WHAT JUDY CHICAGO’S WORK REVEALS ABOUT TOXIC MASCULINITY

Jonathan D. Katz

Judy Chicago, The Three Faces of Man, from PowerPlay, 1985. © Judy Chicago / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo © Donald Woodman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

It’s a simple opposition, really: the chiding, angry, petulant faces of Senator Lindsey Graham, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, and Senator Chuck Grassley set against the painting Three Faces of Man from Judy Chicago’s “PowerPlay” series of 1982–87. When Chicago posted just such a juxtaposition on Instagram following the recent Senate hearings on Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, it struck an eerily resonant chord, with commenters lauding the artist with superlatives like “visionary,” “psychic,” “intense and profound.”

What was old is new again, and Chicago’s social and political import is now again very much on the ascendance. But Chicago hasn’t changed; it’s just that her forthright dissections of male power now find new, immediate, and obvious real world correlates. What was once allegory is now reportage, and Chicago’s art from decades past has never looked so current.

Perhaps that’s why, nearly 40 years after her paradigm-shifting Dinner Party (1974–79), Time chose this year to name Judy Chicago as one of its 100 most influential people in the world. Paradoxically, the presidency of Donald Trump has opened many people’s eyes to issues that they thought were safely historical, and Chicago has emerged as the once and future prophet of male privilege. As she told me, the reaction on Instagram “demonstrates the important role art has to play, as it literally helps us see what has not been evident to many people.”

Yet when Chicago’s “PowerPlay” series was first exhibited in 1986, it dropped like a stone. This was a new experience for an artist whose exhibitions up until that time had garnered reams of press attention, often becoming the scene of warring political perspectives replete with long lines of enraptured visitors. In broad strokes, the “PowerPlay” images—paintings, drawings, and reliefs—offered brightly colored images of male bodies caught between aggressive self-assertion, and the abject fear and vulnerability that underlies and propels their manifest entitlement.

But Chicago’s brand of earnest feminism was decidedly out of fashion by the mid-1980s, as a new generation of women—Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, and Barbara Kruger among them—pursued art about female empowerment with an ironic twist. In their work, feminism refrained from naming men per se as the problem, instead letting the discursive construction of masculinity carry most of the noxious load.

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