From The Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/nov/04/judy-chicago-art-feminism-britain
In the 1970s, feminists decided to take on the men running the art world. Judy Chicago, with her graphic depictions of the female body, was at the forefront. Rachel Cooke talks to the artist who, 40 years on, is about to have her ‘British moment’
Rachel Cooke
The Observer, Saturday 3 November 2012
Judy Chicago isn’t a great one for false modesty – or modesty of any kind, come to that. When she talks about her work, words such as “monumental” and “major” fall quickly and easily from her lips. As a young woman, she says, she wanted not only to paint and draw, but to “set her sights on history” – her aim was to bag herself a place in the canon. As for her elaborate 1979 megasculpture The Dinner Party, a provocatively feminist work which celebrates the lives and work of 1,038 notable women, you can forget what the critics say (the late Robert Hughes called it: “Mainly cliché… with the colours of a Taiwanese souvenir factory”; Hilton Kramer of the New York Times called it: “Very bad art… failed art… art so mired in the pieties of a cause that it quite fails to capture any independent artistic life of its own”). They’re just plain wrong. “I’ve watched it change people’s lives,” says Chicago. “And the fact that the Elizabeth A Sackler Center [for Feminist Art, where The Dinner Party is permanently housed] accounts for a third of all the traffic to the Brooklyn Museum is testament to the importance of it.”
To be fair, this is what a life spent working with your back against the wall does for a girl: either you crumple and disappear, or you develop a Teflon exterior, a shiny veneer of undentable confidence. Chicago is 72. She began her career in the 60s, long before political correctness and women’s studies classes were invented, and her “dinosaur” professors at the University of California, Los Angeles, pretty much hated what she was doing right from the start.
Her early working life was lonely and she was mostly broke. “I didn’t make myself an outsider,” she says. “The art world made me an outsider. Of course, isolation is essential to the creative act. You have to be with yourself, with your ideas. Virginia Woolf talked about it as fishing: you sit on the shore, you drop your line, and you wait for the fish to jump. But I also had to protect myself from the craziness, all the antagonism, around me. It was difficult. I’m not going to say it was anything else. Not everybody could have managed it.”
What did she sacrifice along the way? “Children. There was no way on this earth I could have had children and the career I’ve had. But you know what? I don’t care how much I had to give up. This was what I wanted. You have to make choices. You can’t have everything in life.”
Chicago is speaking to me from her home in New Mexico – a historic railroad hotel that looks like it has come straight out of an old western – and the delay on the line is contriving to make our conversation sound even more earnest than it would be if she was sitting opposite me. A portentous pause precedes her answers; jokey comments (on my part) are out of the question, being more likely to misfire than cheap Catherine wheels.
Continue reading at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/nov/04/judy-chicago-art-feminism-britain
