Anna
Stone
Dr.
Brown
English
306
April
26, 2016
The Identity of Female Artists through Womanhouse
In 1971 Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro
founded the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts, a
group of twenty-one women that challenged expectations of female artists and
women’s role in society through their protest work Womanhouse. Chicago and Schapiro wanted to challenge the women in
the Feminist Art Program to push themselves and create art work that was about
their experiences as women that would be comparable to the work of male
artists. The students in the Feminist Art Program were assigned a project: to
create installation art in a home about their experiences as women (Wilding).
The program was donated a run down mansion in Hollywood with 17 rooms to be
used for the project. Womanhouse was
created in 1971 and open to the public from January 30 to February 28 of 1972. This
school project became a work of installation art that was visited by over
10,000 people and protested against the societal expectations of women and against
the barriers placed on female artists.
1970’s Feminism and The Feminist Art Program
The
1960’s and 1970’s were a major time period in feminist history in the United
States, what historians now refers to as “second wave feminism”(Baxandall). The
second wave feminist movement began in the 1960’s due to the changing of the
nation after the ending of World War II and the beginning of the Vietnam War.
Women that took part in political anti war organizations were dissatisfied that
their work in the movement was to make flyers and do desk work, while men were
the leaders and speakers. This dissatisfaction by women lead to the beginning
of feminist organizers in the 1960’s, who had goals focused around employment,
with ending sex discrimination in the workplace and getting women into politics
(Baxandall). The first major victory of the second wave feminist movement was
the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, enacted by President John
F. Kennedy in 1963 (Baxandall). The Presidential Commission on the Status of
Women proposed a measure that enabled women commission’s at the state level and
succeeded in forming commissions in all states by 1967 (Baxandall). These state
level women’s commissions were the beginning of many of the first influential
women’s rights groups, such as the National Organization for Women, started in
1966 (Baxandall). This organization laid the framework for the many women’s
rights groups to come, and without it the first Feminist Art Programs at
California State University Fresno and The California Institute of the Art’s
would have never emerged.
Another
facet to the second wave feminist movement was women’s liberation, most
influential to the women involved in the Womanhouse protest. The women’s
liberation movement began around 1968 and was more popular among young women
who did not advocate for women in politics but instead critiqued the current
social and political systems, while challenging the idea of public and
political space (Baxandall). The theory developed from this school of thought
was the idea of the personal as political, and was used in the Feminist Art
Program “In the classical women’s liberation technique, the personal became
political. Privately held feelings imagined to be personally held “hang-ups”
turned out to be everyone’s feelings, and it became possible to act together in
their solution”(Schapiro, 247). Here
co-founder of the Feminist Art Program Miriam Schapiro describes the women’s
liberation movement was a major influence on the teaching of the program and in
the creation of Womanhouse where
women created artwork out of their shared societal experiences.
The
Womanhouse protest was not only
influenced by feminist politics of the sixties and seventies but also the
popular art styles of installation and performance art. Rebecca Lowery examines
how performance art became the dominant art expression in Los Angeles at this
time “women artists in particular developed mutually implicative performance
practices that engaged a yet undefined horizon of experience: art as a shared
occasion of social and political dynamism” (Lowery, 121). As Lowery
demonstrates performance art allowed artists to better connect to their social
and political identities, which was also a major tenant of women’s liberation
feminism (121). Installation art also arose in the sixties and seventies and
was often used by feminists due to its objection of having a correct way to
interpret art (Bishop). In Installation
Art: A Critical History Claire Bishop defines the movement installation art
emerges out of, poststructuralism “[poststructuralism] states that the correct
way in which to view our condition as human subjects is fragmented, multiple
and decentred-… by an interdependent and differential relationship to the
world, or by pre-existing social structures”(Bishop, 13). Poststructuralism
translates into installation art by putting the subject in a position where
they are forced to look at the work from all angles, and are not fixed or have
a privileged view of art, but are thrown into the middle. This concept can
arguably be applied to performance art as well, where the viewer is also being
forced to see the art in three-dimensional space.
The
founders and teachers of the California Institute of the Art’s Feminist Art
Program were Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro (Wilding), but this was not the
first Feminist Art program created. Judy Chicago started a feminist art program
at California State University, Fresno in 1969, prior to the program she
created at The California Institute of the Art’s (Wilding). Chicago chose to
create a program on this campus because of their “Experimental College”
(Wilding, 32) in which many radical politically charged classes were held
including Marxist and anarchist studies, Chicano and black theory, and women’s
studies (Wilding). Chicago’s reasoning for creating a female art program was to
“address the unique problems of women artists, or women wanting to be artists”
(Gerhard, 22). This program had 15 students and was focused on discussions and
consciousness raising in order to evoke emotion with the women and to inspire
their art. These sessions were accompanied with group and individual art
assignments done based on their experiences as women. When Judy Chicago was
hired to work with Miriam Schapiro at the California Institute of the Art’s in
1971, it was with the intent to create another Feminist Art Program, which was
based on the principles of the first at California State University, Fresno
(Wilding). The Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Art’s
had more success, with 21 women joining the program (Schapiro). The area of
protest examined in this essay is the crisis stage; in which the women created
and showed their installation art work Womanhouse.
The Feminist Art Program and 21 female artists involved in the protest worked
to object to the sexism faced by female artists at this time. This oppression
came in all spectrums of the art world, with primarily male art instructors,
primarily male art was displayed, and critically reviewed “On a typical day in
1971 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, art made by women comprised a
mere 1 percent of what was on display”(Gerhard, 23). These obstacles deterred
many women from becoming artists or conforming to male art styles in an attempt
to be seen as equal, and this suppression of female experiences is what
inspired the art in Womanhouse.
Examining Women’s Gender Roles through Womanhouse
The
Womanhouse protest piece had a
rhetorical context that was in line with many of the women’s liberation
movement of the 1970’s, using techniques mentioned earlier such as
consciousness raising and “the personal is political” (Schapiro). This theory
stated that women’s experiences were not all separate and unconnected, but had
similar experiences living in a society as a female (Schapiro). This concept
was the basis on which the protest of Womanhouse
was founded, that women could create art based on their experiences as women
and have it reach a wide audience of women with the same experiences
(Musteata). This concept was actualized through Womanhouse simply by creating the installation art piece inside of
a physical house. The use of a house is symbolic to the societal expectations
associated with women as their domain in society for centuries, connecting
viewers to this theme before they even enter the space. The rhetorical goals of
the Womanhouse protest were to use
collective art as a critique of modernist male art, and to apply rhetoric from
feminist theory of second wave feminism to art in order to create a critique of
their oppression as women, and female artists.
Womanhouse
is a site specific installation art piece, meaning that the site, in this
case the mansion, is central to the work, and that it would not serve the same
purpose if the rooms were moved into a normal art gallery (Bishop). In Installation
Art: A Critical History Clair Bishop describes how Womanhouse represents a specific time in installation art history
“with feminist art of the early-to-mid 1970’s in general, it could be argued
that formal concerns were less significant than the politicized content” (36).
Although the Feminist Art Program chose a significant art form at the time to
create their project in, they focused all their attention into making it a
political statement; that female artists could create art about the female
experience and did not need to use male ideas to be considered real artists. These
ideas were developed through the teaching of Chicago and Schapiro.
Chicago and Schapiro created the Feminist
Art Program with the intent to provide a new more productive learning
environment in which female artists could openly express themselves through
their art. Schapiro described their style of teaching as “Traditionally the flow
of power has moved from teacher to student unilaterally. Our ways were more
circular, more womblike; our primary concern was with providing a nourishing
environment for growth” (Schapiro, 247). This teaching method of providing
motherly and emotional support to the female artists in the group is connected
to the use of collaborative artwork in Womanhouse,
where this idea of creating art as a collective rather than isolated process
originated. The language of “womblike” and “nourishing” is not only a reference
to their teaching style but also the art created in Womanhouse that dramatized ideas of motherhood (Gerhard). This
teaching style enacted by Chicago and Schapiro worked to create an environment
where women felt comfortable expressing their art (Wilding).
The purpose of the Feminist Art Program
and their work Womanhouse have been
defined by Judy Chicago and Faith Wilding, a graduate student and teaching
assistant for the Feminist Art Program. Wilding describes what the purpose of
the Feminist Art Program was and what was being taught “The unspoken curriculum
was learning to contend with manifestations of power: female, male, political,
and social” (35). The fact that she uses the word “unspoken” to refer to the
curriculum shows that the ideas being taught in the program were radical and
complex, and were then translated into Womanhouse
to create a message about the social and political standing of women. Chicago
describes the goals of the Womanhouse protest
as “In essence you walk into female reality and are forced to identify with
women”(Time). This forced identity is one achieved through the use of
installation and performance art, in which the audience is forced to feel the
experiences of women through art and performance as more than one-dimensional.
Art in this form is meant to invoke immediate feeling from the art, to elicit a
response from the viewer. In this way installation and performance art were
used in Womanhouse as rhetoric for
conveying protest through art.
The art produced in Womanhouse represents themes of womanhood, motherhood, and the role
of a wife. Choosing these themes is significant in establishing Womanhouse as a protest piece, because
these roles were not ones the women in the Feminist Art Program had fulfilled
themselves. The women in the Feminist Art Program were college students, only
one married, and only for around a year, none were mothers, and none were fulfilling
a home caretaker role at this time (Edwards). This means that these themes are
experiences the women would have knowledge on by observing the women in their
lives: grandmothers, mothers, sisters, cousins, and friends. The ideas shown
and performed in Womanhouse were
meant to convey the female experience, not particularly their personal
experiences, in order to convey that female artists can create expressions of
female experience and have it be just as good as art produced by men.
A
rhetorical strategy conveyed through art in Womanhouse
was what is now known as “cunt art”, or the depiction of female genitalia and
breasts in art (Wilding, 35). Wilding explains the use of this art “the idea of
doing images of “cunts”—defiantly recuperating a term that traditionally had
been used derogatorily and thereby opposing the phallic imagery developed by
men”(Wilding, 35). Wilding goes on to explain how the “cunt art” was not
intended to evoke the essentialism views that it has now become associated
with, but rather was a harnessing of the female artists own sexual expressions
(35). Through this art the women were able to proudly establish their identity
as female artists, and protest the idea that women had to base their art off of
socially acceptable art concepts. Art of this nature was used rhetorically to
add surprise and shock to viewers of all genders and critique the idea that
women, and women artists, were not allowed to discuss or make art about
genitalia (Wilding).
Common
rhetoric created in the 1970’s and examined by the Feminist Art Program was the
concept of the male gaze, which is defined by Judy Chicago in her recent work Institutional Time: A Critique of Studio Art
Education as “In terms of visual art, this referred to the male artist looking at and representing the female
body” (60). Chicago argues that the male gaze has affected female artists in
the pasts and continues to today, as women often do not know how to interpret
concepts in their own art, when the dominant model given is from the view of a
male (59-60). The female artists in Womanhouse
also confronted this concept in their work, by creating art that was not
attempting to compete with the styles of male art, but creating a new genre in
which they show the struggles of women from their own point of view. The Womanhouse project was an objection not
only to the societal oppression of women but specifically women’s restrictions
as artists. Chicago and Schapiro went into the program intending to inspire and
create community between female artists, as a protest to the conventional views
of how male art has been done historically (Wilding).
The
concept of personal experiences connecting women with similar experiences was
applied in Womanhouse through
collaborative artwork, or art in which several artists work together on a piece
(Wilding). Collaborative or collective artwork are terms used repeatedly by the
founders of the Feminist Art Program, the women working in it, and scholars
reviews of this work in the modern day. This practice was significant in the
making of Womanhouse because it
created an installation work of over 20 women but had a common theme: the
exaggerations of roles of domesticity women were confined to (Musteata). One
example of collective art work in Womanhouse
is the kitchen, which was created after a consciousness-raising session where
Vicki Hodgetts sketched a picture of fried eggs on a wall, and other women
interpreted these eggs as breasts, leading to the ceiling of the kitchen
covered in fried eggs, and transitioning into breasts as you move down the wall
(Chicago). Although Hodgetts ultimately created this room, she feels it was
this session that she owed the credit “although I was the one who finally
carried through that aspect of the kitchen (in the main) the idea was really a
collective one. It simply would never have existed if women had not tried to
work together” (Chicago). The use of
this collective style was in defiance of typical modern male art practices that
came before it, where men created work that was interpreted as a manifestation
of their singular genius (Musteata, 7). As a result the idea of a collective
female artist identity was fostered through Womanhouse.
Although
there was an emphasis on collective work in the making of Womanhouse each artist brought her own specific meaning and
intentions with each piece. The work as a whole critiqued the role of women in
the home and the restriction of this space, however this idea was interpreted
through every piece of art created in the house. For example in Robbin Schiff’s
Nightmare Bathroom she constructed a
woman in the tub entirely made of sand, and revealed her intent for the piece
“I wanted to convey the idea of vulnerability”(Chicago). When examining the
rhetorical goals of feminist movements at this time and the project Womanhouse as a whole, the idea of
vulnerability can be read as counterproductive by showing women as weak.
However in the context of Womanhouse
it is a representation of another aspect of women’s scrutiny by society that
leaves them vulnerable to impressions.
In a performance art piece that was
written and performed by Faith Wilding (Chicago), Wilding rocked herself in an
armchair that did not rock, while reciting a poem called “waiting” in which she
described the events of a woman over her lifetime, she chanted “waiting to
talk… waiting to be a pretty girl…waiting for my breasts to develop…waiting for
my wedding day…waiting for my baby to come” (Womanhouse). The concept of this piece was that women do not have
control of their own lives and follow a pre-determined script that they are
“waiting” to fulfill. This performance art is a personification of the life of
the woman that would live in this house. Most of the focus in the house is on
the rooms themselves, using physical space as the mode to convey a message
about certain challenges in the lives of women, but this performance uses
pathos to give the perspective of an actual life of a woman, and give the
audience a connection to her. This perspective is very indicative of the
feminist movement of the time of getting women to take control of their own
lives by putting them into the work place.
Fig. 1
Chicago, Menstruation
Bathroom
One of the most well known rooms in Womanhouse is the “Menstruation
Bathroom” done by Judy Chicago. The menstruation bathroom is one of the most
well known works because Judy Chicago did a re-installment of it in the Museum
of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, after Womanhouse
was demolished (Balducci). As is shown in figure one, The “Menstruation
Bathroom” was a stark white bathroom with a toilet, a shelf filled with
feminine hygiene and cleaning products, and an over flowing trashcan with
“used” pads and tampons. This piece is one of the most well known for being a
controversial subject for men and women, because what is normally a private
struggle for women was put on display. In the documentary Womanhouse men and women were interviewed and asked about what they
thought of the menstruation bathroom, which brought up feelings of confusion,
one man said “That’s very difficult to understand for me”(Womanhouse) and another said “a lot of the house is amusing, and
this is not amusing”(Womanhouse). The
discomfort and confusion from the men interviewed was a big contrast from a
woman that was interviewed “That’s the kind of thing you hide behind a closed
door… Having other people standing there looking at it with me, even though I
expected to see it, it was shocking” (Womanhouse).
The topic of menstruation was picked with the intent to use pathos to get a
reaction out of the viewer, to the men the room was puzzling because they had
never seen something like it before, but to the woman the room was an automatic
association to her own menstruation and the concept of publicly discussing it
made her uncomfortable. As the man points out some of the skits and rooms in Womanhouse
were amusing and whimsical, and the emotions brought about by this room in
context with these brings the viewer back to realizing the house is making a
statement, even if not through humor.
Fig. 2 Chicago, Three Women
A performance titled “Three Women” took
on political issues that women face, such as rape, which was included in the Womanhouse documentary. The performance
begins as a satire, three women in gaudy outfits overplaying a stereotypical
female role. The hippie role of “Rainbow” wearing a large rainbow afro, begins
by talking about getting stoned, which amuses the audience. Then Rainbow begins
to tell a graphic story about her being at a party when a group of men force
fed her pills in the shower and then raped her. This graphic story is told
calmly in a conversational setting (see figure 2) to enforce the commonality of
rape and evoke emotion. The use of pathos is the most prevalent in this
performance, the wide range of emotion causing the audience to confront the
issue of rape that they would normally not talk about or consider an issue too
sensitive to discuss.
The struggle of female artists also came
through to the public at the time. In the Womanhouse
documentary by Johanna Demetrakas a woman that visited the house was
interviewed and gave her opinion of it “It makes an impact on everybody that
sees it that women are not just poor imitation men, you know? They have
something specific to say and special to do and I think it’s very nice” (Womanhouse). This reading of the work by
a woman at the time, who says she is an engineer and not an artist, shows that
the identity of women as artists with “something specific to say and special to
do” came through clearly in Womanhouse.
In Cindy Nemser’s essay “Stereotypes and
Women artists” she discusses the deeply harbored stereotypes of female art by
male critics, and describes what she calls “phallic criticism” or art
criticized with the assumption that male artists are better than female artists
(161). Under this model of art criticism Nemser declares “the more “female” her
art becomes, the more offensive it is” (162). The concept that art work that
represents ideas of femininity is offensive to traditional male art critics
definitely helps the Womanhouse
protest to create controversy in the art world. Womanhouse was not significant purely because a group of female
artists created an art piece as a group, but because they used concepts of
femininity specifically to establish their identity as women and reject what
the male art world deemed as correct.
Conclusion
The protest installation art piece Womanhouse began as a school project for
the women in the Feminist Art Program, and through consciousness raising
sessions the women harnessed the societal expectations of women and created a
satire of them through art. The works created were meant to represent the
struggles of women (with the focus of their background, white and middle class)
that were imposed on them through society. The first time Womanhouse was open to the public they only admitted women to see
the performances, and Chicago described it as an emotional experience that all
of the women that came through related to, opposed to when men and women were
allowed in “During the Three Women piece,
women cried, laughed, and empathized…After the performances, the acting group
was ecstatic…until our next performance the following week, which was for a
mixed audience. Through the evening, there was inappropriate silence,
embarrassed laughter or muffled applause” (Raven). This difference in reactions
to Womanhouse shows that they
represented women through their identity of female artists in a way that
challenged the way men thought of women’s issues and women’s art. This shows
that the protest was legible to their target audience.
The identity of the women as strong
female artists was developed through art and rhetoric popular in 1970’s of the
time. Womanhouse conveys many ideas developed in Women’s Liberation Feminism “the
rhetoric of the Women's Liberation Movement was that relating personal
experience generates a process that is first dialogic (as women discover their
commonality), and then rhetorical (as personal experience is validated into an
accepted litany)” (Edwards). Through creating Womanhouse the women in the Feminist Art Program were putting to
practice these Women’s Liberation techniques through discovering the common
struggles of women in their generation and then creating art that validated
these experiences to other women. At the same time their artwork established
their identity as female artists that were able to express their gender
experiences through art.
After this semester and the Womanhouse mansion was torn down, Judy
Chicago left the University of California Institute of the Art’s to continue to
pursue her art career, and the students graduated and the Feminist Art Program
no longer existed (Raven). Despite the end of the program and the demolition of
the mansion the affect of Womanhouse
lives on, as mentioned earlier, in the re installation of “Menstruation
Bathroom” that Judy Chicago made for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los
Angeles, and in a documentary created by Johanna Demetrakas. The cunt and cock
artwork shown in Womanhouse was
continually practiced throughout the 1970’s, and made extremely famous by the
founder of the Feminist Art Program, Judy Chicago. In 1979 she displayed her
famous work called “The Dinner Table”, reminiscent of the dinning room table in
Womanhouse, however the plates on
this table all had food that was meant to resemble the vagina, or other female
sex organs (Broude). This artwork is currently displayed in the Brooklyn Museum
in New York and has become one of the most popular feminist art works of the
1970’s, and into today (Musteata).
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