Needles Are Mightier Than Judy Chicago’s Conceptions

At a time when sports fans know as much about a player’s performance asthey do about his agent’s ability to negotiate a multiyear contract, it’s appropriate that Judy Chicago is one of the most famous artists in America.

A savvy game-player who knows the difference between public perception and behind-the-scenes deal-making, Chicago is not an artist in the old-fashioned sense of the term. Locking oneself in a garret and toiling away in obscurity holds no romance for the pragmatic feminist, who has made a name for herself by organizing groups of women to work on collaborative projects she conceives, manages and publicizes--often stirring up controversy in the process.

If Chicago’s reputation had to rest on her own paintings, sculptures and drawings, she would have been forgotten long ago. As an artist, her greatest achievement has been to bring the ethos of a small-market production company to contemporary art, transforming what is often thought of as a solitary, soul-searching endeavor into a social activity characterized by cooperation, dialogue and clearly defined goals.

Her latest project, which she began in 1994 and completed last year, has resulted in a nationally traveling exhibition that opened Sunday at the Skirball Cultural Center. Organized by the American Craft Museum in New York, “Resolutions: A Stitch in Time” presents 20 pieces that feature an impressive variety of needlework by 18 women who live in six states. All of the modestly scaled works juxtapose a stylized illustration (designed by Chicago) with a proverb or bit of folk wisdom the women selected.

In “Home Sweet Home,” for example, 13 dwellings are nestled around the circumference of a blue and green globe on which the piece’s title is embroidered in rosy tints, like the letters on a collegiate cheerleader’s sweater from yesteryear. Rendered in the simplified style of a child’s storybook, the homes include an igloo, a teepee, a thatched hut, a trailer home, a skyscraper and a clapboard house surrounded by a white picket fence. A big red barn stands behind a log cabin, reminding viewers that people are not the planet’s only inhabitants and that beasts of the field also need to feel at home in the world.

Other works are more explicit about the moral lessons they try to teach. A series of six echoes the format of flashcards, with such phrases as “Bury the Hatchet,” “Two Heads Are Better Than One” and “A Chicken in Every Pot” set beneath pictures of people of various ethnicities doing just what the words say.

Imagine what educational pamphlets produced by government agencies in the 1950s would look like if a second-rate cultural-sensitivity trainer from the 1990s had been sent back to advise them. This gives you an idea of just how corny Chicago’s designs are. Or try to picture what Warhol’s imagery would have looked like if he were not an avant-garde artist but a Cub Scout den mother. This gives you an idea of the incompatible goals Chicago’s art strives to serve.

A thick strand of religious sentiment runs through “Resolutions.” While wall labels link her project to the Jewish tradition of tikkun olam (“to repair the world”), the fabric wall-hangings themselves recall the colorful felt banners that began to appear in churches of many denominations in the 1960s.

Following the lead of Sister Mary Corita, an activist nun and populist artist who taught at L.A.’s Immaculate Heart College, many religious communities put Pop Art to spiritual use, deploying its snappy graphics to bring religion out of the cloister and into the street. Over the past 30 years, however, the emotional impact and conceptual edginess of this socially engaged style have dissipated, spread too thin amid the uninspired works of too many imitators. Chicago’s project represents the tail end of this development.

Very little visual dynamism is to be found in her designs. Aside from “Now or Never” and “Do a Good Turn,” whose pinwheel compositions cause your eye to rotate slowly around the cliched phrases in their centers, Chicago favors static imagery.

The postures of most of the people she depicts are stiff and frozen, their expressions wooden and unconvincing. In “Get Into the Swing of Things,” seven androgynous humanoids (yellow, pink, tan and brown) mimic Matisse’s joyous dancers but replace their free-spirited lyricism with robotic awkwardness. Likewise, “We’re All in the Same Boat” harks back to Jacob Lawrence’s vivid imagery but burdens it with an overwrought emotionalism that rings hollow.

Although the values Chicago’s seemingly naive pieces seek to convey are admirable, the designs belittle such noble aspirations, making them look so unattractive, out-of-touch and propagandistic that it’s difficult to take them seriously.

In principle, no one would disagree with any of the platitudes presented in “Resolutions.” But that’s the problem. The messages Chicago’s image-and-text art conveys are too generic to trigger much more than nostalgia and greeting-card sentimentality.

The most compelling aspect of the handsomely framed fabrics is the needlework, which is often dazzling in its mastery. Exceptional examples of a wide range of techniques and materials abound, including embroidery, applique, macrame, beading, quilting, smocking and needlepoint. The exhibition is a tour de force of stitchery, both innovative and conventional.

But the consummate craftsmanship provided by the expert needle-workers clashes with the calculating showmanship marshaled by Chicago. After all, the audience for her project is neither art lovers nor embroidery enthusiasts, but people (and institutions) who are fed up with contemporary art’s difficulty and would be perfectly happy if it did something useful, like teach us how to behave.

Unfortunately for Chicago, but fortunately for viewers, art like embroidery (at least embroidery at this level) is neither efficient nor rational. The beauty of both is that they cannot be corralled by Chicago’s opportunistic packaging. If you can get past her tedious imagery, the surfaces of these exquisite works provide ample and unexpected pleasures.

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* “Resolutions: A Stitch in Time,” Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Brentwood, (310) 440-4500, through April 29. Closed Mondays. $8.