Red Flag: A Contemplative Warning

Mills College Art Museum
Glass Cube
Published in
6 min readNov 15, 2019

Essay by Chloe Champion from the exhibition catalog for You’re Seeing Less Than Half the Picture which featured works from MCAM’s permanent collection curated by students from Mills College’s Museum Studies workshop. The exhibition was on view from Decmber 2017-May 2018.

Judy Chicago, Red Flag, 1971

Transgressive, in your face, and controversial — there’s no doubt that Judy Chicago was a pivotal trailblazer during the feminist art movement of the 1970s. Although she is most popularly known for her 1974–79 installation The Dinner Party, Chicago’s work traverses many modes of execution and material, consistently focusing on her idea of central-core imagery and the visibility of the “female” experience. Her work aligns with an essentialist ideology of gender based on biological sex, commonly affiliated with white, middle class, heterosexual feminism of the 1970s.

Issues of institutional critique, confrontation of power dynamics, and subversive repre­sentations of identity are all at the heart of You’re Seeing Less Than Half the Picture. Chica­go’s work, Red Flag(1971), which is included in this exhibition, touches on all of these powerful themes. This photolithograph depicts a figure — a close up of a woman’s crotch with a hand pulling a bright red blood-blotched tampon from themselves — as the main focal point of the piece. This vaginal focal point comes as no surprise, as central-core imagery and essentialism are key to Chicago’s work of this time.

Judy Chicago, Menstruation Bathroom, 1972

Chicago and her contemporary Miriam Schapiro elaborated on this idea of central-core imagery in their collaborative essay “Female Imagery,” by stating, “. . . we are suggesting that women artists have used the central cavity which defines them as women as the framework for an imagery which allows for the complete reversal of the way in which women are seen by the culture.” They continue on to explain how this kind of imagery is intended to work by asserting that the reclamation of the vagina as a hallmark of the movement’s iconography was intended to “establish a vehicle by which to state the truth and beauty of her identity.”1 Despite the im­portance of this reclamation, it is divisive and lacks any room for a more intersectional “female” experience. Adhering to a definition of identity that is based on strict biological terms is incred­ibly limiting and exclusionary.

The evolution of Chicago’s art practice is an interesting one. Chicago moved to Los Angeles in 1957 to attend the art program at UCLA. She arrived in perfect time to get swept away in the Finish Fetish movement, a form of California minimalism that was overtaking Los Angeles at this time. The work was hard, shiny, clean, and most importantly, devoid of any sign of human touch. Chicago had to negotiate her path in an environment that rewarded techno­logical know-how, formal mastery of materials, and an attitude of cool machismo.2 As the feminist movement took off in the late 60s and early 70s, a major shift occurred in Chicago’s work. The personal became political and women begin speaking out, making work that represented their experiences. Chicago describes this process of coming to her consciousness as a feminist artist, “I peeled back my coded imagery and finally broke through to the begin­ning to new imagery.”3

Guerrilla Girls,Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” 1989

Most important in relation to Red Flagis the time period when Chicago was part of the collectiveWomanhouse, an installation space created for the CalArts Feminist Art Program in 1972. During this time Chicago and others involved with Womanhousemade various works which highlighted the ex­perience of menstruation. Blood is an incredibly symbolically charged and provoking material. In Chicago’s installation Men­struation Bathroomat Womanhouse, the bathroom’s pristine shelves are overflowing with various commercial products that are designed to conceal the “embarrassing” signs of menstru­ation, but these products prove powerless to stop the flow of blood that spills angrily from a nearby basket of blood-stained pads.4 The male gaze is subsequently subverted through this act of nonconformity. By laying bare imagery that does not or should not show, Chicago creates an image that is by a woman for women. This work does not shy away, it is not embarrassed to be on display. Red Flag is like a snapshot of the installation Menstruation Bathroom. This type of imagery becomes a powerful tool that peels away the veil that shrouds the domestic sphere in mystery. Invisibility is destroyed by this type of work, which refuses to hide. Historically the representation of women’s bodies in art has been dictated by men. The image of the female nude has persisted through time, and persistently, through time, men are the one’s creating these images. In a poster by the Guer­rilla Girls, this sentiment is succinctly stated: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” The follow up to this comment is a statistic in which the viewer is informed that less than five percent of the artists in the modern art sections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York are women, but eighty-five percent of the nudes are female. Although this work by the Guerrilla Girls was created some time after Chi­cago’s Red Flag, it is clear that Chicago was thinking about these issues of representation and nudity in all of her work. The reclamation of the representation of women’s bodies in art is meant to deconstruct the preordained code of regulations for the making and judging of art, which is derived from men’s sense of what is or is not significant.5 The function of an image of a nude female form is radically changed depending on the maker of the image. In creating Red Flag, Chicago subverts what is expected of artwork that depicts nude women. She presents a powerfully charged image of an autonomous nude figure that is confrontational, refuses to conform, and does not adhere to the male gaze.

The issues that Chicago’s work raise are central to understanding the politics of modernist, postmodernist, and feminist art theory and art history. This being said, it is also true that Chicago’s work emphasizes the ways in which femi­nism of the 70s fell short. The “female experience” that was so key to Chicago’s work as well as her contemporary develop­ment of a feminist art movement was based on gender, de­fined by strict biological terms, and not about the race, class, or sexuality of the feminists involved. Throughout the history of feminism, white women have commonly ignored their privi­lege, defining the idea of the “woman’s” experience within a limited framework. Perhaps the greatest thing about Chicago’s work is its ability to lead any viewer to question these notions of identity. Her work highlights both the triumphs and the failures of 1970s feminism. Red Flag offers an opportunity for the viewer to contemplate the ways in which Chicago’s work continues to chal­lenge us.

1 Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, “Female Imagery,” Womanspace Journal (1973).

2 Laura Meyer, From Finish Fetish to Feminism: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in California Art History,” in Amelia Jones, ed., Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s ‘Dinner Party’ in Feminist Art History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 52.

3 Jones, Sexual Politics, 95.

4 Meyer, 58.

5 Chicago and Schapiro, 73.

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Mills College Art Museum
Glass Cube

Founded in 1925, the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland, California is a forum for exploring art and ideas and a laboratory for contemporary art practices.