Is art rational? – The Dinner Party

By Elizabeth Dangerfield

When the mundane gets up front and personal and art challenges the establishment

Disclaimer

I believe all humans can be creative in one way or another. Whether it is solving difficult problems, thinking outside the square, building and making things, creating beautiful, useful things, creating works of art of all types that make us think or feel, or producing works of monumental significance; humans are driven to create. Our very survival depends on it and our world is enriched by our creative endeavours. The act of creation has rational, intuitive and emotional components.

Sticking your neck out for art

In 1979 a forty-year-old artist had a unique art installation displayed in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In an interview two years later the artist said that the backlash of threats and hateful castigation in reaction to the work made her feel suicidal. She said she felt like a like a wounded animal and sought refuge from public attention by moving to a small rural community and working on her Embroidering Our Heritage project. What sort of artwork could arouse such passion and such venom?

The artwork was called The Dinner Party and was a monumental work consisting of 39 elaborate place settings on a triangular table representing 39 mythical and historical famous women. Each place setting included a hand-painted china plate, ceramic cutlery and chalice, and a napkin with an embroidered gold edge resting on intricately embroidered runner. The table stood on a floor made up of more than 2,000 white triangular tiles inscribed with the names of 998 women who had made a mark on history. Thirty-seven of plates depictedstylised vulvar forms which became more prominent as the time period represented by the plates moved towards the modern period. The artist had the assistance of many volunteers to bring the complex artwork to fruition.

While many viewers revered the artwork there were also many critics who found fault with every aspect of the installation because it was:

• vulgar, crass, ceramic 3-D pornography
• a kitsch object
• like an advertising campaign
• too solemn and single minded, too preachy
• untrue to the women it claimed to represent
• about the artist’s ego and not the subjects in the work
• artistically uneven
• lacking in aesthetic value
• lacked acknowledgement of those who collaborated on the project
• historically incorrect and culturally skewed
• exclusive because it did not include women from different cultures, races and sexual orientation
• too passive and suggestive of a universal female experience
• not high art because of its huge popularity and public appeal

All these comments show how easy it is to tear down a work of art, an idea, an innovation, anything that is different or challenges the nature of art that is comfortable to many artists and critics alike. Furthermore, all these criticisms could be made of artworks produced by menthroughout the ages. No one in the past has baulked from showing male genitalia (despite the addition of fig leaves later) because genitalia is so obviously part of masculinity. On the contrary, it has taken a long time for women’s labia to come out, and not be considered shameful. The artist, Judy Chicago, showed that labia could be celebrated as a natural, joyful, and important part of women’s bodies.

Was Judy Chicago attacked so relentlessly because this was the first time the celebration of women, their sexuality and their artistic preferences were displayed so blatantly, or because the artwork consisted of everyday things, or because of the expectation that as a feminist she had an obligation to be all things to all women?

Hilton Kramer attempted to demolish the esoteric intent of the artist with the comment that The Dinner Party was “very bad art… failed art… art so mired in the pieties of a cause that it quite fails to acquire any independent artistic life of its own.” But then Kramer was a conservative art critic and essayist who in 1952 expressed his belief that post modernism attempted to remove art from the only sphere in which it can be truly experienced, which is the aesthetic sphere.

At the time that The Dinner Party was displayed the art world was dominated by men. While the piece is made up of craftwork normally considered the domain of women and usually described as low art, Judy Chicago saw The Dinner Party as high art because of her intention to suggest that women have the capacity to be prime symbol-makers, to remake the world in our own image and likeness. She actively worked to challenge the prevailing hierarchy that devalued art forms traditionally associated with women and crafts, like needlework and ceramics. She aimed to elevate these forms, demonstrating their artistic potential and breaking down the boundaries between high and low art. 

So what can we learn from The Dinner Party about the rational reasons, if any, for ascribing the term high or good to an expression of creativity? In some ways, an opinion seems depends on what a critic has to lose by giving the artwork a good review. Or less cynically perhaps – where the critic is coming from, what they expect in a good artwork, and how open-minded and generous they are feeling.

Art that is useful and meaningful

Part of what Judy Chicago was doing with The Dinner Party was taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary. Filling our present with intrinsic worth. Crafting our lives.

The Arts and Craft movement did this. Some have labelled it as low art because it was about producing material for domestic spaces. But this just illustrates how the term ‘low’ art, with its dismissive overtones, is not helpful for judging the value of art. The Arts and Craft movement actually emerged from a reaction to industrialisation in Britain and the mass production of everyday items in which design and craftmanship was wanting. The initial impetus came from the Great Exhibition of 1851. Some of the organisers thought that there were too many things with excessive ornamentation or which were impractical or badlymade; that there was novelty without beauty, and beauty without intelligence.

William Morris was the main force driving the Arts and Crafts movement and there was nothing in the home that did not come under his consideration. Indeed wonderful houses were designed on Arts and Crafts principles. Morris produced crafted furniture and decorative objects such as wallpaper and wall hangings commercially.

He modelled his designs on medieval styles with patterns were based on flora and fauna. In this way the Movement aligned with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This group of English painters, poets, and art critics was formed in 1848 to challenge the Royal Academy’s preference for the classical ideals associated with Raphael, a famous painter in the Renaissance. They sought a return to what they saw as the freshness and sincerity of medieval art. 

By the end of the nineteenth century, Arts and Crafts ideals had influenced architecture, painting, sculpture, graphics, illustration, book making and photography, domestic design and the decorative arts, including furniture and woodwork, stained glass, leatherwork, lacemaking, embroidery, rug making and weaving, jewellery and metalwork, enamelling and ceramics. Beauty and purpose were fused together to produce the most extraordinary, everyday objects.

The Japanese Aesthetic – lifting the ordinary to a high art

The concept of aesthetics in Japan is an integral part of everyday life and encompasses what is beautiful and tasteful. The term wabi-sabi refers to a mindful approach to everyday things including the aspects of decay and transience. Wabi-sabi can be conceived as an altered state of consciousness that sees beauty in the mundane and simple. There is a belief that virtue and civility can be instilled by an appreciation of, and practise in the arts. Artisans and craftsmen and craftwomen are highly valued in Japan because they preserve Japanese cultural heritage through their work, and are highly skilled and dedicated. Their work translates the notion of Japanese aesthetics into many fields of artistic and cultural expression.

Thus in Japan, aesthetic and practical arts integrated, and both aspects valued. What matters is the ability to be thoughtfully immersed in your surroundings even if they are imperfect, impermanent, or incomplete. To me it is like the feeling of apricity in winter or shuffling through fallen leaves in autumn.

All this suggests that the division of art into low and high is too artificial, simplistic and black and white. Rather it seems to me, that there is a spectrum of artworks each with a different focus but what matters is the intent and skilfulness of the artist and the state of mind of the viewer.

For example, the Australian artist Anne Dangar, practised cubism at under renown cubist artist Albert Gleizes in France for many years. Not only was she a brilliant painter but she was a dedicated potter. She took common, traditional French pottery shapes and used them to express her cubist perspectives. Her friend, Crace Crawley, created controversy with her 1933 Archibald entry, a cubist Portrait in grey. Cubism was a revolutionary change in artistic expression that led to the development of abstract art.

Through her everyday medium Anne Dangar was like Judy Chicago with her ceramic plates. Personally, I find The Dinner Party installation to be mesmerising, and it speaks deeply to me about feminism and the meaning of art.*

*In 2018 Chicago was named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” and one of Artsy Magazine’s 2018 “Most Influential Artists.” In 2019, she received the Visionary Woman award from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and was an honoree at the annual Hammer Museum gala in Los Angeles. In 2020 she was honored by the Museum of Arts and Design at their annual MAD Ball.

 

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