This essay aims to discuss the domestic themes many women artists engaged with in the wider context of feminist art. The engagement with domestic themes by notable feminist artists in the latter part of the 20th century needs to be placed within the wider context of the second wave of feminism from that period. While First-wave feminism in the early part of the century won women the right to vote, inability to participate fully in politics along with social and economic inequality remained. Inspired by the Civil Rights movement and the anti-war movement in the United States, feminists in the 1960’s and 1970’s took on the systems that institutionalised gender inequality.
Championing the phrase “the personal is political” feminists called for equality at work and at home. Feminist art, spearheaded by artists including Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who will be the focus of this discussion, developed as a cultural branch to what was to become a worldwide movement that brought about significant political and social changes throughout the first world. According to the artist Suzanne Lacy, the goal of feminist art was to "reconstruct the world from the point of view of a female vision”. They sought to rewrite the male-dominated view of art history as well as challenging the world around them through their art.
Understanding that art is a powerful tool to reflect and sustain the bedrock of power, feminist artists took the politics of gender equality into the art cannon and much of their engagement with domestic themes was a direct engagement with the politics of inequality. Theartstory.org argues that, their approach was to undermine and expand traditional notions of art, beauty and creativity, often by employing and adapting traditionally domestic/female practices like craft techniques and ‘low art’. They also gravitated towards other newer media such as performance and video, which did not have the same history of male dominance that was embedded into more traditional mediums such as painting and sculpture. In a groundbreaking essay in 1971, Linda Nochlin asked “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” The answer, she argued, was not that women are less talented than men but that structural inequalities, including restricted access to artistic training and support, restricted women’s development as artists. She went on to argue that not only were the majority of women artists unrecognised by the art world, they were commonly denied gallery showing because of their gender. Much of the feminist artwork of the period was intended to confront the absence of female representation in the cultural documentation of society. For example Judy Chicago's seminal Dinner Party, (1974 -1979), credited a total of 1038 women artists including Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf. As well as demanding greater representation within museums and access to educational opportunities for women, feminist artists of this period created alternative venues for themselves, perhaps the most important being Womanhouse (1972) which was the first large scale space to display a group exhibition of just female work. Suzanne Lacy (theartstory) considers this period to be a “Very fertile moment in art history” which has helped to shape what we view as art as art as well how we view it.
According to the Brooklyn Museum The Dinner Party (1974–79) by Judy Chicago is widely seen as an important, if not the most important feminist art work to date. The work consists of a triangular shaped banquet, with thirty-nine place settings, each commemorating an important female figure from history. Each place settings used embroidered ‘femmage’ techniques and had butterfly and vagina motifs, using styles which were appropriate to the women who was being honoured. On the floor of the piece the names of another 999 women were inscribed in gold.Chicago explained that her goal for the piece was to “reveal both the record of women’s accomplishment and its historical suppression”.
Jane Gerhard explains that Chicago took a step from the domesticity of “Womanhouse to the materiality of The Dinner Party”. Like Miriam Shapiro she carried on her interest in skills that women used at home, taking on china painting, which often dismissed as ‘craft’ by the art world. Chicago explained that she saw china painting as a ‘perfect metaphor for women’s domesticated and trivialised circumstances’. She claimed it was ‘excruciating’ to watch women ‘squander their creative talents on teacups’.The idea that women’s creative expression, can only be placed within a domestic setting is one she challenged by the use of china painting. According to Chicago, often women who took up china-painting had gone to art school, taking up the craft after marrying and having children. This was directly due to the choice a lot of women had to make between being a mother and an artist. Something which ‘Miele Laderman Ukeles, explored in her ‘Manifesto for Maintenance art’. Chicago also used embroidery techniques on the runners for each place setting which was again seen as ‘low art’.
The Space itself is a domestic space, often associatiated with the woman and the home. Chicago takes a step further from the critique of the womanhouse into a celebration of women and female achievement. She mentions fairly known women from history like, Queen Elizabeth and Virgina Woolf, but also less known figures like female mythical god’s like Kali.
Another key artist key artist who dealt with domestic themes was, Miele Ladernman Ukeles, a feminist and self proclaimed ‘maintenance artist’ . According to Andrea Liss, Ukeles’s work from the mid 60’s onward has been fundamentally about; “nurturing and maintaining natural and physic life systems in their entirety and acknowledging the under valued labour of the people who keep those systems alive” Her service orientated work, created a link between process in conceptual art and domestic and civic ‘maintenance’. She was inspired to write her most notable work entitled ‘Manifesto For Maintenance Art (1969)’ after attending a sculpture class in the Pratt institute while heavily pregnant. Following a lecturer’s comment ‘Well, Mierle, I guess you know you can’t be an artist now,’ Ukeles responded with her manifesto in an attempt to break the taboo of being a mother and an artist. The manifesto argues the difference between ‘development’ and ‘maintenance’. Development according to Ukeles is associated with the avant-garde which she claims to be historically a male dominated field and encompasses “pure individual creation; the new; change; progress, advance, excitement, flight or fleeing”. On the other hand, maintenance is tasks generally associated with women and the domestic sphere. She states women must ‘keep dust off the pure individual creation, persevere the new, and protect progress’..Ukeles points out that while society values artistic development and creation, it devalues and often criticises maintenance work.
Following on from her manifesto, Ukeles performed a series of actions entitled ‘Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside [July 22, 1978),’ at the Wadsworth Anteneum in Hartford Connecticut. In the morning, Ukeles washed the stairs of the entrance to the museum and in the afternoon, she washed the marble floor inside the building. Using water and diapers to clean the floors she directly referenced the mother/artist taboo. At the end of each wash, she stamped and dated the diapers ‘Maintenance Art Original’. Her painstaking engagement with physical realities of domestic life and her insistence on being a mother, a woman and an artist were radical and called into question the way society viewed women, domesticity, maintenance and made her a key female artist who engaged directly with themes of domesticity.
Another key female artist who dealt directly with themes of domesticity in the context of feminist art was Miriam Shaprio (November 15, 1923 – June 20, 2015) the candian painter, sculptor and printmaker. She is considered one of the main controbituors to the feminist art movement. Shapiro coined the term "femmage" to describe works she began to make in the 1970s that combined fabric, paint, and other materials with traditional women's skills like sewing, cutting, quilting, appliquéing and cooking. The style emphasised the visual patterns of mediums such as quilting, fabric design, or wallpaper to demonstrate the tradition of female engagement with abstract art-making. In her definition of femmage, Schapiro wrote that the style, which simultaneously recalls quilting and Cubism, has a “woman-life context” and that it “celebrates a private or public event.” It could also only be made by women. By combining these materials and processes with visual elements taken from accepted masters, she sought reassert "women's work" as an acceptable contribution to the category of traditional "high art"and to question its exclusion. Shapiro's use of femmage to create abstract compositions or vibrant colours and hard-edged forms, launched her as one of the leading artists in the Pattern and Decoration movement, an American style that emerged in the mid 1970’s and lasted through the early 1980’s.
Perhaps one of the most innovative and challenging projects which directly engaged with the theme of domesticity was the ‘Womanhouse’ group project co directed by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro in 1972. The instillation was part of the California Institute of Arts Feminist Art Program. A group of women artists and students took over a run down building, transforming it into the first major women only group project (only women were allowed to visit the installation on the first day). Composed of twenty-five mixed-media pieces and six performances, the aim was to create a dialogue between women and the home by questioning domestic norms and gender roles. ‘Womanhouse’ itself was a domestic space, as writer Temma Balducci explains; ‘roughly ten thousand people who entered the seventeen-room space were confronted with a deconstruction of the myth of the white, middle-class housewife as a satisfied, fulfilled, domestic goddess.’ The artists used humour and exaggeration to question the stereotypes and roles in which women were placed.
Schapiro’s contribution Dollhouse, a collaboration with Sherry Brody, was intended as a statement on the lives of women. When closed, the house revealed nothing, paralleling how a woman's public persona was supposed to convey compliance and homogeneity. However, inside much is contained about the personal interests and lifestyle of the owner of the house. At first each of the rooms appear perfect but on closer inspection contain hidden terrors of spiders, snakes scorpions. While the traditional roles of homemaker or caregiver are included, there is more to be discovered beyond the female stereotype and opportunities for her to choose to be sexual or glamorous. Just like the shutters can reveal or conceal these rooms, so women control their lives and the perception of their public and private lives. When Dollhouse was placed in Womanhouse, it acted as a "house within a house" and further reinforced the message of the larger work.
The performance piece ‘Cock and Cunt’ written by Judy Chicago and performed by Faith Wilding and Janice Lester, explored the gender roles between men and women. Each performer had comically oversized genitalia and based their arguments on why they could or couldn't perform certain household chores was due to their genitalia. As the dialogue of the piece progresses, the female (Cunt) played by Janice Lester asks the male (Cock) played by Faith Wilding for help with the dishes, the Male responds by stating ‘But you don't have a cock! A cock means you don't wash dishes. You have a cunt. A cunt means you wash dishes.’ The female questions the male again stating ‘I don't see where it says that on my cunt.’ pointing out that there is no physical difference between who should do the domestic work due to biological difference. The male responds, ‘Stupid, your cunt/pussy/ gash/ hole or whatever it is, is round like a dish. Therefore it's only right for you to wash dishes. My cock is long and hard and straight and is meant to shoot like guns or missiles. Anyone can see that’. This comedic exploration of how gender differences result in for the designation of roles in the domestic realm questions the validity of the inherent power imbalance. It also explores the broader power imbalance of the male phallic relationship with guns and violence.
In several rooms of the ‘Womanhouse’ the idea of beauty aimed towards men was parodied. The historical pressure for the middles class suburban housewife to look beautiful and fear of ageing was dealt with in ‘Leas Room’ by Karen Lecoq and Nancy Yolderman. In the daily performance the character Lea, based on the novel Cheri (1920) by Colette. The performer sat at a dressing table applying layers and layers of make-up, removing them and repeating over again in an attempt to remain youthful because this is what the male world values in women. This piece explores the constant pressure on women to be beautiful and youthful. It also touched on how women compete with one another for male attention.
Art in the 21st century is broader, deeper, and more diverse because of the wok of women artists in the later part of the 20th Century. The legacy of the second-wave feminism of the 1960s and ’70s is rich. By focusing on the negative impact patriarchy and gender roles has on women, they expanded what art is, how we look at it and who and what is considered to be included. Through their engagement with domestic themes, artists such as Judy Chicago, Miriam Shapiro and Mierle Laderman Ukeles have helped to transform the culture to such an extent that many contemporary female artists no longer see it as necessary to identify as "women artists". However while much of the work in the 21st century is not directly identified as feminist, there is a clear legacy to draw on.