Cynthia Daignault. The Pure Products of America Go Crazy, 2017; installation view, CAPITAL, San Francisco. Courtesy of the Artist and CAPITAL.

In her past project Light Atlas (2014), a result of a yearlong road trip throughout the United States, the artist explored the social and geographic characteristics of paintings as what she calls “place settings,” or stakeholders—as objects that create meaning from particular representations of claims to space. Daignault’s odyssey resulted in an epic portrait of the country in the form of 360 paintings, which spanned more than 300 linear feet of wall, filling the gallery from edge to edge. Prior to embarking on this project, Daignault realized that she could name over a hundred canonical works that depicted and defined the country, all produced by men: Twain, Dylan, Guthrie, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Evans, Ruscha, Smithson, and so on. Light Atlas is a feminist corrective and as close to a performative as painting can get.

As in all of Daignault’s painting–installations or painting–performances, each painting in The Pure Products of America Go Crazy can be experienced as an individual work or as part of a larger theoretical and optical puzzle. The artist explained that the work was made “100% post-election,” as she was reckoning with the new order of things in a “deep fog,” and the fuzzy images of the series Matrix (2017)—based on front pages of U.S. newspapers that feature headlines and photographs of Trump’s victory—can be read as trembling reproductions of horror.[1] Alternatively, they can be read as the current U.S. condition and in relationship with violent pop-culture icons, such as the machine-gun-toting Rambo or Schwarzenegger depicted on a round plate set on an adjacent table. They prompt the question: Whose dinner party is this?

Cynthia Daignault. Matrix, 2017 (detail); oil on linen; 11 x 12 in. Courtesy of the Artist and CAPITAL.

The artist’s reverence for art history and her playful resistance to its authorial discourse are made evident in references to heavy hitters such as Judy Chicago (a queen mother of feminist art and the maker of The Dinner Party, 1974–79) and Marcel Broodthaers (a conceptual-art mastermind and the creator of Department of Eagles in Brussels in 1968). The two figures symbolize polar opposites and are represented here, the former by a plate with a Georgia O’Keeffe–style vaginal form, part of Dinner Party on the Eve of My Conception (Or: We Were Born Under a Dark Star) (2017), and the latter by a picture of an American bald eagle, in a series titled Reading Room (Belgium) (2016). Standing out as an oddity is a portrait of Karen Carpenter: Is it a random marker of 1970s pop culture or a doppelgänger of the artist?

Cynthia Daignault. The First Edition Karen Carpenter Commemorative Collector Plate, 2017; oil on linen; 10 x 10 in. Courtesy of the Artist and CAPITAL.

Daignault operates with the idea that her painted objects are “dreams or feelings,” but nonetheless her exhibitions remain within a semantic and representational logic. She has been called “a poet of a painter” by the New Yorker, and the exhibition title is a line from a poem by William Carlos Williams. Is Daignault suggesting that her methodology is like that of the Imagist poets, whose aesthetic manifestos proclaimed, “‘Imagism’ does not merely mean the presentation of pictures. ‘Imagism’ refers to the manner of presentation, not to the subject” and the “direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether subjective or objective.”[2] She explains, “All my text works (whether painted or typed) are hybrids of painting/writing/drawing. But the question is if the work wants to relate more closely with painting or with writing, if it wants to be an image or a text.”[3]

Cynthia Daignault. The Feminine Mystique; 2017; ink on paper, framed; 20 parts, 12 x 9 in. each. Courtesy of the Artist and CAPITAL.

Indeed, filling the back gallery is Daignault’s most literary and psychographic exploration of thingness to date: a series of framed, typewritten lists, entitled The Impalpable Sustenance of Me from All Things. In these works that resemble 1960s conceptual art, Daignault creates portraits of the women in her life by carefully cataloging the contents of their purses: reading glasses, tissues, Burt’s Bees lip balm, one blue bag with panty liners, tampons, CeraVe cream, Weleda Skin Food, hair ties. The lists are like another form of still life. Daignault plays with Freud’s famous interpretation of Dora’s purse as a vagina—a metonym for gender, sexuality, and economics—the purse-as-vagina-as-purse. Daignault’s desire for a current feminist interpretation seems so urgent that the title for her new artist book (in newsprint, like vintage Village Voice or Bay Guardian papers, and available as an exhibition handout), A–Z Volume 4: The Feminine Mystique, confronts second-wave feminism with first-100-days-in-office feminist rage.

Cynthia Daignault. A–Z Volume 4: The Feminine Mystique, 2017; newsprint. Courtesy of the Artist and CAPITAL.

Purse- (or pussy-) snatching has never been more of a political commentary than in this election year’s re-visioning of Betty Freidan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. In this show, Daignault seems to be emptying out her own bag: Trump, Freud, California landscape, gender, sex, psychology, capitalism, objecthood, still life, vaginas, and painting in the era of post-Obama traumatic stress.

Cynthia Daignault: The Pure Products of America Go Crazy is on view at CAPITAL in San Francisco through April 22, 2017.

[1] Interview with the artist, March 28, 2017.

[2] “Imagism,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagism.

[3] Interview with the artist, March 28, 2017.

Do you remember your first time you saw dry ice? Mine was in a punch bowl as part of a Halloween school dance. There was something inherently magical about the material; when I first encountered it I kept blinking, waiting for what looked like an illusion to reveal itself. Watching Judy Chicago’s revival of ‘Disappearing Environments as Sublime Environment’ revives that initial excitement and gives it poetic understanding. Chicago teamed up with Materials & Applications to revive her 1968 ‘Disappearing Environments as Sublime Environment’ performance, originally by Chicago, Lloyd Hamrol, and Eric Orr. The piece consisted of 25 tons of dry ice into pyramid formations that shrouded the surrounding environment in a hazy fog. At sunset, the installation was incited with road flares and left to disintegrate over the following four days until it disappeared.

Chicago described the medium of dry ice as “a metaphor for the preciousness of life.” The performance piece alters the landscape of the Santa Monica Barker Hanger, turning an airport structure into an outdoor dream laboratory in which an experiment had gone awry. The dry ice creations are a combination of architectural pyramids and apocalyptic wedding cakes. Continuing in Chicago’s language of confusing typically masculine and feminine fields, traditionally male pyrotechnic flares gave way to a pinkish rolling fog that softened and feminized the landscape. The piece was a stunning addition to the Art Los Angeles Contemporary art fair, and can be seen in all its glory in the video below:

Judy Chicago, "Car Hood," Sprayed acrylic lacquer on Corvair car hood. 42 15/16 x 49 3/16 x 4 5/16 in. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © Judy Chicago. Photo: Donald Woodman

Pacific Standard Time, a nearly year-long paean to SoCal art history, has barely begun and, already, I’m experiencing PST fatigue. Funded by the Getty Institute and the result of at least a decade’s worth of scholarship by the Getty researchers and others, PST will include 60 or so exhibitions and more artists than you can count, all of whom were working between 1945-1980. Over 60 institutions are “partnering” with the Getty, which means SoCal galleries and museums will be ablaze in the glory of their own history for much of the foreseeable future. Shows have titles like Greetings from L.A.: Artists and Publics 1950–1980 or Best Kept Secret: UC Irvine and the Development of Contemporary Art, 1964-1971, mouthfuls that would be at home on textbook covers. The draw of the PST initiative is, of course, that some of the work on display will have barely been seen since it was made, and uncovering overlooked gems makes a canonized period of L.A. history feel open and alive again. However, even this draw exacerbates the fatigue. Obscure, surprising gems from the 1950, ‘60s or ‘70s will undoubtedly send you reeling back through history; you’ll want to learn more about the work’s making and reconsider its makers. And how will you ever get through 60-plus exhibitions that way?

One particular work that’s not obscure per se – it’s been reproduced in biographies and other SoCal histories –sent me back through archives and biographies. It’s Judy Chicago’s Car Hood, made in 1964 and scheduled to be on view at the Getty Center. You wouldn’t necessarily recognize it as hers at first. It acrylic lacquer on the hood of an actual Chevy and it looks more like something Billy Al Bengston or Craig Kauffman might have come up with: minimal, flat, metal, bold. But upon closer look, the feminist matron’s characteristically bodily—yes, vaginal—imagery presents itself in the form of a red and pink curve that drips downward. It’s car culture meets mother earth, and it’s also festive, far more folksy than anything Bengston might have done during that period.

Judy Chicago, "The Dinner Party," 1979. Installation.

Chicago, who still went by “Judy Gerowitz” at that point (she was “the first of several women to adopt pseudo-geographical surnames as Feminist gestures,” quipped critic Peter Plagens), made Car Hood around the time she participated in a show of hard-edge abstraction at L.A.’s Rolf Nelson gallery. Earlier the same year, she had enrolled in auto-body school. According to biographer Gail Levin, who also notes the car-painting instructor drove a lavender and candy-apple colored convertible, Chicago was the only women out of 250 students. She learned the craft, though, and after 8 weeks she could manipulate lacquer and spray paint on metal, which meant she too could achieve that “finish fetish” aesthetic the boys in SoCal were becoming known for. Her dabble into this traditionally male world would, seemingly came to an abrupt end when she moved to Fresno in 1970 to start the first Feminist Art Program, dropping all the masculine pretenses she’d adopted to get ahead in the ‘60s art world. After spearheading a number of other feminist ventures — most notably Womanhouse, the month long women-only, live-in  performance piece, and the Woman’s Building, an abandoned art school in downtown L.A. turned into space for women artists — she would begin The Dinner Party, the work for which she’s still most famous.

The team of assistants behind Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party"

Never before had I considered the slick, overly perfect glazed plates from The Dinner Party an offshoot of car culture. That they might be makes them even more compelling. A massive installation comprised of a triangular dinner table set for an entourage of female ground-breakers all downplayed by history’s canon, The Dinner Party has an explicit theatricality. Each plate is clearly inspired by female anatomy, and this can be overwhelming, even hard-hitting. But see it in light of the unapologetic kitsch of California custom cars and the absurd obsessiveness of the fetish finish aesthetic, and suddenly Chicago’s feminist opus becomes sunnier, a masterful mash-up that’s formal flair should celebrated as much as its message. Screw the institution; women can have fun too, it suggests. After all, the piece is supposed to be a party.

Ana Mendieta, "Silueta Works in Mexico," 1973–77, Details, Color photographs. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

In 2002, feminist matriarch Judy Chicago co-curated an all-women art exhibition in China, in a place called Lugu Lake, historically a matriarchal society. At the last minute, just before the show’s opening, another curator, a man, arrived with a piece his wife had made. “You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d think that was by a man,” Chicago said to a friend. As it turned out, it was. “The guy used his wife’s name and thought he’d put one over on me,” recalled Chicago, who has looked at countless artworks by men and women and become an expert at distinguishing the sometimes slight differences in perspective. After all, telling the girls from the guys is a necessary ability when your aim is getting more girl artists onto the playing field. Though, in the past six decades, the girls have often made announcing their gender key to their projects.

Two shows up in Los Angeles right now feel like smart reunions of member of an all-girl gang, one that banded together in the 1960s then began to thrive ‘70s and continued into the early ‘80s. Not all the key members actually knew each other. But they probably knew of each other, given that they shared a goal: to show how much women mattered and how criminal it was they’d been excluded from art, which stood in for life at large.

The Personal is Political, a headily titled exhibition of work culled from the collection of MOCA Los Angeles, includes some goose-bump worthy gems. Ana Mendieta’s gently insidious Siluetas, showing of the outline of the artist’s petite body in blood, sand, dirt and greenery; pages of handwriting by Adrian Piper, chronicling the artist-philosopher’s youthful, overtly optimistic dive into Kantian metaphysics; Alice Neel’s figure painting, defiant yet wholly comfortable in its own skin. Most of the women in this compact exhibition seem bent on proving the mind to be as potent and powerful as the body, a project particularly feminine since the minds of women had been downplayed for eons.

Mary Beth Edelson, "The Last Supper," 1972.

Only a few miles away, at Subliminal Projects in Echo Park, a similar sort of corroboration plays out in an exhibition called Eve. Artists Mary Beth Edelson, Judy Chicago, Lisa Steele and Hannah Wilke—women who also belonged to the groundbreaking girl gang—again assert themselves as bodies with minds that deserve a place in history. There’s an urgent energy to their work, most of which aims to reform the art world itself. Edelson superimposes the heads of female artists on figures in da Vinci’s The Last Supper—Georgia O’Keefe appears as Christ—and Hannah Wilke poses topless in a print that posits feminists as fascists, warning the art world to watch out.

It’s a lot of fun to immerse yourself in history through these artists, especially since art has that singular ability to not just record what happened but to be what happened. Edelson’s Bringing Home the Evolution (1979), which puts maternal mastermind, sculptor Louise Bourgeois in revolutionary garb at the helm of a peace walk, not only reflects a sentiment of the time. It actually is the means Edelson used put that sentiment into the world.

But here’s the problem with Eve at Subliminal Projects, and other shows like it: in attempt to trace a trajectory, it includes work by younger female artists, who, perhaps with the exception of politically pointed Ayanah Moor, clearly do not belong to the same gang. This makes the younger artists seem more diffuse and undirected than they otherwise would.

Born in 1969 and after, they’re barely old to have witnessed third wave feminists and, as much their work grapples with experiences of women, it doesn’t aggressively assert this experience, or carve a place for itself in spheres of culture. Kim McCarty’s flowing figures are ghostlike and lost in themselves. Alex Prager’s well-dressed ladies are lost in thought as well, and the photos live in a psychological space that sometimes becomes Lynchian, while Stella Vine’s dripping, big-eyed paintings of Princess Di or Lisa Lopes humanize celebrity.

Alex Prager, "Christine," 2007.

There are other women artists who would probably fit better into the legacy of 1970s feminism than those presented here. But the point is that time has changed enough that women working today feel comfortable in a space of ambiguity. Not only has this resulted from their far less dire circumstances—women now have retrospectives at MoMA and MOCA, they get gallery shows, etc.—but out of a changing cultural landscape.

When she reviewed the feminist blockbuster exhibition WACK!, critic Hunter Drohojowska-Philp commented that the catalog cover, a sea of sexy naked bodies culled from pop culture by Martha Rosler was originally a “critique of representation.” But, “Today, it looks like an advertisement for The L Word.”  Explicitness doesn’t have the same sway as it did forty and fifty years ago, but, at least in Eve, putting ambiguous artists next to the explicit, driven women of first and second wave feminism, makes the former appear weak-willed. It’s not fair, and it’s not informative. There’s something to be said for letting history stay in the past.