Judy Chicago

The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice investigates the widely debated, deeply flawed yet influential concept of the uncanny through the lens of feminist theory and contemporary art practice. Not merely a subversive strategy but a cipher of the fraught but fertile dialogue between feminism and psychoanalysis, the uncanny makes an ideal vehicle for an arrangement marked by ambivalence and acts as a constant reminder that feminism and psychoanalysis are never quite at home with one another.

The Feminist Uncanny begins by charting the uncanniness of femininity in foundational psychoanalytic texts by Ernst Jentsch, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Mladen Dolar, and contextually introduces a range of feminist responses and appropriations by Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Sarah Kofman, among others. The book also offers thematically organised interpretations of famous artworks and practices informed by feminism, including Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, Faith Ringgold's story quilts and Susan Hiller's 'paraconceptualism', as well as less well-known practice, such as the Women's Postal Art Even (Feministo) and the photomontages of Maud Sulter. Dead (lexicalised) metaphors, unhomely domesticity, identity and (dis)identification, and the tension between family stories and art's histories are examined in and from the perspective of different artistic and critical practices, illustrating different aspects of the feminist uncanny.

Through a 'partisan' yet comprehensive critical review of the fascinating concept of the uncanny, The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice proposes a new concept, the feminist uncanny, which it upholds as one of the most enduring legacies of the Women's Liberation Movement in contemporary art theory and practice.

http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-feminist-uncanny-in-theory-and-art-practice-9781472505583/

BOOK LAUNCH -- ICA, 7pm, 16 September 2016: https://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/book-launch-art-and-feminisms

Book review: Amy Tobin, 'Homesickness', Oxford Art J (2017) 40 (1): 199-203. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcx013

The Ana Cha Collective is a coalition of feminist scholars, artists, and filmmakers formed to interrogate the cultural world through a feminist lens and engage in a creative practice that deconstructs violent power structures. This article outlines the feminist (her-)story and politics that contextualizes the formation and political praxis of the Ana Cha Collective. The Feminist Art Movement’s points of strength and limits can reveal effective feminist political practices in the contemporary cultural sphere. The Ana Cha Collective formed to utilize radical feminist practices in cultural production for the complete liberation of the marginalized by dismantling the structures that identify and
oppress these groups. By archiving the collective’s critical and creative pedagogy, this article serves as a form of feminist counter-discourse that will hopefully spark more
collective feminist art praxis.

Between November 1971 and January 1972, 27 women collaborated to cre- ate a fantastical, dreamlike exhibition in a run-down, seventeen-room mansion in Hollywood, California. Aptly titled Womanhouse, it drew on their experiences as women and critiqued the domestic roles to which their sex had often been confined: daughter, wife, mother. In order to expose the “feminine” as culturally determined and counter the predominantly male art establishment, they deviated from the standards of exhibition display and dominant postwar modes of art making: they claimed the home as a setting for art; encouraged a nonhierarchical, collaborative approach to production; championed unconventional materials, tools, and methods; and prized personal content over formalist concerns.

Among the parade of objects at the January 2017 Women’s March in Washington, D.C. was a bobbing cluster of body-size tampons painted with dripping red rivulets and smirking, if not flirtatious, faces. And while the crowd responded to the bloody tampons with cheers and applause, such open celebration of menstruation and its attendant products is not typical in society. Examples of reclamation and positive appreciation of the female body and its “natural” effects, in particular menstrual blood, by contemporary artists finds its source in the feminist practice of Judy Chicago, notably her handmade lithograph Red Flag, 1971, and Menstruation Bathroom from Womanhouse, 1972. Chicago’s visualization of a taboo subject is often historicized, and thus ossified, as representative of a particular moment of 1970s “in-your-face” feminism. However, I argue that Chicago’s work constructively and subversively flows beyond historical containers, as demonstrated by the continued artistic interest by twenty-first century female artists who use menstrual blood as aesthetic material. Such employment of menstrual blood in contemporary performances, paintings, and photographs connects these artists and their work to Chicago via a discursive lineage where abject material, and specifically menstrual blood, is visually rendered as something politically and positively riotous.

1960年代的女性主義不是一處應許之地，有關女性的歷史文獻寥寥可數。那些總成為男人影子的妻子、姐妹、母親，終究在男性凝視之下，於歷史中毫無痕跡地消逝了。芝加哥的故事便從這裡開始，在龐大且耗時多年、擴及上百人的協作中展開。然而，〈晚宴〉一作縱然成為自當時至今激進的女性主義藝術，大眾對於「賓客名單」的政治正確性仍多有質疑與檢驗，而其參與式政治亦只創造了女性主義的表象，本質上則牴觸女性主義的民主性。那些年為芝加哥勞動的藝文工作者們，亦指出芝加哥的剝削不過是淪為另一套極似父權的繁殖形式。

A discussion of contemporary feminist art, specifically Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro's "Womanhouse", within the context of Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own".  I look at the connections and parallels in symbolism and ideologies that culminate in the writes and visual works of the artists.

Despite centuries of debate about the medieval medical writers Trota of Salerno and Hildegard of Bingen, there still remain widely disparate views of them in both popular and scholarly discourses. Their alternate dismissal or romanticization is not due to a simple contest between antifeminist and feminist tendencies. Rather, issues of gender have intersected in varying ways with other agendas (intellectual, nationalist, etc.). Recent philological researches have helped not only to clarify why these earlier interpretations were created in the first place, but also to raise our understanding of these women and their work to a new, higher level.

In 1968, Judy Chicago worked on a number of dome-shaped sculptures, each consisting of three acrylic hemispheres arranged symmetrically on a square surface. Made with new industrial materials and techniques, works such as Iridescent Domes #2 and Bronze Domes fit within the formal-aesthetic discourse of Minimal art. During the 1970s, Chicago and feminist critics positioned these sculptures—characterized by round forms and evanescent colors—as unconscious expressions of what they conceived as a feminine sensibility, which they opposed to the angular and cold language favored by male, Minimalist artists. This article argues that Chicago’s dome-shaped works were protofeminist due to their associations not with traditionally female forms but with contemporary engineering structures. I show that Chicago’s hemispherical sculptures, and her Minimal art more generally, referenced civil engineering projects at the forefront of technological innovation that were thought to advance human society and improve living standards for all. I thus expand the concept of protofeminism beyond notions of radical subjectivity, as theorized for art made by women during the 1960s, to a broader sociopolitical attitude intent on building a more just world. Interpreting Chicago’s Minimalist sculptures within the historically specific context of engineering, however, associates them with Western ideologies of modern progress that since the late 1960s have been questioned, reformulated, or discarded. Indeed, from the perspective of second-wave feminism, these ideologies not only seemed out-of-date but morally objectionable. The article reveals both the promises and pitfalls of Chicago’s techno-aesthetic, protofeminist practice.

Excerpt: I recall these art historical obsessions with negation in order to frame Sally Mann’s own absences, which I will present unceremoniously and unpoetically as a list. She is absent from conventional, academic art histories, which resent her for eluding appropriation, for being a photographer and not an artist-using-photography, for intersecting with the popular imagination, and for sidelining academic discourse in her writings in favor of the poetic. Relatedly and always surprisingly, she is largely absent from feminist art histories, save a smattering of essays, such as those by Anne Higonnet (2001), Jennifer Friedlander (2008), and Claire Raymond (2017). Finally, she is absent from queer histories of censorship and the Culture Wars, with Robert Mapplethorpe and all his cold and careless handsomeness dominating that discussion at the expense of others, like Mann, the Guerrilla Girls, and Judy Chicago—each of whom faced censorship in the same period.

Amerika'da Feminist Sanatın yaratıcılarından ve günümüzün en çok tartışılan sanatçılarından Judy Chicago'nun The Dinner Party/Yemek Ziyafeti  yapıtı Newsweek dergisi tarafından bin yılın en çok tartışılan 10 sanat eseri arasında gösterildi. Judy Chicago, 20 Temmuz 1939'da Chicago Illinois'de dogdu. 1962 California Üniversitesi Sanat Bolümünü bitirdi. 1964 California Üniversitesi Sanat Bölümü Master Programını tamamladı. 1970 Fresno Üniversitesi'nde ilk Feminist Sanat Programını kurdu. 1971'de Miriam Schapiro ile birlikte California Güzel Sanatlar Enstitüsünde Feminist Sanat Bölümünü, 1973'te Arlene Raven ve Sheila De Brettville ile birlikte, Los Angeles'ta halka açık ilk Feminist Sanat Bölümünü oluşturdu.

1974-79 Yemek Ziyafeti adlı kadın tarihine adanmış ilk anıtsal yapıtı yüzlerce gönüllünün de yardımları ile tamamladı. Yemek Ziyareti'ni altı değisik ülkede milyonu aşkın izleyici gördü. Yapıt Amerikan Senatosu da dahil olmak üzere Amerika'da büyük tartışmalara yol açtı. 1980-1985 Doğum Projesini tamamladı. Amerika'nın değişik yerlerinden Chicago'ya gelen sanatçılar yapıtın tamamlanmasına yardım ettiler. Eser 100 değisik yerde sergilendi, değisik müzeler tarafindan satın alındı. 1996 Chicago Artur ve Elisabeth Schlesinger Kütüphanesi Kadın Tarihi bölümünde yer alan ilk yaşayan kadın sanatçı oldu. Fotoğrafçı Donald Wodman ile birlikte üzerinde çaliştığı Holocaust Projesi: Karanlıktan Aydınlığa  adlı yapıtı Chicago Spertus Müzesinde sergilendi.

The chapter revisits the work of Judy Chicago and Eleanor Antin in terms of an intersectional analysis that foregrounds issues of gender, race, and ethnicity. It examines how the relative invisibility of ethnicity as a category, and of Jewishness in particular, over and against the visibility of African Americans and Latina artists, is important to understanding the undertones in the work of these well-known artists.

This is early research I presented at Arts in the Present/9 (Oct 2017). It is preliminary work on a chapter for Routledge edited volume, _Documenting the Visual Arts_, edited by Roger Hallas. The images are from  Lynn Hershman Leeson's documentary film. http://womenartrevolution.com/

Taken from my book "Jewish Identities in American Feminist Art: Ghosts of Ethnicity," this chapter discusses how two very different Jewish women artists of some renown—Judy Chicago and Mierle Laderman Ukeles—negotiated their careers as artists and feminists in the 1970s. By embarking the decorative and domestic handicrafts in a transgressive way, Chicago’s work at that time was seen as a breakthrough and a significant contribution to the women’s art movement. Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s work takes a different trajectory, for on the one hand she foregrounds her Jewishness, defined in a traditional way (as a religion), while on the other, she engages in a radical aesthetics like Chicago and departs from standard practices and assumptions of art history.

Taken from my book "Jewish Identities in American Feminist Art: Ghosts of Ethnicity," this chapter discusses how two very different Jewish women artists of some renown—Judy Chicago and Mierle Laderman Ukeles—negotiated their careers as artists and feminists in the 1970s. By embarking the decorative and domestic handicrafts in a transgressive way, Chicago’s work at that time was seen as a breakthrough and a significant contribution to the women’s art movement. Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s work takes a different trajectory, for on the one hand she foregrounds her Jewishness, defined in a traditional way (as a religion), while on the other, she engages in a radical aesthetics like Chicago and departs from standard practices and assumptions of art history.

Frauen wurde für Jahrhunderte die Fähigkeit zu kritischem Denken abgesprochen. Diese verbreitete Aberkennung der Geisteskraft war die Grundlage für den Aus-schluss von Frauen aus Universitäten und Kunstakademien in ganz Europa. Frauen wurden über das Reproduktionsvermögen ihrer Körper definiert und waren eng assoziiert mit den Leidenschaften, den Gefühlen und den Affekten (Lloyd 1985). Weshalb sich vor diesem geschichtlichen Hintergrund aus feministischer Perspektive heute mit dem Affekt befassen? Wie kann körperlich verankertes, in der Erfahrung gründendes Wissen einen Beitrag zur Wissenschaft leisten und wie verändert dieses Wissen die Wissenschaft? Welchen Stellenwert hat die Beschrei-bung von Wahrnehmungen und Sinneseindrücken im wissenschaftlichen Diskurs? Die Beschäftigung mit dem Konnex von Affekt, Gender und Wissen ist aus epistemologischen Gründen dringend geboten. Die kritische und kreative Auseinandersetzung mit der eigenen Erfahrung ermöglicht eine andere Form des Wissens: Passioniertes, leiblich rückgebundenes, erfahrungsbasiertes und verantwortungs-bewusstes Wissen erweitert einen rein rationalen Zugang zum Wissen und zur Wissensproduktion und ermöglicht eine Neubestimmung der eigenen Verortung in der Gesellschaft und in der Welt. Affekt -- eine spürbare Intensität, die Atmosphäre in einem Raum -- wird un-terhalb der Wahrnehmungsschwelle übertragen und schlägt sich als körperliche Anspannung und Entspannung nieder. Affekte sind unwillkürlich, nicht bewusst, ansteckend und bis zu einem gewissen Grade automatisch. Daher steht der Affekt in einem Spannungsverhältnis zur Konzeption des rationalen Subjekts, der klar abgegrenzten Einheit des in sich selbst abgeschlossenen Individuums, das seit Jahrhunderten als einzig fähiger Akteur des kritischen Denkens begriffen wurde. Im Gegensatz dazu rufen die Arbeitsweisen des Affekts Verbundenheit, In-teraktion und Interdependenz auf.

This exhibition comprised paintings—made in airbrushed acrylic and oil—from Judy Chicago’s 1982–87 series “PowerPlay,” in which the feminist artist allegorized tropes of masculinity and the issues and misconduct that can occur when men wield the power and privileges afforded them. While it was easy to see the work as prophetic of the era of Trumpian politics and #MeToo, the patriarchal structures that Chicago examined have of course long existed—in fact, their entrenchment in Western society is a central theme of the series.