During that same decade, at the time of the Women’s Movement, feminist art emerged, critiquing modernism and emphasizing content. A number of the leading feminist artists looked to classical culture for material with which to express their political point of view. Their interest coincided with the development of feminist scholarship among classicists and historians, as documented in the bibliography about ancient women published in Arethusa in 1973. Classicist Barbara McManus (1997) has surveyed the theoretical and methodological principles developed by pioneering feminist classical scholars, such as Sarah B. Pomeroy, who in Goddesses, Whores, Wives, Women and Slaves (1975) sought to recover information about women from skimpy and dispersed evidence filtered through centuries of patriarchal assessment.
Feminist artists such as Judy Chicago (born 1939) imbibed such scholarship, eager to know more about women in ancient times. In researching her major art work The Dinner Party (1979), Chicago sought to create a work about the history of women in western culture that would be so monumental and important that it could not, like so much earlier art by women, be erased from memory. She designed a triangular table with 39 ceramic place settings, each on a cloth runner, illustrated by needlework, representing women from myth and history. Working with hundreds of volunteers to research and complete this work, Chicago chose not only these 39 women, but 999 others whose names are represented on the porcelain floor.
Among the 39 place settings are five women from antiquity who reflect the new scholarship in classical studies: Sappho, the Greek poet from Lesbos; the Athenian Aspasia, who was the influential consort of Pericles; Boadaceia, whom, as Tacitus recounts, the Romans fought in the British Isles during the first century AD;
Figure 25.6a Sappho placesetting from The Dinner Party. Plate: 14’’ in diameter, China paint on Porcelain. Runner: 5’ x 3'. Mixed media. Collection: The Brooklyn Museum of Art. © Judy Chicago 1979, 2006 / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Hypatia, the Greek upper-class mathematician who lived in the Roman era; and Marcella, a Roman widow who devoted herself to Christianity. In addition, on the ‘‘heritage floor’’ at the center of the triangular table, we find such names as Anyte, Anasandra, Carmenta, Cleobuline, Corinna of Tanagra, Cresilla, Erinna, Helena, Artemisia I, Cleopatra, and Zenobia.
The Dinner Party has had a tremendous impact on its audience, raising consciousness about the significant roles played by women in western civilization. Judy Chicago has written, ‘‘Greco-Roman goddesses paled beside their historical antecedents, and the position of Greek women was summed up in this famous remark...: ‘That
Figure 25.6b Installation view of The Dinner Party. Featuring Judith and Sappho place-settings. Photo © Donald Woodman. Collection: The Brooklyn Museum of Art. © Judy Chicago 1979, 2006 / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Figure 25.6c Installation view of The Dinner Party. Wing One & Heritage Floor. Photo © Donald Woodman. Collection: The Brooklyn Museum of Art. © Judy Chicago 1979, 2006 / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Woman is best who is least spoken of among men, whether for good or evil.’ ’’ The comment to which she referred was made by the political leader and statesman Pericles, as reported by Thucydides. Chicago went on to write, ‘‘The destruction of the Goddess reflected the gradual erosion of women’s political, social, and religious authority.... While Roman women were in a similar legal position to that of their Greek predecessors, in actuality they were far less oppressed’’ (Chicago 1996: 17).
The lives and contributions of particular women represented in The Dinner Party have since inspired entire books. Likewise, Sappho’s plate made its way into a recent scholarly book on women, sexuality, and gender in classical art and archaeology. There, Jane McIntosh Synder wrote,
Who knows, it may be that Judy Chicago comes much closer to the heart of Sappho’s poetry, with its sensuous images of trembling bodies, soft beds, purple headbands, roses and honey-lotus, garlands and perfume, and the rosy-fingered moon, than did the Athenian vase-painters, striving to create images that would please the Athenian men who wanted to please their wives with a suitable - and suitably safe - gift. (Snyder 1997: 117-18)
For the debut of The Dinner Party at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979, a day-long conference called ‘‘A Celebration of Women’s Heritage’’ took place and featured a panel discussion about ‘‘Women in the Ancient World,’’ with Harrianne Mills, Marilyn Skinner, and Bella Zweig, all classicists by profession. In addition, Amazons and witches were the subject of a talk by Susan Rennie, an author and editor of the feminist journal Crysalis.
During the same period, the feminist artist Nancy Spero (born 1926) was also drawing upon images from classical antiquity to explore the imbalance of power between the sexes and between oppressors and victims. By utilizing classical images long associated with the masculine - even the giant phallus - Spero forged new symbols of feminine power by creating a new context for these images. She first became interested in ancient images, especially Roman and Etruscan, while living in Europe and specifically when making a long visit to Italy with her husband, artist Leon Golub, in 1956. Her subsequent use of classical imagery is distinguished by her use of either a frieze or mural arrangement of smaller figures, as in her Athena-Sky Goddess-Masha Bruskina (1974-92).
Spero’s interest in ancient imagery has been ongoing. She even called her 1994 show at the New York gallery, P. O. W., ‘‘Black and Red III,’’ making an allusion to the colors of classical Greek vases, from which she borrowed ‘‘dildo dancers.’’ Her references are different from Chicago’s use of metaphoric representation of ancient women or from the heroic dimensions of the figures adopted by the feminist sculptor Audrey Flack (born 1931).
Flack was already well established as a photo-realist painter when she gave up painting in the mid-1980s and took up sculpture, the content of which often derives from classical tradition. Already in her paintings, Flack was drawn to images of spirituality, such as a Gothic cathedral, the Madonna, or Buddha. She had also depicted iconic images - from Isis (1983) to Marilyn Monroe (1978) to Michelangelo’s David (1971).
Figure 25.7 Colossal Head of Medusa, 1990, by Audrey Flack. Courtesy Meisel Gallery
Thus it was but a small leap to move on to sculpt figures that evoke images from classical antiquity.
Flack’s sculptures in the classical tradition include Diana (1988), American Athena (1989), Colossal Head of Medusa (1990), and Galatea (1998). For Medusa, Flack sought to reimagine the ancient myth and to question the traditionally negative identity given to this, the most beautiful of three Gorgon sisters. Learning that Medusa had suffered a rape in the temple of Athena, Flack saw in Medusa a metaphor for the rape of the earth.
Modeled and cast in bronze, Flack’s forms often have distant classical sources, but these have evolved under the influence of European academic traditions from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Flack endows her figures with an intentional grandeur and often imagines her sculptures positioned in prominent public spaces.
Joyce Kozloff (born 1942), another important feminist, drew upon Greek classical vases in some of her watercolors called ‘‘Patterns of Desire,’’ a cross-cultural and witty exploration of eroticism, in which she alternately mixed figures from a Greek red-figure amphora with Chinese imagery on a Chinese-shaped vessel that she called Smut Dynasty Vase (1987). Around the same time, she also used imagery from both classical Greek black-figured and red-figured vases on her own ‘‘revolutionary textiles,’’ which parody early Soviet designs. By combining the classical with Asian motifs, Kozloff showed the universality of Eros.
Like so many other feminist artists, Eleanor Antin (born 1935) has successfully appropriated classical imagery for her own ends. In her 2001 series The Last Days of
Figure 25.8 Pornament is Crime #4: Smut Dynasty Vase, 1987, by Joyce Kozloff, 22’’ x 22’’. Collection of Terry Stept. Photo: Eeva Inkevi
Figure 25.9 ‘‘The Artist’s Studio’’ from The Last Days of Pompeii, 2001 by Eleanor Antin. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York
Pompeii, she conveys the decadence of Roman life through carefully staged photographs with costumed actors that she directed. Her imagined scenes include an artist’s studio complete with nude model, a Roman banquet, and the death of Petronius.
On the wall of Antin’s most recent show, ‘‘Roman Allegories,’’ held in the spring of 2005 at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York, she quoted Pliny the Younger: ‘‘That summer, in the first year ofthe reign ofTitus, there appeared a small band ofplayers who met with some success until they disappeared without trace, leaving behind one of their number.’’ The show featured 12 large tableaux, beautifully staged and photographed. Her characters included Columbine, the Lover, the Trickster, an ex-gladiator Strong Man, the Poet, and a little girl, all of whom act out episodes in Roman times, along with a fully costumed Bacchanal and sylvan scenes that are clearly allegorical. The parodic and ironic aspects of Antin’s work make it postmodern. Malcolm Bradbury’s literary term, ‘‘parodic realism,’’ appears appropriate for her work (Rose 1993: 270).
World History
