The Dinner Party
Mia Fineman at Slate takes a look at feminist artist Judy Chicago’s famous installation piece “The Dinner Party” on the occasion of it taking up permanent residence at the Brooklyn Museum as the centerpiece of the new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.
“Chicago began working on The Dinner Party in 1974; it took five years and the labor of 400 volunteers to complete. The installation consists of a massive banquet table in the shape of an equilateral triangle-an emblem of equality. Along each side are 13 place settings, a reference to Christ and his 12 disciples at the Last Supper. Chicago said she wanted to reinterpret ‘that all-male event from the point of view of those who had traditionally been expected to prepare the food, then silently disappear from the picture.’”
“The Dinner Party” at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.
One third of the table is dedicated to place-settings for pre-Christian goddesses and important women from antiquity. This includes a place setting for the primordial goddess, Ishtar, Kali, the poet Sappho, and the Celtic queen Boudica. Fineman wonders if the work (originally displayed in 1979) can still be effective and moving in our cynical and irony-laden present, but finds that there is power to the installation that shines through.
“So, is The Dinner Party great art? Well, not by the standards of today’s art world. It’s too middlebrow, too literal, and its earnestness is out of step with today’s endlessly self-ironizing sensibility. And its pudendal imagery, once radical, looks silly and heavy-handed today. But as an emphatically populist work with a clear set of political and educational imperatives, The Dinner Party has held its ground. It’s nervy, ambitious, uncompromising, and-unlike most recent art, feminist or otherwise-truly original.”
You can see a short interview with Judy Chicago from the opening of the permanent installation, here. For more photos of the installation check out Flickr. One wonders that if “The Dinner Party”, now that it has a permanent home, will become a place of pilgrimage for goddess worshipers? It certainly stands out as one of the most famous works of modern art that has been influenced by feminist strains of modern Paganism.
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