Judy Chicago, the 1960s, and the Metaphor of Sex
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” the feminist collective Guerrilla Girls once asked, underscoring visual art’s view of women as objects. Unsurprisingly, this masculinism underpins much life writing by visual artists—from Benvenuto Cellini in the Renaissance to Larry Rivers in the late 20th century. However, as feminism infiltrated visual art, women’s voices began to be heard, particularly when, from the early 1970s to the early 1980s, women artists recalled the 1960s: Kate Millett (Flying [1974]; Sita [1977]), Judy Chicago (Through the Flower [1975]) and Anne Truitt (Daybook [1984]). Moreover, these women all would produce further reminiscences and their books would be joined by later reflections on the 1960s like Faith Ringgold’s We Flew Over the Bridge (1995), Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Net (2011) and Eva Hesse’s dairies (2016). \n\tReading their books against the cultural and politic tendencies of the 1960s, we see these artists adopting various positions relative to the 1960s’ visual idioms: feminism destroyed Chicago’s engagement with minimalism while tempering Truitt’s engagement with minimalism little if at all, and Ringgold’s intersection of feminism and black activism precluded engaging with that moment’s formalist avant-garde at all. Furthermore, this range of engagements with the artistic avant-garde mirrors a range of engagements with what we might call the sexual avant-garde. Truitt (and, later, Ringold and Hesse) discussed her sexuality modestly. By contrast, Chicago and Millett (and, later, Kusama) foreground sexuality and sexual activity, modeling a sexual agency that opposed the objectifying masculinity dismantled by Millett in Sexual Politics (1970). But at a time when sexual liberation was widely celebrated while almost always turning out to mean male sexual liberation, this emphatic female sexual agency seems like a metonym for female agency in general, its urgency facilitated by the art world’s perennially Romantic injunction to be oneself.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".