The Lesson of Judy Chicago: Fame Has Its Detractions

Last year, two women were in an elevator in a Boston art museum. One looked at the other, quizzically.

“Are you Judy Chicago?”

“Yes.”

“I see.”

Chicago is the artist whose extraordinary and extraordinarily controversial work “The Dinner Party” features 39 oversized place settings on a huge triangle of a table, each dedicated to women of achievement, many of whom have been obscured by history’s relentless focus on the attainments of men. Much of the imagery is unabashedly sexual.

Chicago, 56, has the kind of success they’re talking about when they tell you to be careful what you wish for. She is one of the country’s most famous women artists; she also is one of its most reviled. Her art has drawn people by the thousands to museums; it has been trashed by critics and by congressmen.

The museum elevator stopped. The door opened. But before the first woman stepped out, she turned, looked Chicago in the eye, and said, “Emily Dickinson was not lacy!”

“I meant it as ironic,” replied Chicago, “but I really appreciate that you’ve remembered it all these years.”

Not surprising. Once you’ve seen “The Dinner Party,” you are not likely to forget it.

Chicago and I stood in front of the Dickinson plate at the UCLA / Armand Hammer Museum of Art in Westwood the other day. Workers were adjusting the lighting on the massive “Dinner Party,” the centerpiece of “Sexual Politics,” an exhibit of feminist art that will run through Aug. 18.

The Dickinson plate features a long narrow opening surrounded by exquisite ruffles of pink porcelain lace.

“I conceived it as this strong, pale center, confined--almost smothered--by lace,” Chicago said. “But her voice is clear.”

Witty, I thought, and dead on as I recalled a story Dickinson once told about her father. “He buys me many books,” she wrote to a friend, “but begs me not to read them--because he fears they joggle the mind.”

I first saw “The Dinner Party” in 1979, at its debut at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It was an exhilarating time for American women; “The Dinner Party” was an exhilarating piece of art by one. It celebrates the forgotten, the overlooked or the amazingly courageous. A hundred thousand people came to see the piece, the largest crowd the museum had ever drawn.

Wherever the piece has gone--in this country and abroad--it has inspired crowds and controversy.

“Great Vaginas of History” sneered a Boston critic last year. That phrase pretty much sums up the criticism. (Rep. Robert Dornan [R-Garden Grove] called the piece “genitalia, served up on plates.”)

“We’re not used to seeing forms that externalize our experience,” said Chicago, who, understandably, has trouble reconciling the clashing popular and critical responses to her work. “There’s an absence of forms that celebrate us.”

Hmmm. Forms that celebrate women?

Chicago’s remark gets a girl thinking: What, for instance, is the female equivalent of the Washington Monument, the Eiffel Tower or Seattle’s Space Needle?

Carlsbad Caverns? The Grand Canyon? The Grand Tetons? But those are natural phenomena, not human ones.

We live in a world where the phallic symbol is an aesthetic given. The feminine equivalent is controversial or dirty or repulsive.

Maybe that’s why the form is so often alluded to by flowers. Who, after all, would knock a chrysanthemum?

Well, someone would; flowers have been a dominant image in Chicago’s work.

Her new autobiography, “Beyond the Flower” (Viking), is an attempt to come to grips with her ambiguous place in art history. Since I am a humble viewer of art, not an expert, I cannot say whether she succeeds or not, but one reviewer wrote that her experience “can be taken as a primer and warning for other female artists.”

So far, this year has been a good one: “The Dinner Party,” for which she is desperately seeking a permanent home, is being shown for the first time since 1988, her Holocaust Project goes to Cleveland next month, a survey of her work is on display in Minneapolis.

Instead of basking in the exposure, Chicago said her anxiety was so great, she sought the services of a therapist.

“Some people like to sow, some like to reap,” said her therapist. “You need to learn how to reap.”

Maybe.

It’s also possible that she fears the harvest that awaits: popular praise, critical dismissal.

Things could be different this time around. But you’d be anxious, too.

* Robin Abcarian’s column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Readers may write to her at the Los Angeles Times, Life & Style, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053.