JUDY CHICAGOLAND

The Dinner Party is a table featuring place settings for 39 women, running the gamut from significant historical figures like Mary Wollstonecraft to mythical creations of feminist ideology like “Primordial Goddess.” (Enlightened classicists will recognize her as the queen of the Land Before Patriarchy.) They vary from the truly influential — Queen Elizabeth I — to the truly obscure — Natalie Barney, a turn-of-the-century lesbian who established a gay-friendly salon in Paris.

Chicago’s choices of whom to represent in this festival of gynocentrism are nowhere near as objectionable as the way she represents them. Each woman is commemorated by a ceramic plate and cloth runner. The runners depict scenes from the woman’s life or “story.” And each plate contains an image Chicago feels is the “physically defining characteristic of woman in an almost metaphysical sense” — an image of the vulva. The vulva can be “dark and molten,” as Chicago writes of the image for Primordial Goddess, or trimmed with pink lace, as in the case of Emily Dickinson, but whichever way she shows it, the vulva is always there.

Just how does the vulva define women “metaphysically”? Chicago gives several answers in Beyond the Flower. There’s the highfalutin answer: ” The vulval image could act . . . as an entryway into an aesthetic exploration of what it has meant to be a woman — experientially, historically, and philosophically.” There’s the robot-feminist answer: The vulval image “was just one way of demonstrating that the oppression experienced by the women represented at the table was a result of their gender.” There’s the revolting answer: “Rippling out from their tiny centers is the insistence that female sexuality is to be celebrated and embraced, not hidden away, purchased, excised, or despised.”

When The Dinner Party debuted at the San Francisco Museum of Art, it caused quite a sensation. Five thousand people flocked to the opening. Mother Jones and Life reported the show favorably. NPR’s All Things Considered featured Chicago in an interview with Susan Stamberg. Later, when the piece traveled to the Brooklyn Museum, CBS News and People covered it.

Chicago was invited to the Today show and the Bill Meyers Show.

But not all the attention she received was congratulatory. Hilton Kramer, then the art critic of the New York Times, wrote a particularly biting review of the piece in 1980. “For its principal image, The Dinner Party remains fixated on the external genital organs of the female body,” he said. ” Its many variations of the image are not without a certain ingenuity, to be sure, but it is the kind of ingenuity we associate with kitsch.”

A decade later, when Chicago planned to donate her work to the University of the District of Columbia (UDC), the explicit sexual imagery caused a tumult in Congress. The school needed a $ 1.6 million grant from Congress to renovate the building in which The Dinner Party would be housed. In 1990 the House voted to withhold the funds; during the debate Rep. Dana Rohrabacher dismissed the work as “weird sexual art.”

But it wasn’t just conservatives and congressmen who were appalled by The Dinner Party. In Beyond the Flower, Chicago writes of her frustration when feminist theorists labeled her work “essentialist” and accused her of ” degrading women through my use of vulval imagery.” The criticism confuses Chicago, who claims to have coined the phrase Feminist Art — “a term that didn’t exist until I invented it.” In 1970, she created a Feminist Art education program, the first of its kind, at Fresno State University. The purpose of the program was to produce art “in which distinctly female subject matter would both be central and unabashedly expressed.” The Dinner Party met this goal, but other feminists were apparently too obtuse to get the point: “I could not figure out how seemingly erudite women could completely miss the point — understood by so many less sophisticated viewers — that The Dinner Party entirely celebrates women’s sexuality, history, and crafts.”

But what exactly is Chicago’s goal in celebrating these feminine wonders? What does Chicago expect feminist art to do for women? First and foremost, feminist art intends to give true voice to “women’s ways of being.” In order to allow for the true expression of the female voice, feminist art must move out of the mainstream, or “male-stream.” It must be free of “male” rules for art, such as attention to form over content, a concept which hampers creativity.

Art informed by feminist values must focus on personal empowerment and thereby provide “an alternative to the prevailing paradigm of power, which is power over others.” Most important, feminist art will be able to speak to a broad audience: “Feminist Art was . . . not intended primarily for a sophisticated art audience, one familiar with the sometimes arcane visual language of contemporary art.” By design, everyday women will be able to understand the message of feminist art, that message being one of victimization and oppression.

Thus, feminist art relies on the assumption that women, regardless of their history, culture, or class, speak the same language — that of oppression — and need a collective “voice.”

What gives Chicago the authority to proclaim that women all share status as victims of oppression? Nothing. And Chicago proves her error with a vignette in Beyond the Flower. When The Dinner Party failed to win the anticipated acceptance from the art establishment, Chicago set out on a new endeavor, called The Birth Project, a series of needlework images of women giving birth. It included over 50 women across the country who stitched Chicago’s designs and then turned the work over to her to be displayed at various locations. Chicago, however, did not anticipate that women might have priorities other than creating art: “We heard about angry husbands, who expressed considerable resentment that their wives wanted to stitch rather than spend time with them; about family members who came to town and simply assumed that the women would drop everything and squire them around; about calls from school-board members and PTA officials insisting that the women help with one or another seemingly pressing crisis.” From her perch far above the rest of us peons, who can only dream of spending our days painting and sculpting, she sees oppression in the demands of ordinary life.

Chicago complains not only about men who want their wives to spend time with them, but also about the art world. “Women participate only marginally,” she writes. “As dealers, critics, historians, and curators, they are deluded into thinking they have real power.”

Dealers, critics, historians, and curators are not marginal participants in the art world; they are the art world. Indeed, many pages of Beyond the Flower are committed to Chicago’s frustration that critics and curators are able to decide the fate of an artist and to control opinion. Funny that Chicago never considers male critics marginal. Does the power just fizzle away for a female art critic? How about for Mary Boone, doyenne of the New York gallery scene, whose Soho space made dozens of reputations in the 1980s?

Chicago wants not only women but women-centered art as well to receive the same recognition given to men and “male” art. This is especially true for The Dinner Party, which was, she writes, “intended to test whether a woman artist . . . could count on the art system to accept art with female content.”

So it seems the establishment is to embrace feminist art even though Chicago segregates herself from the art world and thumbs her nose at it. The goal is contradictory and the enterprise is doomed to failure. Chicago designed The Dinner Party so that average viewers, outside the art community, could understand it. In doing so, however, she made it so obvious in its essential vulgarity that it leaves little to the imagination. In the attempt to elevate content over form, Chicago has left aesthetics behind. A radical feminist might find 39 vulvas beautiful, but for art critics and museum-goers alike, they are something else entirely.

It is doubtful that women would actually use the voice Chicago provides for them. “Since the UDC debacle,” she writes, “there have been no other offers for permanent housing, the simple explanation for which is that there is apparently an absence of institutional will regarding women and women’s art.”

And here she blames women as well for not embracing her and her cause: ” What will it take for women to turn their attention to the honoring of our own history and achievements?” Honor? Is it an honor to lock Sappho in the same jail of male oppression as Anne Hutchinson, to put Judith on an equal footing with Sojourner Truth, to set Ethel Smyth (who?) equal to Emily Dickinson? The women represented at The Dinner Party — the real ones, that is — would have had little tolerance for sexually explicit art, especially art that included representations of their own bodies. “Women,” Chicago writes, “do not yet understand that they must financially support the art that speaks to them.” Maybe they understand it all too well. Maybe, like those unwillingly “invited” to Judy Chicago’s “dinner party,” they resist being reduced to a vulva with a political agenda.

By Pia Catton