Judy Chicago

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0:12Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which leading artistic figures choose the most significant influences and experiences that have inspired their own creative work. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is the pioneering artist, author and educator Judy Chicago. Having run the first ever feminist art course in California. She established herself as a powerful advocate of women artists in the early 1970s. She's best known for a groundbreaking installation piece called The Dinner Party and Monumental Work, which was first displayed in 1979. Now aged 84 and enjoying her sixth decade as an artist, she was in London recently for the launch of a show at the Serpentine Gallery, the largest ever UK exhibition of her paintings, sculptures, textiles and photographic works.

0:59Judy Chicago is now regarded as a trailblazing figure in the art world. Judy Chicago, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you. You were born Judith Cohen in Chicago in Illinois in 1939. When did you become Judy Chicago? Well, I actually became Judy Chicago before I became Judy Chicago. When I left Chicago when I was 17 to go to school at UCLA, I had a gallery owned by a guy named Rolf Nelson. And the one thing I had brought from Chicago was my accent. So he used to call me Judy Chicago. It was also a time in L.A. a lot of artists had underground names. What, like nicknames? Yeah, like Ed Ruscha, if people know who he is here, was Eddie Russia.

1:56And Larry Bell was Ben Lux. And we all listed our phones under our underground names. It was kind of an in joke. If you knew what our nickname was, then you know how to find us. Then, after 10 years trying to make place for myself in the singularly inhospitable to women L.A. art scene of the 1960s and early 70s, I decided I wanted to be myself. And so in a radical gesture, I publicly changed my name, and my then-dealer had this idea that my name change should be proclaimed in a boxing ring ad, which was actually a takeoff on all my male peers who were always doing posters and announcements with a cigar or a motorcycle and a surfboard.

3:04board. And so the idea of me being in a boxing rink where Cassius Clay, Muhammad Ali trained, I thought was really funny. Well, I want to explore more about how you made your mark on the art world, on the male dominated art world. But let me take you back to childhood. I've read that your father came from a 23 generation lineage of rabbis. Yes. But he broke away from that tradition. What did he do professionally when you were growing up? Well, what he did for a job was not what he did. He worked in the post office, but he was a union organizer. And he trained me in logic. He trained me in thinking.

3:51And he expected me, even as a young girl, to participate in the political discussions that he held in our house. Would he have been regarded as a feminist, even though that term probably wasn't used at the time? Well, he and my mother believed in equal rights for women. There's no question about it. That's the good news. The bad news was they didn't tell me the rest of the world did not share that idea.

4:19So I had no preparation for encountering it. But it was a politically engaged household. Absolutely. But this is in the sort of post-war years when McCarthyism... He was a victim of McCarthy. Well, I was going to say, was he targeted for his left wing views? Yes. The FBI visited our house when I was six. My father was drummed out of the unions and he went into a terrible decline and died when I was 13. at which point I learned probably the most important lesson of my life. This was the height of McCarthyism. My father was a wonderful man who had really, really good values. And at school, we used to see something called the Weekly Reader.

5:14It was a cartoon magazine for children. and it pictured horrible, bloated, ugly communists bayoneting beautiful blonde boys. And here I was, my father had died, I was grief stricken, and the world is telling me that my father was a terrible man. And at 13 years old, I had to decide if I would believe my own experience or I would believe what the world was saying. And so I concluded that just because everybody thinks something doesn't make it true. That's quite a tough lesson to have learned at a young age, wasn't it, though? What about your mother? What was she doing at the time? Well, my mother, unfortunately, bore the brunt.

6:06When my father died, my mother was 40 and she had two children to support. I was 13. My brother was five. She suffered from a botched operation that left her epileptic. She was allergic to all the anti-epileptic drugs, and she had to work to support us and take care of us. I didn't fully appreciate how difficult my mother's life was because also when my father died, I still don't understand this. My mother was a smart woman. She would not allow us to go to the funeral, and it was like he walked out the door and we never spoke about him. You still don't know why she made that decision? No. Did she go to the funeral?

7:02Actually, you know, I don't know. But anyway, it's only more recently that I've begun to feel more sympathetic to my mother because I really hated her for a really long time.

7:22On This Cultural Life, Judy Chicago, I ask my guests to choose the most significant creative influences and experiences that have inspired their own work. And your first choice for this programme is the Art Institute of Chicago, where you told us she began studying at the age of five. So who took you there? Your mum? I started drawing before I started talking, which was upsetting to my parents because talking was really important to them. And when I was four, apparently my nursery school teacher told my mother that I was talented. Well, my mother being a conscientious middle-class Jewish mother, even though we had no money, she borrowed a friend's membership card to the Chicago Art Institute.

8:13And at that time, they had these big classes in an auditorium where if you were a member, you could send your kid. So at five years old, I used to cross the street from my house, get on a bus by myself, ride downtown to the Chicago Art Institute, cross the street, go in and study, and then go home. Inconceivable now, right? Absolutely. Because the Art Institute is downtown as well, isn't it? And you've got to cross quite a major highway, as I remember it, to get in there. Yes. Five years old. Anyway, so what did you study in there? Well, for a while I went to these big classes. I mean, there used to be still lives, models.

9:04And then from the time I was eight, the time I was 17, when I left for California, I would take two classes, morning and afternoon. And then I would wander around the galleries upstairs by myself. Well, it's a fabulous collection at the Art Institute in Chicago. So which artist were you particularly drawn to? He had this incredible Impressionist collection. Monet's Haystacks. You know, I used to follow the reds into Luce Lutrec's paintings, saw how he got your eye to move across the painting by the placement of the reds, saw Serra's Grandjet, and looked at the color oppositions in the dots. I didn't really notice there were almost no women artists.

9:57It was the art that I was moved by. And it was the art that helped me establish my ambitions, which was to become part of that illustrious art history. At what age do you think did that ambition kick in? I never wanted to be anything but an artist. And I always had that goal. After high school, you went to UCLA on a scholarship and you've said that you use your own art school education as an example how not to teach women. So what was your experience like that? I would like raise my hand in class and the male professors would not call on me. Being the brash young girl I was and didn't quite understand, I would wave my arm around until they'd get embarrassed.

10:50There were a lot of women in my art classes, both in undergraduate and graduate school. But by the time I got out of graduate school, most of them had just disappeared from view. You did exercises that were established for men, by men, with the idea that young men are brought up knowing how to use tools. knowing how to build things whereas young women were not and so for those young women who wanted to bring a different sensibility there was no possibility of that and that's the way you were taught in college then it was still like that that it was not only there was the feeling that women didn't really have a place there but if you wanted to join in you didn't really have the skills I would just barge in on things Like I would almost lost a breast on a table saw.

11:51I mean, because of my father, I had a lot of confidence in myself. So I kind of disregarded a lot of the, quote, messages. So I took a course called The Intellectual History of Europe, taught by a very, very respected historian. In the first class, he said, on the last class, I'm going to talk about women's contributions to Western civilization. The last class, he strode in and he said, women's contributions to Western civilization, they made none. That was the prevailing attitude in the 1960s. This is before any women's studies classes. That's outrageous, isn't it? Now we think it's outrageous.

12:41But what did you think at the time when he walked in and said that? Did you challenge it? Did you say... Oh, you mean did I wave my arm up? No, I didn't know enough then to challenge it. I mean, now I just stand up and shriek at him. But, I mean, the next years between then and when I decided to make a radical change in my art making and to try and figure out how to create a feminist art practice and how to develop an art education that would be relevant and encouraging to women, where they wouldn't have to make art that denied their gender as I had to in order to be taken seriously during my first decade of practice.

13:27And so I started wondering at the end of the 60s if there had been any women before me who had encountered the challenges I was encountering. And that's when I started looking back at history in my self-guided study tour. And that's when I began to discover the enormity of women's cultural production.

13:55your next choice is a group of male artists that you met at a place called barney's beanery in la so firstly who were these these artists well i mean some of them are world famous now like ed roche billy l bankston bob irwin larry bell they all showed at a gallery called ferris which was an all-boys gallery. Billy Al, who was unbelievably handsome, rode motorcycles, he was kind of that ringleader. And he came to teach at UCLA for one semester when I was in graduate school. I kind of followed him around because unlike my teachers at art school, I know Billy Al was a real artist. and I remember I went to his studio, big, first big white studio I'd ever seen and I said, God, this must be expensive.

14:56And he said, the first of every month is$700. That was a lot of money in the 60s. I'm like, how do you pay for it? You don't have a job. He said, yes, I have a job. Being an artist is my full-time job. and I said, well, how do you make money? And he told me about the something's going to happen way of living. Now, this was very, very foreign to women of my generation. What did he mean something's going to happen? He was going to sell some work at some point. Yeah, he was going to sell some work or somebody was going to appear who would offer him support. The L.A. art scene was very, very different.

15:39So you were learning from these men because they had confidence and they had a sort of positivity and they knew that they could, if they really applied themselves, they could make some money out of this art. No, nobody thought they'd make money. It was way before the advent of the art market in L.A. But you could make enough to pay the rent. That's all you cared about was just making enough to keep going, being able to make art. No, not money. Absolutely not. But there was in L.A., as difficult as it was for women artists, there was a spirit of self-invention there because there wasn't really any big established scene.

16:17And that had a big impact on me. Because it may be surprising to some people that you've chosen this group of male artists. They were the only ones who were taken seriously. They were the art scene, the serious art scene. But also around this time, you started taking courses in learning practical skills often associated with men, you know, and used by some of these male artists that you were hanging around with. I went to auto body school when I got out of graduate school. And the reason I did actually what inspired me was John Chamberlain, who was a sculptor. And he used to work with crushed cars.

16:59And then he would spray paint them, but he would spray paint them with spray cans. And he used to say, if I were really serious, I'd go to auto body school. Those guys know how to spray. Well, he never did, but I did. And I was the only woman out of 250 men, most of whom got paid to go because they were retraining. They used to make me wear this long white coat. I thought it was really funny. It was like, oh, my God, what if she bent over and the 250 men would see a breast, which obviously they've never seen. Anyway. And what you were learning was about how to spray paint cars, but you were adapting those techniques and using it and not creating a newly painted car, but a work of art.

17:49No, but I made some car hoods. But the thing I learned, I learned a reverence for craft, which is sometimes lacking in the art world. And that has actually carried through my whole career. Tell us about Atmospheres, the series of pyrotechnic shows. Oh, yeah. No, I started those in the 60s. But these are landscapes that are filled with colourful smoke. What inspired those works? The mid-60s was a period of burgeoning land art, like Jim Terrell. James Terrell, who's known for the light sculptures. I saw a piece at the Pasadena Museum by Richard Serra, and it was piled up, chopped down trees. That horrified me.

18:43I had a kind of reverence for nature, for our planet, for the world we live in. And it just outraged me. So I told him. So the next morning, there was a pounding at my studio door. And Richard Serra was outside the door waving art for him. And he said to me, you may not like it, but they do. Well, I didn't like it at all. And meanwhile, I was doing a lot of work on color, how to create emotive states with color. I don't remember what prompted me to get fog machines, but I got fog machines. And I see this colored smoke in the air and I'm like, oh, my God, I'm going to do fireworks. Then you took those works into the great outdoors.

19:40Yes, then I started. There are interventions in the landscape against something. Absolutely. They also challenged the dominance of then land art. Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty is one of the most famous works of that time. Michael Heiser, all of them going out and reconfiguring with bulldozers and like... Making their mark on the world. Right, making their mark on the world. And is the difference with yours, because you were using smoke that is beautiful and very striking, but ephemeral? and then like a puff of smoke disappears. Right. Well, what I was interested in was an entirely different impulse.

20:18First of all, I was interested in disappearing the man-made environment, which I like doing a lot. You know, my colours would go up and all those phallic buildings would just disappear for a moment. So I was interested in kind of feminising and softening the environment. And just to clarify, you do these works in situations, in the landscape. They're site-specific. But they're photographed. Yes, they're photographed or films. At first, you know, L.A. was kind of the Wild West. And I could just go out and buy smokes. My friends and I would go out into the landscape. We'd go to the beach. We'd go to the national park.

20:57For me, what they're about is inviting people to really see the beauty, the preciousness and the significance of the world and the planet we live on. In the early 70s, you started the very first feminist art course at California State University at Fresno. So what did you set out to achieve there with that course? Well, I got the chair of the art department to agree to doing it without actually explaining what my intention was. Because if I'd really explained my attention, I never could have done it. My early work was greeted with shrieks of horror by my male art professors. Wombs and breasts!

21:46Yeah! And by 10 years on, I had moved very far away from those impulses. So I thought, if I taught young women how to be professional artists without having to choose between their gender and their art, but being able to be themselves in their work, maybe I could find my way back. There is a whole history of thought that helps us stop being ignorant, and we have to take responsibility to understand and change ourselves and prepare ourselves for a real task. That is one of the reasons women are not able to translate their aspirations into reality, because they are embedded in remaining ignorant.

22:29and it pisses me off. Do you feel there was those young women, those students, there was a real appetite to learn in that way? It was like I lifted a lid. Then, because of the success of that programme, I was invited to bring it to CalArts, the new, at that time, radical school. And it was out of CalArts that we created Woman House, which was the first openly female-centred art installation. Which was in a dilapidated Hollywood mansion. What was the idea behind that work? Well, the students got to choose the rooms they wanted to work in. We had what I call content search, which was kind of based on what I saw my father do.

23:18You know, we talk about, like, a kitchen, the kitchen, and what were the associations for the kitchen. I mean, it was really fascinating because it turned out that the kitchen, in most of the young women's experiences, became a site of power struggle. Like who got to eat? Who did the cooking? Who cleaned up? Who determined what they were going to eat? It was very, very interesting. And out of those discussions, those would stimulate the art making. So it was going from content to form, which is the opposite way art school operates, actually. Tell us about some of the displays, the installations and the reaction against.

24:05Well, I mean, Woman House not only attracted 10 ,000 viewers in the month it was up, including Gloria Steinem. And she wrote something I didn't know. She said, before Woman House, I thought art was only for men. And it was not until I saw Woman House that I realized there could be art for women by women. That blew me away. Anyway, we used the living room as a performance space since so many young women are brought up to perform the construct of femininity. and so we used a lot of role-playing again to find content. Will you help me do the audition? But you don't have a cap. What's that got to do with it?

25:00And out of that came a series of performances, some of the earliest feminist performances. And at one point I realized, here's this whole house full of art by women and there's no reference to menstruation. I also realized there were no images of menstruation that I had ever seen. So I did what's come to be known as the menstruation bathroom, which caused shrieks of outrage and horror. there's some really funny scenes in the Woman House film of men looking at the menstruation bathroom. What did they see when they walked in there? You couldn't go in. You could only look in. What could you see? Well, you saw menstrual products on a shelf, a toilet, a sink, and a bin overflowing with used tampons and Tampaxes and Kotexes.

26:02It was all paint. In fact, it was really funny. My students and I had a painting party, and they all like, no, the carrette's too brown enough. It was, okay. I mean, there were very moving installations. There was a woman dressed as a bride at the top of the staircase who basically came down the staircase and walked into a wall into which she disappeared. or there was the linen closet in which a female form was completely encased by the linens. I mean, it was the first body of art where women began to actually talk about and express what domestic life was. You know, it was a big taboo. Now, of course, there's lots and lots of books about the subject, the subject of motherhood, then not.

27:06Your next choice is Christine de Pizan, the poet and court writer for Charles VI of France. When did you first come across her? In that study tour that I started at the end of the 60s in search of my predecessors and how they had managed the challenges. I remember discovering Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies, although I couldn't read it. And this is a book that's 600 years old? Yes. Over 600 years old? Yes. I couldn't read it because it had never been translated into modern English. I could tell from reading about her book that she had the same impulse I had, which was to teach women's history.

27:55Because in the book... Her book was called The City of Ladies. The Book of the City of Ladies, and it was written in response to the extreme misogynist writing of the Renaissance, which really aggravated her. She described sitting in her study very depressed at this misogynist writing saying maybe women really are inferior. And three women, mythological women, reason, justice and virtue appeared before her and said, Christine, don't be ridiculous. Of course women are not inferior. And she's like, well, what can I do about it? And they said, you can construct a city of ladies, which she did. She put together the biographies of 500 important women in history, many of whom we had to re-research for the dinner party.

28:55Well, Christine de Pazan is one of the women featured in The Dinner Party, the work that you are most famous for and is now regarded as one of the most influential pieces of post-war art, probably. So how would you describe The Dinner Party for anybody who hasn't seen or doesn't know about it? For a long time, there was one word that described me, Judy Chicago, the Dinner Party. And I used to go around saying, will I live long enough to see people understand that the Dinner Party is only one work in a huge body of work? Well, the answer is yes. I've just begun to experience that. It's great. But the Dinner Party is a symbolic history of women in Western civilization that premiered in 1979 at the San Francisco Museum of Art and was an enormous success.

29:51And it's an enormous work of art as well. It's a triangular table, 48 feet on a side, that features 39 place settings for 39 women. And the place settings are grouped above these streams of names of 999 other women that represent the long history of achievement each of the women at the table symbolized. So, for example, around Queen Elizabeth, going back practically to Hapshatsuk, the first female pharaoh, is a stream of female rulers. So you're creating links between the primary guests at the table, the 39 guests, and then the other 999. Well, it's very important because, you know, there's this idea of people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, but actually nobody can do it without support.

30:48It's a work which took, I think, five years to make and was very much a collaborative project in which you employed the skills of teams of craftswomen in particular, people specialising in ceramics or needlework. Did it feel like a radical work of art when you were actually making it? First of all, I started it all by myself. I worked alone for a year and a half. I was painting plates, and then I wanted the plates to rise up as a symbol of the increasing struggle for liberation that one sees, but also emergence, erasure, emergence, erasure, emergence, erasure. It's like, you know, people ask me all the time, oh, has everything changed for women artists?

31:36I'm like, this is not the first time in history that women artists became prominent. So then I found a young ceramicist to help me figure out how to make the plates rise up. Because we should explain each one of those 39 primary guests at the table, those women are represented by a ceramic plate. On a plate, as a metaphor for being contained by the construct of femininity. And each one of those ceramic plates, those porcelain plates, depicts is the woman is depicted by a vulv. No, no, no, no, no, no. That's a, you know, there's Ethel Smythe. She's a piano whose lid is crashing down on her. There's Sacagawea.