"# I've got no secrets kickin' up from behind #" "# We keep no secrets We play right in time #" "# Your time is gonna come #" " # I think I hear it now #" "In the late 1960s, a few women artists formed a coalition... and named it WAR- Women Artists in Revolution." "# We come together in this garden for a day #" "# Your time is gonna come #" "# I think I hear it now #" "And you have to ask yourself... why it was necessary for them to do this in the first place." "The books that you read in those days... were written in a way that denigrated women artists, if they even mentioned them." "As an undergraduate at Harvard University," "I don't think there was a single woman artist... whose work was ever discussed in any one of my classes." "# Your time is gonna come ##" "When you're a woman, it's hard to tell that you're being censored... when you're not in a museum to begin with." "Can you name three women artists?" "Who's a woman artist?" "Um, Frida Kahlo." "That's one." "Yeah?" "Uh, Frida." "Oh." "Can anyone name three women artists?" " I need two more women artists." " Two more women artists." "Yes." "A female." "This film is peppered with images... that for years you were prevented from seeing... because there was no access to them." "This film is the remains of an insistent history... that refuses to wait any longer to be told." "# There's a war in the world #" "# Yes, there is Yes, there is #" "# There's a war in the world#" "# Yes, there is Yes, there is ## 1968." "One year after the summer oflove," "America was still in Vietnam." "While at home, the Black Panthers, civil rights and free speech movements... were only part of the subterranean agitations." "# We shall overcome someday ##" "Another revolution was in progress." "There was a moral fervor to gather the fractured, displaced and scattered remnants of the conditions of obscurity." "I was a freshly radicalized graduate student at Berkeley... during the free speech movement." "I came from Cleveland and was expected to return, but, after Berkeley, there was no turning back." "I felt an urgency to capture that moment, to hold on to that experience." "I wasn't about to trust my own memory, which was fragile even then." "So with a borrowed camera, I shot people that came through my living room... right here on this very sofa 35 years ago." "One of the earliest feminist demonstrations... was staged at the 1968 Miss America contest, which was a symbol for women who measured up... or didn't measure up to artificial standards." "The new Miss America stands 5 feet 7, weighs 125 pounds... and measures 36-24 1/2-36." "Police arrested a young woman inside the Atlantic City Convention Hall." "Police said the woman was spraying a foul-smelling vapor... about 20yards from the end of the runway." "# We're gonna ask all our sisters here #" "# To come andjoin the fight #" "# Don't need no Miss America no more ##" "And it was at that precarious moment in history... that art and politics fused... and then transfused... into the blocked cultural arteries of the time." "It was a week long protest of art events against the Vietnam War." "I used a formation from my war piece." "And we snaked through the streets of SoHo with black armbands." "The politics of 1970 must clearly say to all American people... that the walls between the races and the walls between the classes... must come crashing down." "Judy Cohen-Garrowitz was inspired by the Black Panthers... when she changed her last name to Chicago." "So we adapted the forms of the Black Panthers before we developed our own forms." "No, it was absolutely true." "I didn't feel like I had a name, you know, and I wanted to make some statement, some kind of symbolic statement about the fact that I was taking control of my own destiny." "I was fighting it out, pretty much alone and isolated." "I shot wherever and whenever I could." "This clip of Judy Chicago was shot in a bathroom at Hayward State, where we were able to get good sound." "Uh, let's see if I can think back that far, Lynn." "Now, we're going back into the end of the '60s, okay?" "There were almost no women artists who were visible at all." "We all thought we were alone." "Some friends said to me," ""If anybody can tell you, you know, what galleries you can go to or what you can do with this stuff, go to Leo Castelli."" "So like a fool, I made an appointment." "And I went to the uptown gallery, but of course he didn't see me." "Ivan Karp saw me." "And I was wearing high-heeled boots at the time, and so I was, you know, really kinda tall." "And Ivan is small." "And there were these sculpture stands all around the place, and he didn't have me put my big tablet" "24-by-36- on this." "He had me put it on the floor." "So every time I turned a page, it was like I was genuflecting to this guy, you know?" "I felt humiliated." "And then he said- he said," ""What'd you bring these to me for?"" "I learned to, you know," "look into a lot off acets of the real world... and what it meant to be a woman artist... in the society and in the art world." "And as it was- it was pretty tough." "Women aspiring to success in the male-dominated art world, as we know, must work much harder at it... and will be defined as second-rate for the most part." "It was sort of a built-in attitude within the institutions... that it was acceptable, normal and preferable... to have all-white-male shows." "So, coming up against that, both as a black person and as a woman, was very daunting because it had to do with basic attitudes." "The people I was meeting didn't realize that I was recording... and that they were creating much of what would become... part of the feminist art movement." "But we all felt something transformative was occurring... and that we were a part of it." "One voice, and then another, became a chorus, syncopated into a movement," "became a revolution." "These works are relics of resistance... and very different from the work... that was being exhibited in museums and galleries... or was taught about in art schools and universities." "Minimalism was the prevailing tendency at that time." "The whole ethos of minimalist art... was to arrive at an ever-purer notion of what an object could be." "I stepped forth from the university trying to figure out how, trained as a minimalist painter," "I was going to make mywork relevant to people I loved and cared about." "And there was that incredible disjunction at that point... between content and the notion of making art." "In otherwords, art was content-less." "It was free and devoid of politics." "And that was a higher form." "When you have a culture in a state of grave agitation, where people are marching by the hundreds of thousands in the streets" "Come alive, brothers!" "We are waiting for you!" "And the leading artistic activity of the day is mute... because of the way that that art is construed as an intellectual pursuit." "The growing tensions between minimal and feminist art... are expressed in this performance... where one artist represents minimal art... and the other feminist art... as they wrestle for domination... to the background drone of minimal art rehetoric." "Art had reached an impasse... that American culture was already breaking through." "There had to be an invention of a new kind ofart, and that's exactly when feminism starts in the art world." "# There's a waring the world Yes, there is #" "In cooperation with the armed forces of South Vietnam, attacks are being launched this week... to clean out major enemy sanctuaries on the Cambodian-Vietnam border." "The National Guard is called out to restore order at Kent State in Ohio." "Leave this area immediately." "Guardsmen, harassed by rock-throwing and name-calling, fire into a group of students." "What really spurred me to do performances... was around 1970 when the killings at Kent State happened... and Nixon invaded Cambodia." "I got a sense of the immediacy of these issues in my life... that made me feel as though the work I had done up to that point... was just not adequate to express my current concerns." "And so I felt the need to move out into the world... and also the need to be more concrete and confrontational... in my interactions with people through my work." "In protest to the invasion of Cambodia, the artist Robert Morris closed his exhibition at the Whitney." "Robert Rauschenberg and Carl Andre withdrew their work from the Venice Biennale, and together they opened a Biennale-in-Exile in New York City." "But the artists in this exhibition were only white men." "They said, "This show can't include women!"" "Well, we just got mad, and we said, "We're mad!" "We're not taking it anymore!"" "Faith contacted the organizers... and threatened to demonstrate if they didn't integrate the exhibition." "And that was the first action." "And that was done by a group called WSABAL" "Women, Students and Artists for BlackArt Liberation." "That group was actually just me and my daughter Michelle Wallace." "Those were the days when two people could raise a lot of hell." "And make everybody think we were 35,000 people." "You know what I mean?" "Between May and September 1970, simultaneously and spontaneously, other creative actions for integration surfaced throughout the country." "We had al ready picketed the Corcoran Gallery's Biennial... for having an all-male exhibition... right at the time when people were beginning to have a discussion about this." "And we organized that at my house, and the conference used one of my bedrooms... as our headquarters." "It was a sculpture annual, and people said," ""There are no women who make sculpture"- the usual silly business." "We did a big demonstration around the Whitney Annual." "We picketed every Saturday." "We had women's slides projected on the outside of the Whitney at the opening." "We faked a press release... that went out to all the media on Whitney stationery... saying that the Whitney was so pleased to be the first museum... to acknowledge that women artists have been neglected... and have 50% women and 50% nonwhites." "Those slides were projected on the outside ofthe museum." "Artists placed eggs inside the exhibition space." "Faith painted her eggs black... and wrote "50%" on them." "They went nuts!" "You realize that little changes make big changes." "I eventually wrote the song- "Stand up forwhat you want to do." "Stand up, there's no one telling you how to stand up." "Stand up when people put you down." "Stand up and dance above the ground." "You've gotta stand up." "You've gotta stand up."" "This isn't a microphone." ""Disposable objects, society, consumer reports, lives of certainty." "Exposing the truth is like nudity, so stand up, you've got to stand up."" "The Los Angeles County Museum was planning an "art and technology" show, and the red flag was the cover of the catalog, with a grid with 50 heads of men on it." "We went to the museum... and counted the works on the walls." "We embarrassed them, and they felt they had to negotiate." "What was A.I.R.?" "Well, it was the first women's cooperative." "It was very hard to find a show of women's work in SoHo." "We rented a ground-floor loft on Wooster Street." "I think it was 97 Wooster Street." "And we gutted the inside, and we built with our own hands the gallery." "Judy Chicago began the very first feminist art program... at Fresno State College in 1970." "A Room of One's Own, Sisterhood Is Powerful and The Dialectic of Sex." "How many people have read all three books?" "We didn't study men at all, figuring that everybody had studied men plenty." "So we were all into remedial education- learning our own history, our own heritage." "How to meet a gallery, how to present yourself to the world, you know." "All of these things that men artists do." "We found pictures." "We photographed them." "We made slide libraries." "We would meet everyweek and we would choose a subject, and then what we tried to do was make art out ofit." "I remember asking my students... how many of them had been raped, and being just totally shocked when, like, a quarter or half of them raised their hands." "It was all discovery about what our true experiences had been." "I was really scared." "You know, I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but I was impelled to do it." "There was, as we went along, a lot of hostility and kind of jealousy, I think, that began to develop about that program." "We were sitting on the platform talking about these ideas, and this man came up from the audience and started threatening me." "Some man jumped up onstage and slugged her." "I discovered that it was easier to get access to the subject matter through performance." "Most women knew how to act out." "Even if they didn't have any experience performing, they were experienced at performing roles in society." "Will you help me do the dishes?" "Help you do the dishes?" "Well, they're your dishes as much as mine." "But you don't have a" "We all learned how to make art from our own point of view as women in that year." "And then we went to Cal Arts." "My husband Paul Brock was the dean of Cal Arts." "He proposed that Judy be made a member of his faculty." "I was already a member." "Mimi Schapiro and Judy Chicago had organized this big conference." "It was a weekend at Cal Arts." "And during that conference, they invited women from all over the country... to come and show slides and talk about their work." "And that's all we did for three days." "It was very simple." "Lynn, what we found out was... that our slides were moved out all over the country." "They were copied!" "It was like an underground railroad." "The women in America were just waiting to be released." "When I saw those slides, after decades of having felt that to be an artist is to be a man, it was like a veil had lifted." "Women were able to enter the art structure... through performance." "Performance art is this strange, amorphous area... that attracts hybrids from every discipline." "It remains this peculiar place... that people can be extremely experimental." "We started the whole consciousness-raising concept... on the idea ofthe grape theory." "One person tells another person, another person tells a third person, and pretty soon you've got a group, and you can start talking to each other." "And there's a wholeness about that." "I remember being in this consciousness-raising group and looking around the room." "They were all white women." "And I was really fascinated by the fact that all of these women... had made the determinations that I was in the process of making" "choosing to focus on their work, choosing perhaps not to be wives in the traditional sense." "By facing up to the way the micro-politics of power within the family... have shaped women and their responses." "I think I was very scared by the anger all of them were expressing, and the rage." "I was very recently married, and I was feeling very conflictual... about how one had to suddenly be angry about men." "Naturally, as a result, I had to leave my husband, as so many of us did." "Everyone's opinion counted equally." "That was both wonderful and a total nightmare." "And sometimes it just simply ground to a halt." "But when it didn't grind to a halt, then you could sometimes get a kind of combustion, a kind of nitroglycerin effect... that shot off all kinds of new directions and ideas in really productive ways." "What we found was a whole different way to talk about work." "And I discovered very quickly, it wasn't the way the boys talked about art, that we talked about things like content- how much of the feminist movement, period, was about giving us permission... to let us be who we think we are." "That simple." "I stopped doing the dishes, making the three meals a day, the laundry and the house cleaning and so on." "The process of personal liberation for me resulted in the breakup of my marriage." "So that was my first introduction to feminism." "And there was a second stage of that in which after- right after- a few days after I left my marriage, I was raped." "And that experience was highly politicizing for me." "And I became very strongly connected to the fact... that I wanted all of my energy- my professional energies,my personal energies, my political energies- to be integrated in the struggle for women's liberation." "In America, the statistics are that... every two minutes, a woman is raped." "Like Arlene, early in my life," "I became part of that statistic, and there after cautiously side stepped the associated land mines... of depreciated dignity and self-worth." "Through consciousness-raising, came some of the early feminist literature" " Apron." "like The Politics of Housework... and philosophical slogans like "The personal Is the political. "" "Bowl." "All these gestures and utensils actually are a sign... for a certain kind of utilitarian domesticity." "Chopper." "Other meanings escape, and you see a kind of madness... and anger contained, but explosive." "With each letter, there's a certain kind of confrontationalism... which I discovered quickly that many men found frightening." "Dish." "Overlays of personal history..." "led to internal conflicts of breaking with traditional roles." "But I just felt it was fashion, so I was, like, the best mother you could possibly be, the best house cleaner, the best cook." "I never seem to have more than 20 minutes at a time for myself, and slowly, painting just faded away." "There was an enormous collection of very exciting people... who were passing all of this inspiration on down to their students." "When I got to Cal Arts, it was, like, "Gee, this is pretty squeaky clean."" "And it struck me as a kind of intellectualized version of minimalism." "The women's program had been very influential." "This messiness was feminine, it was hysterical, it was really looked down upon." "Around this time, you also have role-playing and gender swapping." "I was interested what would my male self" "Naturally, I've told you I'm vain, so I wanted to be the most handsomest male self." "And you know, in my tape I discovered I was a king with my small face." "But a king has to have a kingdom, so I went out into the world... and conversed with my people- the citizens of Solano Beach." "I considered for a long time whether or not to include my own work in this film." "But I decided not to continue the legacy of omission, so here I am." "# Your time is gonna come #" "# I think I hear it now #" "From 1973 to 1979- nearly a decade" "I lived as a fictional person." "Roberta had a driver's license, saw a psychiatrist... and had better credit than I did." "The fragments ofher life emerged, like the fragments of this film, to eventually show a portrait of what it was like... to experience alienation, rejection and loneliness." "Roberta put ads in newspapers to meet roommates, and, as she met them, she became part of their reality... just as they became part of her fiction." "She was a fractured identity, a virtual person... captured in a time frame, waiting for her history to congeal." "Roberta was my own flipped effigy." "She was a mirror of culture." "So we made art in which we created identities, even fictional histories, which were better than none at all." "The personal became the political, and the very personal became art." "We were juggling identities, living encrypted lives... covertly as artists, beneath the surface of visibility." "Race became the subject and the content of art that was produced." "For example, it's our problem if you feel that I'm making an unnecessary fuss... about my racial identity... if you don't see why I have to announce it this way." "Well, if you feel that my letting people know I'm not white... is making an unnecessary fuss," "you must feel that the right and proper course of action for me to take... is to pass for white." "This was in the '40s, so it was during segregation." "I was one of the few black children in kindergarten, if not the only one in this particular one, in Philadelphia." "They had "potty time,"" "and I remember one of the white teachers believed... that whites and blacks should not use the same bathroom." "And so what she did was tie me to the cot with sheets." "I remember it vividly.I remember lying there and I said,"I'm not gonna pee on myself."" "I'm a little kid." "And I talk about this experience, which is always a shock... 'cause people can't believe this happened, but it did." "And I told stories about experiences my mother had... and experiences I had with racism." "But I play both parts." "You ungrateful little" "After all we've done for you." "You know, we don't believe in your symbols." "You must use our symbols." "They're not valid unless we validate them." "You really must be paranoid." "I have never had an experience like that." "But then, of course, I'm free, white and 21." "People were offended by it, were very angry about it." "I first showed the tape at A.I.R.... in the Dialectics of isolation exhibition that Ana Mendieta curated." "A political exile from Cuba, the feminist artist Ana Mendieta... met and married the minimal artist Carl Andre." "Cal Arts in 1972," "I showed photographs of myself... dressing as a man trying to look like a woman, photographs using makeup to beautify and then to deform my face." "And then Judy said, "Well, what do you think of the work that you see here?"" "And there were flowers and breasts all over the walls, and I thought it was hideous." "So I said,"It looks prescriptive to me."" "And then she said" ""Don't you understand what we're trying to do here?" "We're trying to support these young women!"" "So, uh, I started crying." "I completely lost it and just, you know" "I couldn't believe that a feminist could act like this." "And to this day, I haven't forgiven Judy Chicago for making me cry." "In China, they have study groups." "They have consciousness-raising groups." "They read theory." "They read Mao, they read Marx, they read Lenin!" "It's, like, you say, "How do I make change?" and we tell you, and you say, "Oh, I don't wanna do all that." "That won't make change!"" "And we say to you, "Those of us who are effectively making change are not ignorant." "Those people who have ever made change in the history of the human race were not ignorant, and nobody who is ignorant will ever make change!"" "Unfortunately, because of some moves that Judy made" "like locking the door of the program- this exacerbated the hostility." "That is one of the reasons women are not able to translate their aspirations into reality- because they are embedded in remaining ignorant, and it pisses me off." "Twenty-one students in the FeministArt program at Cal Arts, under the supervision of Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, created Woman house, which transformed a vacant Hollywood home... into a feminist artwork." "The first year that I was teaching with Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro," "I found it to be difficult because they are not speaking to each other." "Woman house had already happened." "That was kind ofthe finale of the excitement." "Being able to actually address women's educational needs within an institution... that supposedly was committed to that, that was wonderful and thrilling." "But of course, it didn't work." "So we decided to leave and had an idea to do a brochure... in which we would be standing inside of trash cans... throwing away old art history and old art... and pulling out feminist art history and art," "and went to our friend Sheila de Bretteville to see if she would assist us with the brochure." "And she thought that was just the worst idea she'd ever heard." "At the core of what your design sense is, is political." "Lynn, I love that you see it as political!" "I see it as very political." "The independence of having our own institution is a really heady experience." "You don't have to ask permission from anyone." "You just do it." "And I like very much having an idea and just going ahead with it." "Ifit's not right, we'll adjust it later." "Judy Chicago, Arlene Raven and Sheila de Bretteville..." "left Cal Arts and formed the Feminist Studio Workshop, and they held the first classes in Sheila's living room." "Eventually, they founded their own building." "We found a building that had a tremendous amount of dignity and presence, except it was like nobody else was there 'cause it was like warehouses." "It wasn't chic." "And right over the bridge is Lincoln Heights, which Judy Baca had said, you know, "Oh, these are two gangs." "They're gonna see all these women and fight with us."" "I said, "I don't think so."" "I have a good relationship to taking chances." "# Standing in the way of control #" "# Gotta live your life Surviving the only way that you know #" "# Know ##" "The Equal Rights Amendment was passed in the House of Representatives, and there was a buoyancy about new possibilities." "I was able to travel and to lecture at different schools... and see what was happening, like, in Minneapolis and Chicago and Atlanta." "I was able to go to the Women's Building." "So, some of us were doing cross-pollination." "We were all so excited to begin this endeavor together... that anything that was a barrier or an impediment or a glitch... was just a barrier, impediment or a glitch for you to solve." "And we did." "I mean it's hard." "This will make every emotional." "It just hurts to not have money when you want things so badly." "And I" " It makes me identify with who doesn't have money." "The sense of limitation that economics makes... is so powerful and, in a way," "I think we used it wrong then." "We saw that as, you know," ""The dominant culture not letting us have what we have"... instead of the identification with people who don't have." "I think there wasn't enough identification with that, and it made- it made it peculiar... to be so lacking in funds and so unable to get them... and so unable to do... some of the things we wanted to do." "That's just hard." "Consciousness surfaced from the inside out." "Traumas dissolved through the pores of the skin, and the body became the bodypolitic." "There's a long tradition of the woman being looked upon." "When feminist performance began, it literally was the looking back." "Martha Rosler, for instance." "Thirty-four and a half." "That's above standard." "She's measured ruthlessly, but it made you think of how women are measured ruthlessly." "Mid-thigh girth is 19 inches." "That's standard." "It is about constraints." "Miss America stands 5 feet 7, weighs 125 pounds" "The ability to challenge cultural presumptions... was in it self a triumph." "There were some works I did that suddenly pulled it all together, and it felt right." "I put up all these naked pictures of me." "148 or something." "I looked at that and I was shaking, and I said," ""Oh, my God." "They're not gonna take me seriously." "I'm so fucking obviously a woman."" "And I remember going outside and taking a walk... and saying," ""Well, you know, fuck 'em, you know?" "That's me."" "Ana Mendieta stressed the temporal nature and frailty of the female body." "I think that that was not only an art expression, but that was a political expression... of how she felt about violence... and the vulnerability of women's bodies." "Violence is embedded in much of this art," "like the blood-filled corpses of Ana Mendieta's Earth Works... or her tears for unknown horrors still to come." "The rumor went around almost immediately... that I was gonna be in this room naked, which I was." "But guys could come in, and I would make love with every one of them." "And this is exactly contrary to the meaning of the piece or what I was going to do." "The women got very upset about it, but they thought that, I guess, I was completely a victim." "But there have been other women who've done performance pieces, such as Yoko Ono and Marina Abramovic, in which they really were victims, 'cause by the rules of their piece, they could not... interact or protect themselves." "In the performance Cut Piece," "Yoko Ono sat motionless on a stage... after inviting the audience to cut away her clothing." "Self-inflicted wounds and exposed vulnerability... reflect a culture of rage and aggression." "The women's movement gave me permission to start moving... into my experiences as a woman." "It was a series of gestures that went" "And that act of covering... that part of the body, touching one self there, as far as I knew, no one had ever done that before." "In fact, a friend of mine, a dancer, said when she saw that, she gasped." "Instead of the female body being the enemy of an artist or the muse for an artist, suddenly it really became not just the stuff of work, but the tool of work." "The real struggle with my work was to potentially introduce... or penetrate my culture with different meanings ofthe female body... and the female attributes of that body." "But it was the body in conjunction... and as an extension of my materials as a painter." "So the body itself was subjected to the materials... that I, as a painter, was using in the constructions." "It was painted, it was greased, it was oiled, it was chalked." "It was covered in ropes, it was collaged." "They all said it was like a kind of pornography, and if I wanted to paint, I should paint." "It was an imaginative leap... to think that women could represent sexuality on the screen... without somehow being either condemned by it, without it being career suicide, without being laughed at or without being attacked by other women," "because that wasn't any nicer." "Media was challenged." "Tactics included revising projected, idealized images." "# Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman #" "# Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman #" "# Wonder Woman ##" "Or scrutinizing and rupturing the forms of media transmission." "Or claiming the copyright itself to the mediated image." "Now go back to a profile." "Now move your whole head forward slowly." "Forward." "No, this way." "Oh." "Forward." "Okay, stop." "Mm-hmm." "Good." "Now just let your whole body settle down." "I like that." "That's good." "That's nice." "Okay." "Now, uh" "You want just the straight, uh, profile and full face?" "Yeah, I got an idea of what we can do." "Play this tape on this machine now... and then take a photograph of what I'm doing, okay?" "No, stay where you are." "Do you know what I mean?" "Media became a platform for articulating private battlefields." "My video diaries were a way to, finally, hear myself." "There were things that happened that... you weren't supposed to talk about." "When I was small, there would be these episodes of batterings." "And I would go up to my attic... and retreat into other people that had a voice," "since I had lost my own." "You're not supposed to talk about it." "My art was a zone of safety and survival." "Part of the reason that the feminist art movement could happen... was that there were feminists writing about art." "I created three fictional critics." "Their names were Herbert Goode, Prudence Juris and Gay Abandon." "And these fictional critics wrote about my work." "The articles got published in prestigious journals, and I took the published articles into galleries." "And that's how I got my first exhibition." "There were women starting magazines." "Magazines were self-published" "Chrysalis on the West Coast, Heresies on the East Coast... and many others throughout the country." "The first meeting of the group that was to become Heresies was actually in this loft." "We literally took it out to the bookstores ourselves." "We did distribution." "We did mailing." "Issue Number 3 was "Lesbian Art and Artists."" "In editing that issue, one of the things that came up right away... was how little there was out there." "It was very hard getting women to, in a way, you know- in a sense, almost come out as artists." "Not come out as lesbians, but to come out as artists." "Because the lesbian separatist community was anti-art." "It was bourgeois." "My sense of the feminist movement then... was that women were kind of storming the art world." "We were trying it all out." "We were giving birth to it." "Pardon?" "Inventing it." "It was excitement." "It was empowering." "It was a lot offucking work." "It was such an explosive time, where all of this was really getting sorted out." "There wasn't an ideology yet." "There wasn't a prescriptive way of doing things." "And half the in toxication was that we were there helping to figure it out." "I started Franklin Furnace after moving to New York- 1974- because my work had been marginalized." " So I thought to start an institution that would show marginalized work." " #...you wanna sit on my face #" "Feminism in the '70s was an exercise in trying to do something... that you knew full well was probably not gonna work." "But you had to do it anyway, or you were gonna go nuts." "We started the Woman's Building, and, after a year, I left that... because I had become strengthened... in my own sense of what I wanted to do and be as an artist." "Three years after leaving, Judy completed The Dinner Party." "There's 39 place settings at the table- 13 on each side." "Each ofthe place settings represents a woman of achievement from Western civilization." "Over 400 people came from all over the United States, from as far away as Australia, to work on the project." "In 1979, when The Dinner Party opened in San Francisco- when it premiered- it wasn't just The Dinner Party in the museum." "You got to see a glimpse of what it would actually mean to have a feminist society." "The museum was full of poetry readings, performances, discourse, excitement." "I'm doin' pretty good." "This is fun." " Finally, it's fun." " I know it." "..."would bring world peace and equality between women and men."" ""Liberated motherhood would retrieve"" " Hmm." "Yes." "Not having to have babies all the time." "We're never ourselves." "That's very flamboyant." "I have a chance to work to bring other women to Yale... and to enhance a feminist presence at Yale... and to be the kind of person I am here there." "I felt the need to have a more total commitment to women... and to work for more long-range goals." "And I also was beginning, at the time, to put out to the public... the work I had been doing on lesbian artists... and to republicize myself as a lesbian." "Judy was having success in museums, but others were taking the lessons of political activism directly to the streets." "These windows begin a series that deal with a ging." "They're also studies of the people that shop at Bonwit Teller." "I began a very long period of time of straddling two lives- the feminist information and life that supported my growth as a woman... and my community life, which was within the Latino community, as I worked intently in the neighborhoods." "And they never really met." "The concept of the mural was to bring a group of youths together from different neighborhoods... who had had trouble with the police... and have them try to accomplish something together... that was greater than any one of them individually." "And so we attempted to paint the longest mural in the world." "But the idea was that we would paint the history of California... and put particular emphasis on the part of history... that had been left out in history books." "These kids are known for not getting along with each other, so we didn't know what was going to happen." "It was an experiment, and we think it worked." "Suzanne Lacy was trying to figure out how the media... could come to the services of putting information to the public about rape." "The media surround at that point in time was all fear- showing women how to retreat, to hide, to barricade, to defend... around this manipulation of information on slaughter basically- sexual slaughter of women." "And we wanted to interrupt that flow in the media with another image." "I am here forthe 388 women who have been raped in Los Angeles... between October 18 and November 29." "The thing that I really have learned, and I'm gaining more confidence in, is the potential of artists as image makers to really make a change in society... in terms of the images that they project of women." "And that that's just as important as a political organization and the things that they make." "We were sitting over coffee in Venice, looking at the newspaper, and just said, "This is it." "We've had enough." "We have enough women around us." "We have other options." "We're going to organize and do something to show the women of L.A. that they don't need to be afraid."" "Suddenly it was 1980" "and it was as if time was sliding backwards, rewinding history in the process." "The Feminist Studio Workshop closed, and the first cases of AIDS were reported." "The E.R.A. was defeated in the Senate." "The planet's rage and disrepair were background white noise to our own private apocalypse." "A subculture that was no longer content with remaining a footnote... sought to become an implicit part of the cultural narrative." "In 1984, the Museum of Modern Art opened an exhibition... called An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture." "And in this exhibition, there were 169 artists." "Very few were women or people of color." "And we realized that we had so much more to go." "So the Women's Caucus for Art called a demonstration in front of the museum." "I remember that Frida Kahlo and I- the Guerrilla Girl Frida Kahlo and I, Kathe Kollwitz- went to this demonstration." "So we're walking around on a picket line, and nobody paid any attention to it." "We had this idea to do a kind of political art... that didn't just point to something and complain and say, "This is wrong."" "We had an idea to try to twist issues around and use facts and humor... and change people's minds about the issues." "This particular member misspelled "Guerrilla" as "Gorilla,"" "and so that was where the idea of the masks came forth, and here we are." "# She's sogorgeous #" "# You can always find me lyin'on the floor #" "# Just to see herperfection from underneath #" "# She's so sweet Her intellect's superior #" "# Makes me want to reach into the interior ofher skull #" "# All ofher thoughts are complicated, brilliant, sheer genius #" "# Would make other girls act kinda mean #" "# Just knowin' they're smarter- ##" "Artists and critics, museum people, writers... were part of the fact that women were not being shown." "So we targeted them." "We named names, and that was an extraordinary thing." "Not just generalize, but specific names." "We gave report cards- how many people in this gallery are women?" "We fingered one group after another." "We went after artists themselves- successful male artists." "They've gotta speak up about this." "We travel in the dark of night, in the mists." "It could be everybody." "The person next to you could be a Guerrilla Girl, so it's not clearwho is and isn't, and hopefully it will stay that way." "The penis count at the Met." "Someone had to do it, and we were the ones." "We made them, through the posters, accountable- for how many women were in galleries, how many women were in exhibitions, how much money women were making." "And we did it through humor so that all ofus could laugh." "The feminists ofthe '70s had been earnest and breast-beating, and it just didn'twork." "The bra-burning didn't actually effect social change." "It was so difficult to be female in the '60s and '70s." "To do feminist work was just the most profound leap of courage." "I think the influence of the feminist movement on the art world and on culture... was the most profound thing that happened in the last half of the 20th century." "If the collectors were really smart about it, they would purchase females' artwork... because it's totally undervalued- Mm-hmm, and it's an investment." "Yeah." "It's a huge investment." "And remember that one poster we did where we named, I don't know," "like, 150 women artists that you could purchase for one male artist." "Yeah." "That was a good poster." "That was a great poster." "They're mostly business people." "I'm just surprised they haven't caught on to that yet." "Tenets in the art world that we believed were inviolate... proved to be just the prejudices of the people in power." "But the existing power structure was shifting." "The Whitney contacted me." "I was the first woman they had hired- except for Margaret McKellar, the registrar- the first woman since Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney... and certainly the first woman in any- in a curatorial position." "Came through the '60s." "Had read, you know, all the writings of Bobby Seale." "I was supposed to, you know, make a change- go into the belly of the beast, make an impact." "I want to change the power structures that create inequities in the first place." "Curatorial work was where you really want to be in museums... because you affect the collection, which stands." "There's an interesting feminist story in this." "Because in those days, David Salinge rwas the president, and he interviewed both me and James Monte." "And he asked questions that are illegal nowadays." "He wanted to know if I had a boyfriend, if I intended to get married, what I thought about a family- um, really amazing stuff." "How old I was." "And at some point I just stopped him, and I said, "Oh, okay." "Let me tell you why you don't want to hire a woman." "You know, first, no man will ever be able to work for me." "Secondly, we know that women can't do budgets." "And third, once a month, I'll go crazy and nobody will be able to get near me."" "And he actually laughed." "They hired us both." "But they hired me at $2,000 less a year, which at that time was considerable." "So I went in to see my director and I said, "This is what's happening, and you've gotta change it."" "And he said, "Well, you know"- The budget, the budget, the budget." "And I said, "The New York Times, the New York Post, the Daily News. "" "So it got changed." "I feel like I'm in the Witness Protection Program, concealing my identity because I don't wanna be whacked by the art mafia." "Do you think that the art mafia really would punish someone... if they found out that they were the ones who were putting out these statistics?" "Yes." "Well, I think actually any subversive voice is in danger of being punished." "I think that's true anywhere." "I remember when Susan Stamberg interviewed me... when the piece opened in the San Francisco Museum." "And she said, "Well,Judy, what are you going to do when the controversy starts?"" "And I go, "Controversy?" "What controversy?"" "I mean, 5,000 people came to the opening." "People were giving me necklaces and flowers." "I mean, it was just this incredible, festive, gala celebration of women's achievement... and, you know, my achievement and our achievement." "And I thought-whew!" "You know, fantastic." "We really are at a moment in history where women can enter the culture, we can be ourselves, we can in fact bring our point of view into the world." "Ha, ha, ha!" "Nobody was prepared for the ferocity of the assault on The Dinner Party- not anybody associated with The Dinner Party and not me." "Museum after museum backed out of exhibiting The Dinner Party." "On the floor of Congress, people were speaking against this work of art... that most of them had never seen." "...smash your face till it bled, you get a letter of reproach." "And now we have this pornographic art." "I mean, three-dimensional ceramic art of 39 women's, uh, vaginal area- their genitalia- served up on plates that requires a whole room." "...in order to display weird sexual art." "I'm a poet, and I do have trouble with this, 'cause it's not art!" "It is not art." "It's pornography!" "Pornographic art" " Military weapons that look like phallic symbols, capable of doing nothing but destroying human life on this planet!" "You wanna talk about pornography?" "You wanna talk about deadly art?" "We deal with pornography every single day!" "That's not the issue." "They're not going to display a mobile M.X. missile or a B-2 bomber." "They're gonna feature a work that has 39 elaborate place settings... depicting female vaginas." "I came to this body against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement, and people said, "Challenge,come here so that you can speak out."" "Look at this garbage." "Art is a precious expression of the First Amendment to the Constitution." "For Congress to spend an hour and 27 minutes discussing The Dinner Party?" "I mean, when are they running the country?" "123 members voting in the negative and one member voting "present,"" "the amendment is agreed to." "All men discussed the future of The Dinner Party." "Not one woman spoke up." "Men determined and decided that The Dinner Party was not going to enter history." "And why did you leave?" "Oh, why did I leave the Whitney?" "I got fired." "Why did I get fired?" "I have no idea." "I have no idea, because he couldn't give me a straight answer either." "But I suspect it was maybe because I was more than just competent." "That's my joke, you know." "It doesn't matter." "It doesn't matter because" "Although it was extremely painful, because I was there for eight years." "And I loved the institution." "Loved it." "That was hard." "That was hard." "But I got over it." "I just got over it." "Because I'm a refugee from the Nazis... and because I came here and was adopted by this country and became naturalized." "A country which I had, you know, such admiration for." "Here's a land that was really one of the only countries in the world... where you could totally, totally, freely express yourself in everyway." "And to see these kinds of things being eroded and nibbled at... and that these forces are really and truly trying to destroy that, is to me just immensely frightening." "The kinds of systemic battle lines that were drawn were really clear... at the time of Ana Mendieta's death." "Ana Mendieta fell to her death from a 34th-floorwindow." "Her husband, the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, was charged with second-degree murder." "Some of the best-known feminist art critics and feminist artists... wouldn't come to her defense." "They were too connected to Carl Andre from the early days of minimalism... to be willing to go against that male establishment... that immediately closed ranks around him." "All of the male artists that put up the money for his very expensive defense at torney" "Rauschenberg, all the rest ofthem." "Even the Guerrilla Girls were so split by differences... that they weren't even able to put out a fucking poster in her defense." "That was a sad moment for what's happened." "Andre was acquitted." "There was a lot of activism, both in the art world, and certainly in the culture, around the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings." "And out of that grew the Women's Action Coalition." "And there were protests going on around the downtown Guggenheim... when that opened in New York with one woman artist represented." "When the Guggenheim opened its first exhibition in SoHo... that included only one woman artist and Carl Andre, outraged WAC protestors stormed the museum, and, in a symbolic gesture, placed photographs of Mendieta over Andre's sculpture." "Where's Ana?" "Ask Carl!" "Where's Ana?" "Ask Carl!" "Where's Ana?" "Ask Carl!" "# Picture yourself You are not beautiful #" "# Andpictureyourself alive, alive, alive #" "# Alive, alive ##" "Marcia Tucker organized the Bad Girls exhibition in New York." "Others followed in Los Angeles and London." "I was seeing a lot of work that was really funny... and was about somehow subverting some of the, uh, the methods... or some of the attitudes that created sexism." "Gee, people hated that show." "It was amazing!" "On my Web site, I have an endless scroll of all my bad reviews." "Humor is the single most subversive weapon we have." "The reactions to the exhibition I organized at the UCLA Hammer Museum in 1996- which was called Sexual Politics:" "Judy Chicago's Dinner Party and Feminist Art History- were deeply disturbing and upsetting." "A certain coalition of Los Angeles art critics wrote these incredibly hostile reviews." "It also incited negativity on the part of older feminists..." "living primarily in New York." "External frustrations mounted and triggered internal animosity." "When women were isolated from the rest of society... and marginalized on account of being- feminism, this infighting started to take place." "I think it was Miriam Schapiro, but it may have been Judy too." "I don't know." "Started speaking very badly about- I think it was Barbara Kruger... or one of the more famous ones." "And I remember getting up and objecting publicly." "A damage that's inherent within an artwork, they call "inherent vice."" "I think these conflicts are a kind of an inherent vice that you'll have no matter what... because the playing field itself has never been level." "Look at what low esteem Carolee Schneemann or Hannah Wilke were held by a lot of women artists." "Like, "Oh, you shouldn't do that." "You shouldn't make a spectacle of yourself like that."" "A lot of us who survived those fights- bloodied, but, you know, relatively unscarred- are kind of like the old C.I.A. and K.G.B. agents that get together for reunions." "Who else knows what we were fighting over?" "Who else is interested in these issues... that have really been consigned to a sort of historic scrap pile... that people don't seem all that concerned about anymore?" "The feminist art movement was always incredibly heterogeneous and... richly conflicted, and that's what made it the most important political movement in the art world... in the contemporary period." "My students react against feminism and feminist art, and they take up the worst of 1950s behavior of women." "I go back to the 1950s and think of how we were raised, and I see young girls mimicking that." "I do." "It's horrifying." "That term has become kind of a red herring... that now gets brought out by major institutions to kind of" ""Oh, well, now we've done our feminist show and we can move on."" "I don't think feminism successfully changed the structures... through which art is made, sold, displayed and written about." "I think for complex and maybe in some ways obvious reasons," "I think a lot of women just wanted to be included." "I think there's a fear within my generation... that identifying with feminism is a limitation and not a foundation." "What really was limiting was the access to information... about the values and philosophy that was implicit in this movement." "Ideas introduced in the '70s were amplified by younger artists of the '80s." "Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer... were among the most important figures in the art world of the '80s." "And it's not an accident that they were there speaking truth to power... while you had these guys flinging broken dishes on their canvases." "# We keep no secrets #" "Some young artists experienced a transgenerational haunting, as if a legacy was passed down to them in secret." "I made this pam phlet that said:" ""A challenge and a promise." "Girl, if you make a movie and send it to me," "I promise I'll send you back your movie... with nine other movies made by nine other women."" "Mira Schor was my professor, and she looked at my work and she said to me," ""Have you ever heard of Ana Mendieta... or Hannah Wilke or Carolee Schneemann?"" "I hadn't, and I went straight to the library, and I couldn't find one thing on those women." "I had to ask myself why, when I went to the library, was there nothing there?" "And so Mira ended up bringing me her catalogs and clippings from home." "And I looked at this work and I thought, "I'm making the work ofthe '70s."" "Martha Rosler's Semiotics of the Kitchen- I remember watching that" "Dish." "and just being completely blown away by the critique." "The art I'm doing currently is very related to the feminist movement... in terms of how I consider the body." "History is fragile." "It clings to the most obvious evidence that remains." "This film is patched together like a quilt from people I could access, events that I heard about, and it represents only a nanocell in the D.N.A. of an international experience, most of which is not included." "I know how much is left out of this film." "What questions are asked in determining histories?" "Perhaps more importantly, what questions aren't asked?" "Some of the things that you're asking are the things that got left out." "The connection to the late '60s movements I think gets left out." "One of the things the film does is to open up a set of problems... that the 1970s raised without solving them." "And I think that's one of the important parts of feminist practice- is not to shut down the questions." "Time is an active ingredient in the composition of any history." "One of the vestiges of freedom that we all have as human beings... is to choose our attitudes, despite adversity... to choose to refresh and rescript every circumstance... into sustained and creative opportunities." "On the cusp of every potential disaster, there was a reinvention... and an absolute resolve to preserve an enduring future." "I began to shoot this film 40 years ago." "I've been waiting all this time for the right ending." "Marcia, how long did it take you... to accomplish your dream of opening the New Museum?" "Well, over a weekend basically." "No." "I got fired in December." "I packed up my stuff, and I left just before New Year's weekend." "And I rented this little space in the Fine Arts Building, and then I opened the space- open for business- the day after New Year's." "I took the model for the museum from consciousness-raising groups, community groups." "I learned a lot from feminism." "Over the weekend between December 1976 and January 1977, as she modestly says," "Marcia Tucker created the New Museum, a still thriving exhibition space for contemporary art in New York." "House will be in order." "One of the great successes was having the Hollywood Women's Political Committee... impress upon the Senate of the United States that even though the House of Representatives... had decided to actually put forth a bill keeping The Dinner Party from being shown in Washington, D.C." "When this very powerful group of women..." "let it be known to the senators who they had supported for years... that this was not to happen, it died right then and there in the Senate." "It was an incredible moment, a moment that probably people will never really know about, but nonetheless was proof to us how political it sometimes had to be." "In 1992, the Women's Action Coalition was formed to mobilize and do activist work... around cultural issues and issues of parity within the art world." "So, it was this kind of full circle moment of activism." "In 2006, Connie Butler organizedan exhibition... that opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles." "The exhibition has a title." "It's called WACK!" "Art and the Feminist Revolution." "Many of the artists said, "You know, it's gonna be career suicide"." "# There's a war on the poor #" "# Yes, there is Yes, there is #" "I'm not sure that the art world can absorb this much art by women, this much really strong, powerful, sociopolitical art by women." "# Are they criminalizing me?" "#" "# But the warwill be over when we've won #" "# Yes, it will ##" "What's important about the WACK!" "show is that it's the beginning of rectification... of a completely falsified history of that era... which tried to reduce, contain and fragment the production of women." "How do you feel about having this in the museum,Judith?" "I thought I'd never see it here in my whole life." "What is that?" "These are my horns." "I grow them periodically for special events." "What about the show?" "It's incredible." "It's an irreducible transformation of our history." "You know, I'm thrilled." "I actually confess I didn't think such an enormous exhibition would come ofit, which is one of the exciting things." "I intend to come back to this show probably another 10 times before I leave the country... because there's so many hours of video, and there's just always something else that needs to be looked at a little bit more." "When artists are battling for space in the cultural memory, omission- or even worse, eradication- becomes a kind of murder." "I have been overwhel med by the reaction to it." "The WACK!" "exhibition traveled to several cities... and spawned hundreds of satellite exhibitions and reunions." "The Sackler Center for Feminist Art opened at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Feminist Art Project opened at Rutgers University." "This is what the timeline of this film looks like." "I realized that the timeline for this film is, in fact, my own timeline." "Publishing articles about myself resulted in an exhibition, and, in 1975, I actually sold some work." "When the buyer learned that I was female, he returned the work, saying buying women artists was a bad investment." "I sold nothing for the next 17 years." "Work accumulated and was stored under beds or in closets." "To preserve it, I offered to donate these pieces, plus 50 others, to a local museum." "They rejected it." "They said it wasn't art and that I didn't know my place, and, if I didn't take it back in three days, they would destroy it." "Thirty-five years later, that work was appraised for 9,000 times the original sale price." "And it was that sale, along with some enlightened philanthropists, that enabled the completion of this film." "I trust that each successive generation will recreate it self." "Women of the '70s worked very hard for something that I 'm benefiting from, that I feel like I have support, that I'm part of a dialogue." "We still have the capacity to respond to our own context in making art." "That relentless communication on a visual level is very powerful." "Things have changed a lot." "I think we still have a lot of work to do." "A legacy is a gift to the future." "The permanent manifestation of women's community is very important to me." "I can't believe it, but this last year in my career was the best, at the age of 81." "So if we suffer and make it into art, sometimes that makes sense out of suffering, and the pain becomes a work that possibly also gets us out of our own tragedy." "Every woman's fame, every woman's success, is all of our success." "# We come together in this garden fora day #" "# Your time is gonna come #" "# I think I hear it now #" "All of the hundreds of hours I've collected for this film... will be accessible online." "There are no outtakes." "And on the RAW/WAR site, future generations will be able to add their stories to this evolving history." "# Your time is gonna come #" "# I think I hear it now #" "# Your time is gonna come #" "# I think I hear it now #" "People really believed that an individual, you know, in consort with other persons, could change the world." "And then so we did too." "# Anyone can #" "# All you have to do is try #" "# Spread your arms to reach the sky #" "# And you'll know the reason why #" "# Anyone can fly ##"