Reliquary

on Judy Chicago and remaking the canon

Throw on this week’s radio show playlist before you dive in!

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I have a friend who celebrates her own “saints days.” Carmel has never been a Catholic, nor does she adhere to any particular religion so much anymore. She subscribes, however, to a philosophy that Andrew and I both share: life is too short to not be punctuated by frequent days of merrymaking – by any means necessary, including the invention of new holidays altogether. 

It’s also about curating a spiritual rolodex of the sort of people you admire. Take, for instance, Carmel’s Jim Henson Day: for making art with your friends, and not working yourself to death (Henson famously succeeded in the former and failed in the latter). She also observes Billie Holiday's birth, a day celebrating the conversion of bitterness to Blues. The point being: venerate those who embody the qualities you wish to emulate in this short, joy-chasing life. 

I can understand this impulse from both a religious and secular standpoint. Hindu tradition offers a dazzling array of deities to pick and choose your own personal pantheon. You might find a special affinity, like my mother, to Ganesha’s approachable angle to the divine. I’m drawn to Durga’s bellicose valor these days. Like many Hindus I also have a magpie eye for other shiny religious practices that catch my fancy. I’ve often been known to invoke St Anthony for my perpetually misplaced keys and credit cards. (He’s a real one.)

The Vijay & Stephens HQ is no stranger to the saints

In the real world, I’m often looking for people who have cut a path I might follow – in the way I want to write or sing or perform, or the way I choose to live. I often lament when I’m not able to find these guiding lights. In the past I’ve wallowed in self-pity over the lack of visible role models for a single, child-free woman living a happy life as she ages. Nowadays, having abandoned the “child-free” part of my identity, I’ve also found myself worrying that I don’t see many artists I can look to who are also mothers, whose legacies aren’t then inextricably tethered to the concept of “motherhood.” 

In January, a friend invited me to see a career retrospective of the feminist artist Judy Chicago. Fellow Brooklynites may know her now-permanent installation “Dinner Party,” from the Brooklyn Museum. It’s a long table of frilly, vaginal place settings for the artist’s fantasy guest list of goddesses and real-life heroines (incidentally, these vaginas sent Andrew’s mother Rhonda into gales of mirth when she visited last). 

I’m writing AT THIS MOMENT from an atrium @ BK Museum, with a Kali vagina cookie in my hand (?!? cringe). I have MANY questions about this, but here we are...

Judy’s retrospective was staged at the New Museum in Manhattan, and spanned four sprawling stories of the building. The coolest gallery was one from which, surprisingly, Chicago herself was nearly absent. It instead contained 90 other women’s artwork, with pieces dating as far back as 1163 (!). Titled The City of Ladies, the gallery was described as an “introspective” within the retrospective; “her own alternate canon.” In addition to her own artmaking, Judy was a curator and a collector. She was driven not by a typical collector’s aim for monetary value, but instead to build the art world she did not see around her; she constructed an entire alternate reality in which these women were the canon. Her own work could then spring from the canonical precedents she had established.

I was astonished by the generosity of devoting an entire floor of your own career retrospective to showcase other people’s art. She had created her own pantheon of saints in the temple-like stillness of the museum gallery. The plush purple carpet was adorned with unabashedly girly, floral flourishes; even the soft dressing of the room was a rejection of the forbidding marble halls in which the traditional (male) canon is presented to us. 

I was also astonished by the works themselves, and the way that Chicago built her own future by laying her own foundations. Most of these artists were unknown to me! And yet, of course they had been there all along, making beautiful things. Instead of lamenting that there is no path cut for you, should you not be working harder to find the breadcrumbs that others have undoubtedly left you? Is it that I lack guides, or is it instead that I limit myself by not actively looking for them? I left the museum thinking: if you do not see a canon in which you belong, shed self-pity, think expansively, try to make your own. 

Not that this is a neat or easy solution, of course. I think frequently these days about how to construct the world we want to be in (rather than lamenting the one we have); the worshipful patience that it requires. It’s quiet work: brick by brick, methodical, and through our own veneration and devotion to the things that matter.

I wonder: What days of rest do you observe? [Your divorce-aversary? The first-daffodil-of-spring day?] What spaces have you consecrated? [your kitchen? Your record player?] Who are your saints?

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