A t one time I became interested in a certain sort of sentence that occurs very naturally in historical texts. Historians will say, for example, that the Thirty Years' War began in 1618, or that Petrarch opened the Renaissance. I call these "narrative sentences," since they serve to connect events into stories, and relate beginnings to endings. We use them all the time. A woman might say that she and her husband first met in 1980. What is interesting about these sentences is that nobody could have known they were true at the time to which they refer--nobody could have known in 1618 that the Thirty Years' War had begun, since no one could have known that the war would last thirty years. No one could have known that Petrarch was opening the Renaissance, since most of the great writers and artists whose work defined that era were not even born yet. And who could really describe the man she just met as her husband--except as a romantic hope--since their marriage lay in the future? The future is something to which we are inherently blind. So although I can now say that Judy Chicago exhibited a piece in the famous "Primary Structures" exhibition at the Jewish Museum in 1966, I could not have known this then, since she was showing under her married name, Gerowitz, and was not to take the name "Chicago," as a political act, for some years. Though art historians can say that one of the founders of the Feminist Art Movement was included in "Primary Structures," that movement was not really to begin until after Gerowitz became Chicago.

One can see Chicago's piece in one of the grainy black-and-white installation shots of "Primary Structures," reproduced in an important book by James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties. The work consisted of six wooden planks in graduated lengths and graded colors--pastel green, pink, lemon and blue--leaning in an ordered sequence against the wall. It was called Rainbow Pickets, and it occupied the same gallery as a wall piece by Robert Smithson. Most of the advanced sculptors of the 1960s were in that show, including many who went on to achieve major reputations, like Donald Judd, Richard Artschwager, Anthony Caro, Carl Andre, Tony Smith, Dan Flavin, Ellsworth Kelly and Anne Truitt, as well as Judy Chicago herself. And of course several of the artists have been forgotten. Gerowitz, one might say, is forgotten--Chicago destroyed most of her Minimalist work. But no one who saw the show, myself included, would have been able to tell, in 1966, who would become what, and least of all that Judy Chicago would become the artist we know her as.

Chicago has written, "When I was a young artist in the burgeoning Los Angeles scene, I wanted, above all, to be taken seriously in an art world that had no conception of or room for feminine sensibility. In an effort to fit in, I accommodated my esthetic impulses to the prevailing modernist style." Her inclusion in "Primary Structures" is evidence that she was taken seriously. One might have inferred a certain feminine sensibility from the colors of Rainbow Pickets, but at the time the use of such colors was attributed to the fact that she was a California artist. "The bright hues favored by the Los Angeles contingent," Meyer writes, "were an antidote to the sober tones of New Yorkers." But Richard Artschwager, a New Yorker, showed Pink Tablecloth--a geometrized effigy in pink Formica of a blocky table neatly covered with a piece of domestic linen--without anyone making an inference to femininity on his part, then or since.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.