THE TELEVISION AGE IV

This willingness to use new materials and give new meaning to art had already begun before Feminism achieved a definitive artistic formulation. Eva Hesse, who died in 1970 at the age of thirty-seven, had begun to introduce nontraditional materials like latex, rope, and fiberglass into sculpture. Carolee Schneemann made films and appeared in performances that centered on her own nudity-in order not only to affirm the right of women to their own sexual fantasies but to reclaim the "image" of the female body from the highly visible context of pornography and other common imagery that views the female body as a commodity. Feminist Art has attempted to gather these strands together into a coherent ideology as well as a basis for dialogue regarding the role of both sexes in our culture.
The art work that sums up most completely Feminist Art principles remains Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, discussed in the last chapter. It summarizes the Feminist determination to re-evaluate the artistic as well as the social history of women. The Dinner Party is also another example of the Post-Modernist tendency to challenge the dominance of painting as the privileged form of art: The Dinner Party was deliberately fabricated in art forms and with materials historically associated with women-and historically relegated by male art historians to the status of "minor arts," weaving, china painting, pottery, needlework, and so on.
Many women artists link their art with Feminism without stressing women's themes in an ideological or exclusive way. Lita Albuquerque, for instance, has extended the Earthwork direction of Robert Smithson in a way that incorporates the emphasis on human relationships, ritual, and mythic associations stressed in The Dinner Party.
All of her art reflects what she describes as the change in consciousness that has resulted from our landing on the moon and from our new perception of the earth, as Albuquerque puts it, "from the outside in" (fig. 13.10).
Inconceivable Mansions is a piece performed on the dunes of the central California coast in 1981. The title refers to a Buddhist text, "the seat of the soul resides where the inner and the outer world meet. All her works since 1977 reflect the earth itself as that meeting point. Figure 13.11 (plate 33) shows the dancing process that produced the sand drawings.
The monumental spiral, the circles, and the triangle represent geometric shapes within the earth that can be felt but not seen. This idea connects with Greek, medieval, and Renaissance beliefs in the geometric connection between art and nature. The drawings are filled with pigments that also have symbolic meaning: blue, the universe; copper, the reflectivity of the planet: red, the energy source of the earth.

Post-Modernist Painting: The Search for Subject Matter
As noted earlier, Post-Modernist painting uses an eclectic approach to earlier styles of avant-garde art; one of its common themes, however, is a stronger emphasis on subject matter