in a bit.

So here we are, we're back. We've been introduced to Judy Chicago, and we've been around the exhibition at the Serpentine. Where we're going to next is we're gonna delve deeper into Chicago's lengthy career, some of the important milestones throughout it, contextualize her research into female artists and writers and activists, and discuss some great questions of curation, which this exhibition brings up. And we've flirted with that question already, but we're gonna dive deeper into it. But first, Joanna, I want to understand how you felt when you left Judy Chicago and what were some of the thoughts you were ruminating on as you as you went to the tube.

Um, I was thinking about um John Haraway, um Isabelle Stangers, Bruno Latour, all these um scholars who were working very hard on um ecofeminisms and other ways of being on the planet, and how in some ways Judith Chicago kind of preempted what they were doing by retelling stories. So I had read about the exhibition before, and she is very adamant in saying in her autobiographies, but also when she talks about this exhibition, how before the big book religions, where we adore and pray to a bearded white man in the sky, um, or non-white man in the sky, uh the the divinity that was central to most cosmogonies was uh the goddess, so was a woman. Uh, and I started, I've been reading um a lot about mythology, um, namely Natalie Haynes, I hope I'm saying the name right, Pandora's jaw, who talks about the relationship between Pandora's myth and Eve, and how these religions from the Greek mythology to today kind of defined and deviated the center of our histories and our stories to patriarchy. And I was also reading uh the book The Patriarchs that talks about patriarchy and the very small places where there's matriarchies and how that kind of sustained the power structures and the structures of society and the roles we have in society. And I was very touched by the way that big drawing in the beginning that says, I I love because I again for me Judith Carg is a complex artist because she is a storyteller as well. I think she writes really well and she likes to tell stories. And for me, her works are dissociated from are indissociable from the stories she's telling. But she talks about a sigh, there's a lot of sound in the exhibition in that and this sigh became a moan, and this moan became a wail, and this wail became a scream of birth. And I was thinking about the myth, the Greek myth of Gaia, how Gaia is impregnated by the god that penetrates her and she starts shaking, and how the focus is on the phallic way of impregnating and never on the fact of giving birth and being impregnated. So I was really sustained by that, and I was sustained by the fact that she doesn't, she's not she doesn't have any children, so she had to experience uh she asked a friend to experience her giving birth, and she wrote about it. Because she's not a mother herself, she doesn't focus on what I find. I think I'm with I'm I have the same visceral reaction you did with what if women roll the world question to the idea of the goddess mother and the the mother of all mothers, the how mothering is what identifies you as a woman. I'm so against that. I am a mother by choice, and I could have not been a mother, you know, it was a very personal choice because I met a per a special person. Um, but I you know, I I could have very well not have birthed anyone, and I don't think that the facts who I am. But the act of giving birth should not be thrown away with the inclusivity now of trans women, yeah, trans men give can give birth. So thankfully now we're expanding this notion of mothering, and Donna Haraway talks about not giving not not not mothering, but but working on kinships, and the idea of kinship, I think, should be integrated in this idea of mothering because you can adopt something you you didn't give birth to. So, what I'm trying to say is that that really interested me, the idea of focusing on the birth, but not gendering the birth to the extent of making women the best there is and the the the divine purity and showing how difficult it is to give birth and showing to women or to trans men who can give birth that if they choose to do so, it's quite an endeavor. But if you do it, don't be afraid of saying that it does give you direct access to a certain spirituality and a certain power. She was very fair in that because she's not a mother, because she was very criticized for doing things about birth and about women without being a mother. I was like, and the that first drawing with yoga, we stayed for a long, long time. And the idea of the the shouting and the the sigh, the moaning, the shouting, those are noises that are not accepted. You cannot, if you're perimenopausal and suffering, you cannot tell your your employer the earth was created from that wail, yeah, and that vibration, that sound. I really love yeah, there's real struggle there.

There's real struggle, you know, rather than sort of this, you know, bed of roses kind of you know picture that it is of motherhood. Um, there's you know, in the in the image, it's like even the hands that are sort of connecting with other hands, it's not a passive holding, you know. I mean, there's real pulling and you know work, you know, there's work taking place there.

And the final drawing before that one. So when you go to the end of the exhibition, there's a drawing where she paints, she says then there was God or something like that. Yeah. And the image corrects that stance and she creates a being that as has a penis and has a vagina, has a vulva, has two faces, I don't know how many arms. And I'm really angry because I'm reading um Jennifer Higgy's book and Lauren Elkin's book, and I'm angry, you forget how much we're discarded, and you forget how terrible it is that art history, Gombridge, all those people we read as art history, art historians were incredibly sexist. You forget, and you need to be reminded all the time. And this exhibition sometimes sacrifices aesthetics to that message, I think. Um, maybe I wouldn't have curated this exhibition, but I do find that the fact that it's filled with women now, non-binary people, queer people, means that we need those spaces. We need those messages, but we need to nuance them and we need to keep on listening to stories and making up other stories that feel close to us, and you, Emily, need to maybe find other stories that are more palatable to you, you know, perhaps. But the need to tell other stories is there, and that I found really profound. And I was very I was happy, I was moved by it. Yeah. It was I went to the thinking, yes, there's a lot of work to do. There's a lot of work to do, and we're doing it, and I'm happy that I'm doing it, you know. So, yeah, that that was that was the sense that I had. Yeah, but not the first visit. The first visit, I was a bit disappointed by the exhibition.

Yeah. And what what do you think was the difference between the first and the second? What kind of made you warm up to it?

I think the first exhibition, no, not Diogo particularly. I think he did, it was interesting. His experience of the exhibition was very, very powerful to me as well. But I think I was I went in there expecting to see certain works that I really like. Um, I think I have a question for you about that, actually. I think her aesthetic is, I think it's not only because she was a girl that she was sidelined a lot. I think her aesthetic is not a highbrow aesthetic. Um, and I was expecting to see some works there that weren't there, maybe that um I I prefer to some of the drawings, like for example, the ecological drawings I'm not very into. I wanted to see the birth. I love embroidery and I love her work on embroidery, and there weren't much of those. So maybe I was a bit frustrated that I didn't get to see the Judy Chicago works.

Sure.

And but also respectful of the fact that they tried to do a sustainable exhibition. Um, and I wasn't looking a lot at the documentary aspect of the show. And then, because I was very, very tired when I got there, and then that second visit, I focused more on the stories, the documentaries, the you know, all the the part that is telling the story of each work. Um, and then I I kind of connected the dots again. And I I I participated in the the booth in the video, I replied to the question, and I was reminded that her her role as an artist is a very uh multi-compartmented role. She was an activist, she did lots of projects with women groups, she created the first building where women could come and create and talk about feminist issues. Um, she created Woman House with Miriam Shapiro. She did the um, I think one of the first feminist um uh magazines of the of the time in the 70s called Every Woman. Um she moved around, she gathered a lot of people around her to um represent her work, but at the same time, who became curators themselves, who became artists themselves. She had a role. And I think that the exhibition does that very well in some ways. It it kind of presents that. But sometimes the the idea of the book of revelations, I think kind of gets away from people. I don't think it's there. And I think, as you said, you focused on the sections and what they're called, and to me that doesn't speak a lot. I don't think the sections are named correctly, I don't think it gives like the yearning. If you haven't read the biography, you don't understand what she's saying.

I agree. I mean, you know, you know, you saying that it's her work is in the context of the story she's telling, so it's you know, a big part of their impact is, you know, is is in that sort of lineage rather than a Philip Gustin painting, which is a painting and it's there and you make of it what you will. For example, hers is part of a continuum. There is part of me that has a real resistance to text in visual art, you know, even like office furniture having, you know, it's just I I I really, really prickle against that. It's like I don't want you to tell me anything. You know, I want you to present something that I can interpret, that I can engage with, that I can find my way into on my own to a certain degree. A lot of the you know, drawings she had, as you mentioned earlier, had you know, text around the side, you know, extinct or I if you have to do that, in my view, is like then the image isn't strong enough. And leave it to the image to do the work it is you want it to do. So I I I think you're right. I think that is an important point that there is something about her work that sits in a broader continuum. Certainly, perhaps the work in this exhibition specifically. I mean, I know very little of Judy Chicago outside of this.

I mean, you're talking about the text, and the the question I had for you was what about the aesthetic? I have two questions for you. The first one is, do you think her aesthetic is very California of those times? And the second one is how would you define it and does it hurt your eyes? Because I think lots of people Does it hurt my eyes? Does it hurt your eyes? I think some people are like, what is this?

Yeah, yeah. Yes, I think it is a very California aesthetic. I mean, the colors she uses feel very much of a California time, those incredibly bright colors. She uses a lot of spray paint. She went to Auto Body Painting School to figure out how to work with, you know, that kind of technology, which I love that. Like what a cool thing to do, you know, to go and you know, you talked about highbrow, lowbrow. I mean, that is like no-bra. I mean, that is, you know, that is that is very uh, you know, that has no place in the art world. And she was like, you know what, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna do it. And it's not even it, it feels drawing in the very loose sense, just not a bad thing by any stretch, but it's it's not conventional drawing. It's you see the the image in relief and the colors all around it. I mean, the the the yeah, how would you describe them?

In the beginning, I I imagined, okay, so her dad was a Marxist. Uh, she probably knew Diego Rivera's murals and all that kind of art that was supposed to kind of celebrate, you know, mural painting, you know, with the kind of these simplified figures, very thick uh bodies, and very centered on the body. Um, so I kind of see a little bit of that. And then, and this is gonna come across as a horrible thing, but for me it's praise. I think she has a sort of a fun fair aesthetic. You know what I mean? Like those black kind of pits where there's motorcycles go around that you look into, and it's black, and there's these drawings outside that are made with very neon fluorescent colors. But it's made with such an incredible, masterful um drawing and line and coloring, and the way she colors and she creates volume, but also the way she creates those bodies kind of make me think of funfair aesthetics, you know? This kind of very strange, and I love to be pushed, and I love to be kind of like almost shouted at from what I considered it from an educate from my education point of view to be bad taste. I love that, yeah, and I see younger generations really delving into that a lot in France, mind you. And they have taught me a lot. Sufiana Barbery is one of them, but there is also Benjamin Auchard, Antoine Med, Louise Alex Alexegiev. I mean, there's lots of artists who are developing uh an aesthetic that kind of goes into a lot of Americana, uh, I think, and other influences, and uh and I am here for it, but I have to say, sometimes I look at it and I'm like, God, I mean, the the one that I really resist the most to is power play. But in the back of my mind, there's a voice saying, you know, the masculine, the faces, the male faces. I really love the pissing on nature one. I love that one. But in the back of my mind, there's a voice saying, God damn it, she completely knew Trump and 2016 before everyone else. And that's the histrionic, horrible quality of that kind of power that she really encapsulated in those drawings, and that's why you hate them. You know, we're looking at African artists nowadays, but uh, I think one of the reasons a lot of African artists were or of African descent or African Americans or Caribbean artists were dismissed. It's because they were bringing a taste, they were bringing an iconography that was supposed to be primitivist, that was supposed to be backward, that was supposed to be ugly. And aesthetics is something you learn, it's not something that's acquired. It's if you're drawn aesthetically to something, it's really reflects your education. And I love that she kind of reminds me of that as well. That's what's one of the things that I kept thinking about too when I went back to the tube.

That slow walk back to the tube. And I think I went in thinking I was gonna like it a lot, you know. I mean, uh yeah, of all of all the exhibitions we've we've been through this, you know, on the show, I've I've fallen in love with, if not all of them, at least part of them in a wholehearted way, you know. And this one I just it just didn't, yeah, but I thought I would. I was my expectations were set up as such that I I expected to really love it.

So just to go back a little bit and contextualize um her work, um within contemporary art exhibitions of the time, of our time now, uh, one of the rooms of the exhibition, like you said, was dedicated to atmospheres. And I must say that I was a bit disappointed with the way it was shown, especially the one we really love with the women in the in the in the landscape, because I had just seen that video in an exhibition called Re-Sisters at the Barbican last year. And it was given prominence. You could really see the landscape, it was so pleasurable to watch. And it was an exhibition about eco-feminisms, so it was a really interesting exhibition, and here it's shown in a way that you know it's kind of this suspended screen. I had to sit and you have to really condition yourself to look at the video, and and kudos to you to perceive the beauty of it, because I don't find it that you know easy to understand and to watch, even though there's photos. It's interesting because in the Barbican show, there were no photos, it was just the video in a small text contextualizing it. And the experience of the film was much stronger for me, to be honest. And I drew on that memory to kind of bring back um the experience of this of this video. As the rapper that she is, you know, Chicago is always kind of like, yeah, I was the first to do this. I don't know if she might have been the first if she was starting in the 70s or 71, but in 72, there's a major work called Uh Landscape Landscape for Fire by Anthony McCool, who was this British artist who met Carol Niche Neiman, fell in love with her, married, um, got married to her, and then went to New York to live. And he described New York as this incredible uh place where you would meet artists and immediately you'd start talking about work. Immediately you'd start talking about a piece, and an artist would say, Do you know what? I'm gonna help you. Let's drive to wherever the landscape is that you need to work on, and I'll do this with you. Because people criticized Judith Chicago a lot for using um women who were specialists in needlework, but those women were unemployed, and in those days, people were just working together. They were volunteering, they were doing stuff. It was a different time. And Anthony McCall talks about New York like that.

Yeah, was it a criticism that she was exploiting their talents or so?

The criticism, and this refers specifically to both projects, the dinner party and the birth project, which were all very, very uh involved with needlework. Um, so lots of needlework um techniques, including embroidery, crochet, lots of stuff. And so by the time, Judashikaga was quite well known because she's she had started Woman House and other projects, and she did a lot of so to earn money, she would do a lot of conferences around America to talk about her work and to talk about her investigation about female writers, female visual artists, and activists. And so she was really, you know, drawing on her research and doing a sort of activist work within uh contemporary art uh places and academia. And so women start as soon as she put out there that she was starting um this big project called The Dinner Party that included those women and celebrated them through needlework. Lots of women wrote to her and said, I want to be part of the project, I want to work with you, I want to work with you. And one of her assistants, she said, I don't want you to pay me, because if you don't pay me, you can't fire me. And women wanted to work for her, they felt valued. There were women who had money.

Yeah, they were assessed, some of them were affluent. There's a huge amount of privilege that goes into please don't pay me, you know. I mean, that's only a certain sliver of uh society can really manage that.

Yeah, yeah, and some of them uh struggled within their families, and that's documented in the exhibition. So Diogo's telling me there was this dude who was sulking because the what his wife was working for Judy Chicago, so doing something she loved doing, and finally, and that's another thing to say about Judy Chicago, she was praising the talents of these needleworkers because you know, one thing that happened here is that textile work was excluded from the genres of what could be considered as high art.

Wow.

So she was bringing textiles and needlework into the art world and saying this is also a technique. There's not only painting sculpture, there's also this. And this man was watching football and was sulking because his wife wasn't watching the football with him and couldn't understand why she wasn't with him.

Why you know her time? Better thing do you have to do other than sit on the sofa with me and watch football?

And how dare you have time for yourself? Yeah, your time belongs to me. So that's the context she was working with, and these women were very, very happy to work for her. The ones that weren't are um absolutely acknowledged in the books she wrote. She did write about the struggles, she wrote about the fact that some women couldn't accept the fact that the authorship was Judy Chicago's and not theirs. Some women wanted to contribute more, and Judy Chicago didn't want that. She was the artist, she was the author. And she acknowledges them. They're all their names are in the um the caption of the works, and her system wasn't perfect. Of course, nowadays, maybe I wouldn't agree with this system, or maybe I would. I wouldn't, everything's contextual.

But yeah, I mean, I thought uh in terms of the themes, like in terms of the chapters, I didn't feel like those were helpful at all in terms of it, it felt like a retrospective that was sort of thrown together in a very, very loose way. Um, but yeah, so I I you know I didn't really, yeah, I didn't feel the read on that.

Are they the chapters of the book Revelations? Yes. But you see, that's where I I'm gonna be a bit harsh, but I listened to an interview where she was talking about the way Hans Ulrich Obrist worked with her, which was he wanted something that had never been shown before. And so he pressed her and pressed her, and like, are you sure you don't have anything else? And then she came up with the text revelations. And for me, as a curatorial choice, I would have said, amazing, we must publish this, and this will be the book of the exhibition, and then do a separate exhibition, but using it as a blueprint for the exhibition for me as a curatorial I don't understand. And I'm happy to know that for you it also didn't make sense. I don't I don't I don't really, really understand all the choices of the exhibition, to be fairly honest with you. Yeah, all right, and I think you're the symptom that it didn't work out. No, not gonna not gonna exploit you, Emily. To bring I think we've come to the end of it. Much could have been said, much more about Judy Chicago's life. I urge you to read the autobiographies. And thank you, Emily, for being the dissonant sound to my symphony or to Judy Chicago Symphony or to Obrist Symphony. Who knows? No, it's great.

Yeah, I mean, I yeah, no, thanks for all of the research. And I mean, even though I wasn't blown away by the exhibition, I found her an absolutely fascinating character. So I think, you know, those those autobiographies I might just check out. Um, and you know, it was funny because the I wondered how I would feel at the end of this conversation if I would feel somehow differently about the exhibition based on whatever it was that you had to say about your experience there or about Judy Chicago herself. And I feel the same, actually. I mean, I think if anything, you know, it hasn't because sometimes it can move the needle, you know, you get insight into something, and then you're like, oh okay, actually I could go and see that again and look at this from a very different point of view. But um, I mean, what a wonderful thing to see work from her while she's, you know, still kicking, still active. But honestly, I don't think she's ever gonna die if you look at pictures of her and videos of her. I've never seen anyone more full of life. I mean, well, people can look it up, just just have a look for yourself. Her bright color palette is expressed in her person as well.

So, yeah, so next time we will be talking, you will be researching Otobong Nkanga, who has an exhibition at Listen Gallery. So, again, we're uh delving into a commercial gallery exhibition, which is a completely other beast, as we said before. We will be with you in two weeks, so very soon. And that will be our final episode of this season.

Yeah, how do you feel about that, Emily? Yeah, I feel ready for a break, to be honest, uh, and ready to come back in in the autumn. All right, well, thanks everybody. Have a great week. See you soon. Bye, Joanna. Bye-bye. Bye, Emily. Bye everyone.