The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Judy Chicago · an installation: an open triangular table of three equal wings, laid with thirty-nine places, thirteen to a wing, each with an embroidered runner carrying a woman’s name, a china-painted porcelain plate, a lustre-glazed ceramic goblet, flatware and a napkin, over the Heritage Floor of porcelain tiles on which 999 further names are written in gold lustre · made 1974 to 1979 in Santa Monica by Judy Chicago with a workshop of several hundred participants · first shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in March 1979 · Brooklyn Museum, the gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation in 2002, permanently installed since 2007 in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art · the unit scored is the installation as it stands in Brooklyn, table and floor read as one work, with the workshop’s making counted as the work’s
Mode
Installation as ceremony: a banquet table laid in the crafts of china painting and embroidery at the scale of architecture, made by a workshop and credited by name
Mythos
The Last Supper reversed, thirteen to a side and the guests women; the triangle as the oldest sign of the female; a history of sovereignty, eclipse and return
Phase
Made 1974 to 1979 and first shown in San Francisco in 1979; toured into the late 1980s, then largely in storage through the 1990s; in Brooklyn since the gift of 2002, permanently installed since 2007; scored as it stands
Presentation
Three wings of thirteen places each in a darkened room, the goblets in a row, the white floor of gilded names within the triangle, the plates rising from flat painting to relief across the centuries
Register
Ceremonial and commemorative; grave at the scale of the room, glossy and sweet at the scale of the plate
Scale
Thirty-nine places and 999 names, some four millennia of named women, one room
Governing Proposition
Three tables of equal length are joined at their ends into an open triangle, and on them thirty-nine places are laid, thirteen to a side, for women from the Primordial Goddess to Georgia O’Keeffe. Each place has a runner embroidered with a name, a porcelain plate painted around a single central form, a goblet, flatware and a napkin. Within and beneath the triangle, on a floor of white tiles, 999 more names are written in gold. The wager of the work is that a banquet nobody will eat, laid in the crafts of the table and the needle that were women’s work, can show in one figure that the history of the West was told without its women, and that the arts they practised were shut out of art by the same act.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The work was made from 1974 to 1979 in Santa Monica by Judy Chicago with a workshop of several hundred participants, and it is read here as one work, its needlework and its ceramics credited and charged to the work and not to one hand. It is a table: three wings of equal length joined at their ends into an open triangle, with thirty-nine places, thirteen to each wing. The first wing runs from prehistory to the Roman Empire, the second from Christianity to the Reformation, the third from the American Revolution to the women’s movement of the twentieth century.
Each place is laid alike. A runner embroidered with the guest’s name hangs over the edge of the table; on it stand a china-painted porcelain plate, a lustre-glazed ceramic goblet, flatware and a napkin. The room is dark and the light is low, and the visitor walks the sides of the table as in a procession. On entry a whole wing is seen at once, goblets in a row; at each corner the turn of the table shows the next wing in perspective. There is no seat at the head, because the figure has none, and the centre of the triangle is open.
The frame compels its count. Thirteen is the number at the Last Supper and the number of a coven, and three equal sides of thirteen give thirty-nine: the guests are required by the figure, not chosen to fill a list. Who sits at each place is another matter. That is the judgment of the makers, and another committee would have made it otherwise; several places in the second and third wings could be exchanged for women named on the floor without the work knowing less. The table is necessary in its figure and assembled in its filling, and that is where the work begins to give.
Movement II
Within and beneath the triangle lies the Heritage Floor, white porcelain tiles on which 999 names of women are written in gold lustre, grouped toward the guests at the table. For every woman seated there are some twenty-five named beneath her. The floor is read with bowed head: the name of a woman one has never heard of, in gold, beneath a guest one has. Nobody walks on it. It is the ground the table stands on, and the work’s plainest statement of its argument, that no woman at the table arrived alone.
Take the floor away and the guests are a pantheon of exceptions; close the centre and the table gains a head. In this the form is the instrument of the knowledge. As a book of 1,038 lives the work would be a reference, and as thirty-nine portraits on a wall it would be a gallery of the famous. As a table it is a hospitality never given, places set and seats empty for guests invited too late, and the floor makes the famous stand on the many.
The floor is also where the work is least compelled. It is a roll, and a roll is additive by nature: 900 names or 1,200 would serve as well as 999. Its selection is less evidently ruled than the table’s, and the lustre lettering, exact as it is, carries no more than a name. What the floor gives on return is new names; what it cannot give is more than names. It is the right ground for the work’s argument and the weakest test of its necessity.
Movement III
The first place is laid for the Primordial Goddess and the last for Georgia O’Keeffe. Between them sit, among others, Hatshepsut, Sappho, Theodora, Hildegard of Bingen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Christine de Pisan, Elizabeth I, Artemisia Gentileschi, Anne Hutchinson, Sacajawea, Caroline Herschel, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Emily Dickinson, Margaret Sanger and Virginia Woolf. The table is the Last Supper reversed: a sacred meal laid by the women who once laid the table for others, their sacrament restored to them, in the oldest sign of the female, a triangle opened at the centre into a vessel.
The order is a story of sovereignty, eclipse and return, from the fertile goddesses of the first wing to the saints and abbesses of the second and the reformers and makers of the third, and the plates carry it in the clay. In the early places the painting is flat; across the centuries the central form rises from the surface, until in the last wing it stands in relief. The rising of women is built into the porcelain, and O’Keeffe’s raised form at the far end answers the flat painting of the first wing. The runners carry the same history in another material: each is worked in the needle techniques of its guest’s era, so that the history of women’s labour is in the stitches rather than stated.
The same plate is the work’s limit. Its central form, a vulval figure, appears on nearly every place, inflected by each life but never left behind, and at that point the work’s knowledge is a sign rather than a form that thinks. Sappho, Hildegard and Woolf become variations of one archetype rather than carrying it as themselves, and thirty-nine lives are reduced to one biological figure, a claim many do not hold to be true. Up close the china painting is often glossy and sweet, the iridescent butterflies of the middle wing decorative rather than grand, the relief plates of the last wing more assertive than elevating. The work rises at the scale of the room and falls back at the scale of the plate.
Movement IV
One law governs nearly the whole table. Each woman is given a place, a runner in her era’s technique, a plate of the central form inflected by her life, and a share of the floor; the order is chronological, and the triangle makes every place equal. The two most distant guests, a goddess before history and a painter of the twentieth century, obey it alike, and the range it holds, from myth to modern painting, is wide.
The law breaks once. The plate for Sojourner Truth alone abandons the central form and carries faces, so that the one Black woman at the table is the one guest denied the work’s own sign. The work does not account for the exception, and it was named at once: Alice Walker objected to it in 1979. It is the most consequential point at which the table could have broken, and it broke there. Lesser strains run through the rest, mythic and historical guests seated on one footing, the floor less evidently ruled than the table, but none weighs as this does.
The orders the table holds are many: history across some four millennia of named women; the sacred, in goddesses, abbesses, mystics and heretics; the body, made the sign of every guest; labour, in the domestic work of the table and the needle and in the collective labour of the making; the state and the law, in queens, reformers and suffragists; learning and art. The table, at once altar, household and record, integrates them. But each life is an emblem, so that consciousness and the family are almost absent, the natural order appears only as the fertility of the first wing, and the world seated is overwhelmingly European and Euro-American. The table is wide and thin.
Movement V
The work was first shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in March 1979 and toured into the late 1980s. Its departure was large and it cost. Against an art world still organised around Minimalism and Conceptual art, it put china painting and needlework at the centre of a monumental sculpture, made a work by a workshop of hundreds and credited them by name, and made explicit female sexual imagery its central motif. Leading critics ridiculed it; for years no American museum would take it; in 1990 a proposed gift to the University of the District of Columbia brought a debate in Congress in which it was denounced as pornographic. The turn had been prepared within its own movement, by Chicago’s central-core imagery, the Feminist Art Program and Womanhouse of 1972, and Miriam Schapiro’s work with fabric; it was that movement’s largest public wager.
It became the emblem of first-generation feminist art, and the field’s argument for two decades was conducted around it, often against it: the feminist art led by theory in the 1980s, Kelly’s, Kruger’s and Sherman’s, defined itself by moving away. It set a model for collaborative and community-made art and for the return of textile and ceramic to the centre of practice. Its literature is large and has not closed, but much of it is debate about the work rather than discovery in it. Through much of the 1990s it was largely in storage, shown at Los Angeles in 1996; the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation gave it to the Brooklyn Museum in 2002, and since 2007 it has stood permanently in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, a museum centre for feminist art founded with its installation.
Porcelain, lustre and textile are fragile to light and handling, and the work is kept under low light, a perishable assembly that depends on the home it now has. Its surface is in part the cultural feminism of the 1970s. It stands level with Fountain at 8.0, below Maman at 8.3 and Spiral Jetty at 8.5, above The Weather Project at 7.7; Artemisia Gentileschi, who has a place at its table, stands on this desk with Judith Slaying Holofernes at 8.5. In Brooklyn the thirty-nine places are laid as they were in 1979, the goblets in a row, the names in gold on the white floor, and the centre of the triangle, which no visitor enters, is still open.
Act III · The Twelve
The frame is necessary. Three equal sides with thirteen places to a side, the number at the Last Supper and the number of a coven, compel the thirty-nine: they are not a list cut to length. Take away the floor and the guests lose the ground they stand on, which is the argument, that no woman at the table arrived alone. Close the centre and the table gains a head. But the subtractive test bites inside the frame. Which woman sits at a place is an editorial choice, and several places in the second and third wings could be exchanged for names on the floor without loss. The floor is a roll, and a roll of 900 or 1,200 would serve. With The Sublime, the lowest axis: necessary in the figure, assembled in the filling.
Score: 7.5 / 10
What it brings into the open can be stated, and it is a social condition, not a mood: that the history of the West has been told with its women left out; that what survives of them survives as names without a place; and that the arts of the table and the needle, which were women’s work, were excluded from the hierarchy of art by the same act. The work discloses this in its form, raising those crafts to monumental scale and turning the domestic table into a place of honour, and the disclosure holds. It stands below the gate for two reasons. The thesis was already articulated in the feminist history of the same decade, and the work illustrates it more than it finds it. And the central form on nearly every plate reduces thirty-nine lives to one biological figure, a claim many do not hold to be true.
Score: 8.1 / 10
With The Inevitable, the lowest axis, and what holds it there is a difference of scale. There is a real elevation, architectural and ceremonial: the darkened room, the long equal sides lit low, the gold of the names catching the light on the white floor, the goblets in a row, a feast laid for guests who will not come. It works on entry and again at each corner, where the turn of the table shows a whole wing in perspective. The plates hold it less well. Up close, where the work asks to be read place by place, the china painting is often glossy and sweet, the iridescent butterflies of the middle wing are decorative rather than grand, and the relief plates of the last wing are more assertive than elevating. The work rises at the scale of the room and falls back at the scale of the place, and it asks to be read at both.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Here the work builds rather than evokes. The table is the Last Supper reversed: a sacred meal, thirteen to each side, the guests women, the sacrament of the table restored to those who laid it. The triangle is the oldest sign of the female, and the open centre makes the table a vessel. The order runs from the Primordial Goddess through the fertile goddesses of the first wing to the saints and abbesses of the second and the reformers and makers of the third, a story of sovereignty, eclipse and return, and the plates enact it in the clay, rising from flat painting to relief as the history nears the present. That is load-bearing. It is held below the gate because the particular does not stay particular: Sappho, Hildegard and Woolf become variations of one archetype rather than carrying it as themselves.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The departure is large and it cost. Against an art world still organised around Minimalism and Conceptual art, the work put china painting and needlework, domestic and hobbyist crafts, at the centre of a monumental sculpture; it was made by a workshop of hundreds, credited by name, in place of a single hand; and it made explicit female sexual imagery its central motif. The cost was paid: ridicule from leading critics, years in which no American museum would take it, a debate in Congress in 1990 in which it was denounced as pornographic, and storage. It is held below the gate because the turn was prepared within its own movement: Chicago’s central-core imagery earlier in the decade, the Feminist Art Program and Womanhouse of 1972, and Miriam Schapiro’s work with fabric. It is that movement’s largest public wager, not its first departure.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Change the form and the work stops knowing most of what it knows. As a book of 1,038 lives it would be a reference; as thirty-nine portraits on a wall, a gallery of the famous. As a table it is a hospitality never given: places set, seats empty, guests invited too late. The triangle with no head makes the guests equal; the floor makes the famous stand on the many; the runners are worked in the needle techniques of each guest’s era, so that the history of women’s labour is carried in the stitches rather than stated; the plates rise into relief across the centuries, so that the argument about emergence is made in the material. That is form as the instrument of knowledge. What holds it from the high band is the plate itself, repeated thirty-nine times: its central form is a fixed emblem applied to each guest, a sign rather than a form that thinks.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Forty-seven years of return, and the evidence is mixed. The literature is large and has not closed: Alice Walker’s objection of 1979 to the Sojourner Truth plate, the only one given faces rather than the central form; the argument over essentialism in the 1980s, in which a feminist art led by theory defined itself against this work; its showing at Los Angeles in 1996; the continuing argument over collaboration and credit. But much of the yield is debate about the work rather than discovery in it. Return to the object gives the room again, and new names on the floor, but the plates show little more on the fifth visit than on the first, and the programme, once grasped, is grasped. A large literature on a work that is largely legible at once.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The field is American art of the 1970s, feminist and general. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility, in three parts: the hierarchy of the crafts breached at monumental scale; the collective workshop made an author; the history of women made the content of a major sculpture. The discount: the most influential feminist art of the following decades, Kelly’s, Kruger’s and Sherman’s, moved away from it and often against it, and the later craft revival owes as much to other lines as to this one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the emblem of first-generation feminist art, the field’s argument for two decades was conducted around it, it set a model for collaborative and community-made art and for the return of textile and ceramic to the centre of practice, and its permanent installation founded a museum centre for feminist art.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole; the thirty-nine places and the floor are shown together as designed, in a gallery made for them. Presence: wide on the tour from 1979 into the late 1980s, then interrupted, the work largely in storage through much of the 1990s, shown at Los Angeles in 1996, given to Brooklyn in 2002 and permanently installed in 2007, continuous since. The interruption is charged, and fame lends nothing. Fabric: porcelain, lustre and textile, fragile to light and handling and kept under low light, a perishable assembly that depends on a permanent home, which it now has. The surface is also in part fixed to its moment, the cultural feminism of the 1970s. At forty-seven years the decade of storage and the period surface take a tenth from the usual figure for its age.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Read to the same anchors as every medium. The needlework is the strongest making in the work: runners worked in a range of historic techniques, each suited to its guest’s era, with lettering, borders and inset motifs. The ceramics are an achievement of scale, above all in the relief plates of the last wing, which pushed china-painted porcelain into forms it resists. The lustre lettering of the floor is exact, and the command of space, light and the processional reading of the room is sure. Charged: the china painting of many plates is accomplished in a hobbyist idiom and stays there, glossy and sweet in colour, its drawing often slack at the edges of the central form; and the making is uneven across thirty-nine places, as the work of many hands will be. High in parts, not load-bearing throughout.
Score: 8.1 / 10
One law governs nearly everything. Each woman is honoured by a place, a runner in her era’s technique, a plate of the central form inflected by her life, and a share of the floor; the order is chronological; equality is guaranteed by the triangle. The two most distant guests, the Primordial Goddess and O’Keeffe, obey it, across a range from prehistory to the 1930s and from myth to modern painting, which is a real achievement of coherence. The law breaks once, and the break matters: the Sojourner Truth plate alone abandons the central form for faces, so that the one Black woman at the table is the one guest denied the work’s own sign, an exception the work does not account for. Lesser strains: mythic and historical guests seated on one footing, the floor’s selection less evidently ruled than the table’s. Coherent across a wide range, broken once at its most consequential point.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Many orders are present, and the triangle holds several in one structure. History, across some four millennia of named women. The sacred: goddesses, abbesses, mystics, heretics. The body, made the sign of every guest. Labour: the domestic work of the table and the needle, and the collective labour of the making itself. The state and the law: queens, reformers, suffragists. Learning and art: Herschel, Dickinson, Woolf, O’Keeffe. The table integrates them, at once altar, household and historical record. What holds the axis is that the orders are present more than held. Each life is reduced to an emblem, so that consciousness and the family are almost absent; the natural order appears only as the fertility of the first wing; and the world encompassed is overwhelmingly European and Euro-American, the rest of the world almost unseated. Wide and thin.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.5, then The Living Form at 8.3 and The Swerve at 8.2. A work whose thirty-nine places and floor stand whole and together, permanently shown after a decade in storage; a form in which the table with no head, the floor of the many and the plates rising in relief across the centuries carry the argument in the material; and a departure that put the crafts of the table and the needle, a workshop of hundreds and an explicit female imagery at the centre of a monumental sculpture, and paid for it in ridicule, refusal and storage.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable and The Sublime at 7.5: a necessary figure with an assembled filling, its guests an editorial choice and its floor a roll that could be longer or shorter; and an elevation that holds at the scale of the room and falls back at the scale of the plate, where the painting is glossy and sweet. Above them, The Bottomless Well and The Encompassed at 7.6: a large literature on a work largely legible at once, and many orders present but each life reduced to an emblem, the world seated overwhelmingly European. They are one fact: a work that rises and knows at the scale of its figure, and repeats one sign at the scale of each guest.
The Necessity Cap is met exactly: The Inevitable stands at 7.5, against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.3, The Made at 8.1, The Inner Law at 7.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable meets the bar of 8.5 exactly, but The Swerve at 8.2 falls short by three tenths, The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 8.1 by four, and Pressure on Tradition at 8.0 by five. The Universal Minimum is met (The Inevitable and The Sublime stand at 7.5 exactly, and no axis falls below it) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 95.4, an average of 7.95 that displays 8.0, the lowest sum that stands in Tier IV.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the installation’s structure, programme and reception, of its permanent display in Brooklyn and of the critical literature; knowledge of the runners place by place, of the exact dimensions and the number of tiles, and of the present gallery’s lighting and condition is thinner, and where a judgment turns on them it is held more loosely. The work scored is the installation as it stands in the Brooklyn Museum: the open triangular table of three equal wings with its thirty-nine places, each with runner, plate, goblet, flatware and napkin, and the Heritage Floor of 999 names, read as one work. Made 1974 to 1979 in Santa Monica by Judy Chicago with a workshop of several hundred participants; the needlework and ceramics of the workshop are credited and charged to the work. First shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in March 1979; toured into the late 1980s; largely in storage through much of the 1990s, shown at Los Angeles in 1996; the gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation to the Brooklyn Museum in 2002; permanently installed since 2007 in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. The tour, the documentary panels and the books that carried the biographies of the 999, the debate in Congress of 1990 over a proposed gift to the University of the District of Columbia, and the years in storage are context and evidence of presence and survival, and are not scored as parts. No words are quoted but the title. Facts that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the length of each wing, the diameter of the plates, the number of floor tiles, the number of participants in the workshop and the names of the collaborators who led the needlework and ceramics, the present arrangement of the entry banners and of the panels naming the workers, the venues of the tour after San Francisco and the number who saw it, the names of the critics who ridiculed it, the organisers of the showing of 1996, the plates lost in firing, the finish of the runners setting by setting, and whether any part has been lost or replaced.