I always assumed Judy Chicago deserved the credit for her 1970s masterpiece of feminist art, The Dinner Party, an epochal installation in the form of a triangular table set with places for great historical women, including Theodora of Byzantium, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Virginia Woolf. This monumental attempt to give women their rightful place in history and culture, now on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum, is a consummately clear and bold expression of an idea only a bigot would argue with now.
But it turns out it wasn’t her idea after all. She received miraculous inspiration from above, or below – for, in her personal cosmology, the female divine power is also a Gaian earth spirit. As she worked on The Dinner Party, Chicago created an illuminated manuscript entitled Revelations that is now being published for the first time and is at the heart of her Serpentine show. It tells us, among other mystical nuggets, that it was not Chicago but “The Goddess”, who originally “created a great triangular table, open in the center and formed in Her sign, which She placed upon the sea of names that honored Her Disciples”.
Call me a literalist but I don’t believe there is a Mother Goddess. Or a Daddy God. On the whole, I think life would be better without any gods at all. So my heart sank when confronted at the start of this show with Chicago’s mural-sized retelling of the beginning of the universe, not with the big bang 13.7bn years ago, but with a sigh that “became a moan / And this moan became a wail / And this wail became a scream of birth.”
Maybe one way to get a handle on this mysticism is to remember that Chicago is an American artist. American culture has dabbled in religious symbolism ever since the pilgrim mothers and fathers. From Moby-Dick to Barnett Newman’s painting cycle The Stations of the Cross, American creativity has drunk deep from Jehovah’s, or Gaia’s waters. In putting cosmic matters at the centre of her thinking, Chicago isn’t very different from these predecessors. So why are the results so tame?
There is a lack of intensity in this show, partly because it keeps drifting away from the Revelations project to include other works. But then, when I study the publication itself, it turns out that Revelations is not really “illuminated” with the obsessive genius of a William Blake. Much of it is just a long screed with fancy lettering. As an artist, Chicago simply does not let go enough. One of her heroines is Georgia O’Keeffe. Chicago’s 1974 work Female Rejection Drawing emulates the vulvas that flower in O’Keeffe’s paintings. It’s one of the best drawings here. Yet unlike O’Keeffe’s sensual paintings it is disconnected from bodies and nature, its pinks and purples tinged with a free floating psychedelic dreaminess that is more like a bad album cover than sublime art.
Chicago draws best – and this is a bit of a paradox – when she portrays men. She so idealises and spiritualises the female form that she doesn’t portray real women at all. Female figures slide into blissed-out identification with some goddess or other. She has much more fun drawing men, whom she caricatures as musclebound phallocratic grotesques. They cavort in Michelangelo-style sketches, or weep blood, or contemptuously urinate on the Earth.
In the medieval manuscripts Revelations claims to imitate, the central imagery was subordinated to the Word of God. But the monks who laboured on these manuscripts filled their marginalia with monsters and obscenities, out of which a more secular art would be born. Chicago does not allow herself marginalia. Her art is all message. A more recent series of eco-protest pieces are not much more than bathos-filled posters. An interactive artwork asks people questions about what A World Ruled by Women might be like. The very first is: “Would God be a woman?” To which my honest answer would be: “No, because God doesn’t exist.” What has this theological banter to do with actual struggles for equality and justice ?
Yet Chicago has been taken up by some very elite champions in recent years. In 2020, fashion house Dior worked with her to finally build her 1977 design for a colossal sculpture of the Mother Goddess in the gardens of the Rodin Museum in Paris, as part of its spring-summer haute couture show. The original drawings are on view while a promotional video takes us inside this hollow artwork with the huge gold Dior sign by its door. Inside, it was decorated with fabrics woven by women in India. The video tells us how women in India are not allowed to participate in crafts that are male-run, but are now being enabled to do so by the munificence of Dior.
So an American artist and a French fashion house combine forces to lift up the helpless women of India. This is some seriously patronising imperialist bullshit. But in the art and fashion worlds, there is an immense appetite for the preposterous. Here, Chicago has been given enough rope to intellectually hang herself, transforming the Serpentine into a cross between a Mormon temple and a 1970s San Francisco health food store. Without a shred of irony. It’s a shame, because The Dinner Party is such an important work.
I felt a familiar sense relief as I escaped from the Serpentine into the sunlight. What was that feeling? Oh yes, it was like being a kid released from church.
• At Serpentine North Gallery, London, from 23 May. Judy Chicago: Revelations published by Thames and Hudson/Serpentine.
