Instead of writing about an individual installation artist, this time I am going to write about a seminal installation event: “Womanhouse,” which was exhibited in Los Angeles, California, in 1972. Below is a photo of the artists.
I’ve heard this installation referred to as “the first feminist exhibit,” which I am not going to research to see if this is indeed true, but it was a major feminist exhibition for its time. It was organized by Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro, who together founded the CalArts Feminist Art Program. Judy Chicago would later become well known for her most famous installation, “Dinner Party,” which is worth looking up on its own.
However, I chose to write about this piece because of its collaborative nature and its location. The artists chose a dilapidated house in LA destined for demolition and took it over for the installation. Twenty-one women each chose one room to take over for her individual work.
The installation was clearly wrapped in very tightly with the location; it would have required a lot of adjustments to do it somewhere else. There were also performances as part of its monthlong exhibition.
The idea behind this installation – that women have been tied domestically to the home for thousands of years and this bears illumination – is one that still resonates. Most women I know still do the bulk of housework and care for domestic matters way more than their male partners, if they have one. Even single women I know base their identity somewhat on the domestic abilities. Clearly, the artists involved in this exhibit understood that very well.
The exhibition of this installation was open to women only on the first day. I wish I could have been there. It hadn’t occurred to me to make any exhibition of my own work available to a selection of the population, and the idea of doing that fits well conceptually with installation work, which bucks by definition the traditional hanging on a white wall with gazing passersby type of exhibition. Installations draw in the viewer to the interior, to a total experience, and often the viewer’s participation changes the particulars or the tenor of the exhibit.
There is a documentary about this exhibit, and I would really like to see it. Johanna Demetrakas is the filmmaker, it came out in 1974, and is simply called, “Womanhouse.”
Peter Bill is an Artist, Activist and Educator. He has, since learning photoshop v. 1.5, been interested in connecting under-represented communities with digital tools so their voices may be broadcast. He has been involved with large scale video projections, guerrilla art actions, and community building since the 90s.
Peter Bill's award winning paint and video landscapes have shown in such diverse venues as The Kitchen(NYC), the Henry Art Gallery(Seattle), FILE Festival(São Paulo, Brazil), and other international venues. He continues in his Oil paintings and video work to weave the painterly with the digital, pixels and paint, indigo and 191970 blue. He envisioned and realized the first time-lapse film festival in North America, the Gila Timelapse Film Festival and has curated and directed shows on three continents. "Art must be realized on the streets, as an agent of change and progress."
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Much of my art has been about creating a vessel, a space for meditation. Through my painting and video installations I hope to create a moment of quietude, a contemplation of this world we have built.
In my mural and documentary film work I have balanced a certain transcendentalism in my heart with my didactic scots-yankee bones. In the public sphere arts role is to inspire and provoke. Therefore in my mural projects I have attempted to involve the local community in the conception and realization of my projects. In my animations and short films I have attempted critiques of the bathetic apocalyptic culture we live in, the false utopia of the California landscape, the contested landscape of New Mexico, and tried to get to the situation on the ground in war torn Bosnia, among other subjects. The world is a complicated, granular place. We cannot oversimplify with our stories, but we can in their telling change opinions, and thus change the world for the better.
