Both Judy Chicago and Louise Bourgeois create fantastic settings for their dinner parties. These settings are awe-inspiring- each in their own way.
Judy Chicago created "The Dinner Party" in the late seventies as a celebration to great women. She shaped this dream of perpetual power of women by creating what seems to be an almost infinite form. The sheer size of the piece and how you must encounter and interact with it in space is inescapable and undeniable- it overwhelms you like the success of the women that it represents. The piece consists of a large triangular table with settings for nine hundred and ninety-nine women. Each woman's setting had an embroidered cloth as well as a floral plate and other details. Each plate's floral motif beautifully evoked core imagery and also evoked ugly responses from politicians. Everyone that viewed it had a strong feeling about it- whether negative or positive.
Louise Bourgeois’ dinner was derived from a dream as well. This dream is about a man's wife and child shredding him apart and feasting on him. Bourgeois uses real memories combined with her imagination to come up with concepts. This concept in particular creates a vulgar yet intimate setting that almost traps you at first glance. Its intimacy joined with its context of betrayal made even me, as a viewer feel vulnerable. That weakness is what makes this work so easy to relate to as well as the anger, fear, and revenge it evokes.
Both works are complex. Chicago's work was detailed and labored with love. Its concept was grand and was successfully portrayed. Bourgeois creates a piece that depicts so many complicated emotions simultaneously that you can't help but get personal with it because that is what makes us human- that we can feel all those things and it amazed me they could all be represented.
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