GAYLETTER

THROUGH THE FLOWER 2, 1973. SPRAYED ACRYLIC ON CANVAS 60" X 60". COLLECTION: DIANE GELON

Deflowered: Judy Chicago

By Patrick Sweeney

Judy Chicago‘s recently published book Deflowered commemorates an exhibition of the same name at Nye + Brown in Los Angeles that focused on her early (1961-1973) drawings, paintings and sculptures. The book is both an insightful overview of the multiorgasmic (see the interview with Lucy Lippard reprinted in the book for more on that) feminist icon’s early career as well as an objet d’art in its own right.

The book, like the exhibition, concerns itself with Chicago’s earlier work, more minimalist and abstract but still vivaciously teeming with traces of the sexual human body. These series may come as a pleasant surprise to those more familiar with higher profile works like The Dinner Party (which is on long-term display at the Brooklyn Museum‘s Sackler Center for Feminist Art, so hop on the 3 train and check it out now if you haven’t already!).

The book itself is strikingly beautiful, featuring a brilliant tangerine cover overlaid with a translucent and turquoise jacket that envelops the shape and heft of a proper coffee table book. Mine looks radiant next to a bouquet of red and yellow gladioluses in my living room.

Speaking of flowers, Chicago’s yonic motif manifests itself in works ranging from ornate yet precisely painted car hoods to the effusive sprays of colored fire and smoke in the included DVD of several pyrotechnic displays. Early minimalist sculptures of phallic pillars or triangular arrangements of 3 shimmering mounds never veer too far from a commitment to exploring feminism, the body, and the luminous flux of my home state of California’s peculiar atmosphere and light.

Bigamy Hood 1965/2011, sprayed automotive lacquer on car hood. 42.9″ x 42.9″ x4. 3″