Wilshire Center

Anyone who slept through the women’s movement or was too young to notice it can take a peek at some of the feminist art world’s major events in a 1974-87 mini-survey of works by Judy Chicago. Others will find the art so predictable and relentlessly hard-line that their opinions--pro or con--will only solidify.

Chicago’s most spectacular debacle, a massive collaborative project called “The Dinner Party,” is based on the premise that to dedicate vagina-shaped porcelain plates to famous women is to honor them. After all these years it’s still difficult to imagine Emily Dickinson agreeing that a vagina dinner plate with lace pubic hair secures her proper place in history.

In another ambitious collaboration, “The Birth Project,” Chicago views birth either as a graphic horror show of ripped flesh, howling mouths and rubbery spaghetti or as a tumultuous upheaval of the Earth--a more interesting concept that leads to a few relatively complex works that actually contain a streak of subtlety.

More recently Chicago has been working on her own, painting hairless men as bellowing automatons whose furrowed muscles have nothing to do with anatomy. These bloodless wonders are a hateful lot who “drive the world to destruction,” manipulate puppet-like women or just yell their heads off.

As a politician, Chicago has asked important questions about the inequality of women and mobilized platoons of adoring minions. But as an artist, she is much less effective. Her porcelains are so coarsely painted, her paintings are so hysterically lurid and her work is generally so literal-minded and heavy-handed that she might as well scream in the wind. What we have here is the visual equivalent of a bunch of soap-box speeches. (Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., to April 28.)