Judy Chicago, the 1960s, and the Metaphor of Sex

“Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” the feminist collective Guerrilla Girls once asked, underscoring visual art’s view of women as objects. Unsurprisingly, this masculinism underpins much life writing by visual artists—from Benvenuto Cellini in the Renaissance to Larry Rivers in the late 20th century. However, as feminism infiltrated visual art, women’s voices began to be heard, particularly when, from the early 1970s to the early 1980s, women artists recalled the 1960s: Kate Millett (Flying [1974]; Sita [1977]), Judy Chicago (Through the Flower [1975]) and Anne Truitt (Daybook [1984]). Moreover, these women all would produce further reminiscences and their books would be joined by later reflections on the 1960s like Faith Ringgold’s We Flew Over the Bridge (1995), Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Net (2011) and Eva Hesse’s dairies (2016). Reading their books against the cultural and politic tendencies of the 1960s, we see these artists adopting various positions relative to the 1960s’ visual idioms: feminism destroyed Chicago’s engagement with minimalism while tempering Truitt’s engagement with minimalism little if at all, and Ringgold’s intersection of feminism and black activism precluded engaging with that moment’s formalist avant-garde at all. Furthermore, this range of engagements with the artistic avant-garde mirrors a range of engagements with what we might call the sexual avant-garde. Truitt (and, later, Ringold and Hesse) discussed her sexuality modestly. By contrast, Chicago and Millett (and, later, Kusama) foreground sexuality and sexual activity, modeling a sexual agency that opposed the objectifying masculinity dismantled by Millett in Sexual Politics (1970). But at a time when sexual liberation was widely celebrated while almost always turning out to mean male sexual liberation, this emphatic female sexual agency seems like a metonym for female agency in general, its urgency facilitated by the art world’s perennially Romantic injunction to be oneself.