Today we went to the Brooklyn Museum and finally witnessed Judy Chicago’s ‘The Dinner Party’. The installation is an enormous triangular table, 48 feet on each side, set for 39 important women, from goddesses to historical figures. Chicago calls them her "girls." Each place setting includes a ceramic plate and a table runner that symbolize the woman's achievements. The table sits on a porcelain ‘Heritage Floor,’ which features the names of 999 other important women in gold paint. The sheer scale of it reflects the pride that Chicago has in her ‘girls’; the vastness of the installation and the psychedelic swirls of color gave us an idea of what it must have been like to be a feminist back then. It's a spread-eagle declaration of arrival. We realize the importance of ‘The Dinner Party’ within its time frame but it still seemed relatively dated and didn't seem relevant to the feminist topics we tend to consider (although these are also dictated by our life span); balancing work and family, and young women thinking it's okay to starve like their favorite celebrities. For us, the whole piece is a list; the scale didn’t seem relative to the work and the materials didn’t feel like it mirrored what the work attempting to say about exclusion or elitism. A list of women who should be invited to a fictional dinner party is more interesting but perhaps it required more substance to gain attention at the time.
There was also a show titled ‘This Place’. It’s an exhibition with hundreds of photographs and document life on one of the most contested stretches of land in the world: Israel and the West Bank, where Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians, Bedouins and Africans, among others, often live tensely side by side, and the threat of violence is never far away. Though none of the images could be considered ‘news photographs’, they are rarely less than striking. It was refreshing to see photography that is engaged and concerned with its subject matter. A particular strong piece was by Fazal Sheikh. His aerial views of the Negev are beautiful, even abstract, until you realize that they are scarred by shell craters, signs of military maneuvers, the ruins of ancient villages and recent evictions. Looking at them has them is similar to reading history’s palms, a future you can’t predict and a past that has already occurred. The photographs can be used as a kind of archaeology. It’s a pause along a continuum; it holds within it everything that you need to access, but one also needs a ‘trained eye’ to unravel what it is you are looking at. Each of the locations captured in the ‘Desert Bloom’ images is locatable on a Google Earth timeline. Detailed within the captions are the coordinates of the space; this feels important so that the viewer can go to that exact site on Google Earth, which is public, and view for themselves what has happened to that space.
