More Famine Than Feast : Focusing on the Flawed ‘Dinner Party’ Undermines ‘Sexual Politics’

“Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s ‘Dinner Party’ in Feminist Art History” is the worst exhibition I’ve seen in a Los Angeles museum in many a moon. It’s a shame, too, given the significance of the show’s subject.

Arguably, feminism has been the most influential and momentous social movement for American art since the 1960s. One reason for its pervasive influence is a matter of affinity: Contemporary feminism began as an insurrection within the middle class, which in our century has also been the locus from which most Modernist artists have come.

Whatever the reasons, though, the success of feminist thought as an operative engine within current artistic discourse is inarguable. Feminist principles are today fundamental to the very idea of a Postmodern culture, which means to up-end the established and confining hierarchies of the patriarchal past.

And recent feminism, despite the caricatures offered by its conservative and reactionary enemies, has never been monolithic. This show rightly acknowledges that in the 1970s the movement searched for a unified female identity that could describe the essence of woman; in the 1980s it shifted to a complex analysis of how gender has been socially constructed; and today it seeks a more polymorphous understanding, which can accommodate the widest possible range of differences.

Still, “Sexual Politics” is a fiasco. And not only because it uses a failed work of art as its fulcrum.

Judy Chicago’s notorious sculpture of a big, triangular feast table set for a gathering of 39 celebrated historical women famously began an international tour in 1979 that enjoyed great popular success, while enduring nearly universal Bronx cheers from art critics and feminists alike. Now the work has been foolishly trotted out at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art as the catalyst for a look at feminist issues from the last quarter-century.

What a blunder.

As art created as an educational or didactic tool for political reform, “The Dinner Party” (1974-1979) is agit-prop. Chicago’s work took its place in a venerable 20th century lineage that began around 1917 with the agit-prop kiosks, trains, posters, banners, broadsheets, festivals and such designed by El Lissitzky, Kasimir Malevich, Liubov Popova, Alexander Rodchenko and other well-known and anonymous Russian artists.

Yet an unbridgeable gap separates Chicago’s work from such extraordinary predecessors. Agit-prop is fervently anti-institutional, but “The Dinner Party” was conceived to be a monument. Monuments represent the opposite of anti-institutional ideals--they mean to establish for posterity a political perspective. Chicago’s “agit-prop monument” is a crass and self-important oxymoron, which partly explains the horrible divisiveness of its reception.

Chicago’s sculpture has long been denounced as politically retrogressive, for merely replacing men with women in its exaltation of Heroic Cultural Ancestors. Rather than a typical legacy of Plato to Picasso, “The Dinner Party” gives us a lineage from the Primordial Goddess to Georgia O’Keeffe. But the institutionalized power of enforcing a hierarchy remains intact.

Guest curator Amelia Jones, associate professor of contemporary art and theory and the history of photography at UC Riverside, is certainly careful to hedge her bets about the work. She refuses a wholehearted embrace of it in her catalog essay and she further cautions against making “The Dinner Party” a touchstone for feminism. She seems to want it both ways--a historical presentation in which Chicago is, and is not, the fulcrum.

In truth her show is overwhelmed by Chicago’s work. In addition to the monumental sculpture, which occupies its own makeshift space on the museum’s ground floor, the upstairs rooms feature 28 Chicago sculptures, paintings and mixed-media works, scattered among just 71 by other artists, most of whom are represented by a single example.

Five of the seven catalog essays are also devoted to Chicago’s art. (The best is Laura Meyer’s illuminating look at Chicago’s pre-”Dinner Party” painting and sculpture in the context of 1960s finish-fetish art.) Curatorial caveats aside, Chicago is the inescapable centerpiece.

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Given the notoriety of “The Dinner Party,” not to mention that it has never before been shown in L.A., where it was made, it was probably curatorially naive to think all eyes would not be riveted on the sculpture, at the expense of the work by the 56 other artists in the show. (One artist--June Wayne--withdrew her work after the catalog went to press but before the show opened because she disagreed with the focus of the exhibition.) The other art covers the waterfront in terms of interest, but overall the checklist is a mess.

Two absences are most shocking. There is no sculpture by Lee Bontecou and no video art by anyone.

Bontecou, beginning in 1959 and continuing through the 1960s, made hybrid wall sculptures of sewn cloth in which allusions to a scarred landscape merged with suggestions of human anatomy, ranging from a grinning face to an ominous vagina dentata. Visually, these works are a crucial antecedent to the vulval imagery so prominent in “The Dinner Party.” And their conspicuous use of the female-identified creative activity of sewing anticipates the elaborate embroidery used to decorate Chicago’s sculpture.

Presumably, Bontecou’s omission can be explained by her identification as a Modernist artist. Her work also immediately predates the organized contemporary feminist movement.

However, we’re not talking of old-time ancestors like O’Keeffe here, but of an artist whose mature sculpture both coincides with feminism’s emergence and introduces major themes advanced by the show. Her absence distorts the immediate artistic context from which “The Dinner Party” arose, making Chicago appear unprecedented.

The absence of any video art is inexplicable. In the early 1970s Hermine Freed, Martha Rosler, Julie Gustafson and many others made feminist-themed videotapes far more significant than much of the art presently occupying the Hammer galleries. No historical survey can be comprehensive, but the wholesale excision of video art from “Sexual Politics” grossly deforms the show.

Even more than performance art, abundantly represented in the galleries by photographic documentation, video represented for women a brand-new medium--one without the patriarchal baggage of such traditional forms as painting and sculpture. Women ran with it. Their achievement was to create a critical platform on which rests much of the media-savvy art made since.

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Erasing 1970s video obscures a big reason for the artistic failure of “The Dinner Party,” which dates from the same years. The new electronic medium’s liberating disengagement from established institutions of art history ran directly counter to the monumentalizing ethos of Chicago’s retrograde sculpture.

Ironically, these vital artistic omissions do reveal the basic curatorial failure of the show. For “Sexual Politics” isn’t really about art at all. Instead, it’s a history of contemporary feminist theory. Works of art have been deployed as mere illustrations, picturing the twists and turns of feminist argument since 1970.

Less a carefully chosen display of art than an illustrated lecture on feminist theory, the show features gallery walls laden with reams of printed text. Lengthy object-labels and preachy didactic panels direct the audience in proper theoretical viewing of the art.

With a curator who is an ideologist, theory is privileged over practice. Art is thus misused, its efficacy undermined by curatorial trivialization.

You want to run screaming from the room. Works like Judie Bamber’s exquisite little vulval painting on a phallic block of wood or Betye Saar’s diminutive assemblage of “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” wither into footnotes, subordinate to the arrogant curatorial text that engulfs it. Mere works of art get crushed beneath the boot.

It’s always disappointing to come upon an ambitious but failed work of art, like “The Dinner Party.” But to witness a museum actively participate in the trivialization of art is infinitely worse.

* UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., (310) 443-7000, through Aug. 18. Closed Mondays.