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246 CHAPTER EIGHT From Controversy to Canonization The Dinner Party in the Culture Wars, 1990–2007 after the brooklyn museum opening, The Dinner Party moved to Chicago, Cleveland, and Atlanta for community shows, and then abroad. Three Canadian museums showed it in 1982 and 1983; huge crowds turned out and made the venues significant and (somehow still) unexpected profits. The international tour became an unbridled success, opening to enthusiastic reviews at the Fringe during the Festival in Edinburgh, the Warehouse in London, and at the contemporary art museum, Schirn Kunsthalle, in Frankfurt, Germany, where the showing was accompanied by a gala women’s festival at the city’s newly renovated opera house.1 The final museum show in the tour took place at the Royal Exhibition Center in Melbourne, Australia, in 1988. All told, The Dinner Party opened fourteen shows in six countries. Over a million people came to see it. Between 1979 and 1989, an average of 775 people viewed it each day it was on display.2 At a $4 admissions fee, The Dinner Party generated money throughout its tour; when coupled with the audio tour and tie-in products, estimates of The Dinner Party’s potential revenue stream to a host institution reached an impressive $1,652,000 annually.3 These tangible markers of The Dinner Party’s economic heft came into sharp focus as the decade and the tour came to a close. After such extensive touring, Chicago—in consultation with Susan Hill, Peter Bunzick, and others who installed and broke down the piece everywhere it traveled— decided that the piece was showing signs of wear and tear. The time had come to find a permanent home for The Dinner Party. Eighteen years later, in 2007, The Dinner Party found just that—an institutional, safe, prestigious, and permanent home at the Brooklyn Museum. The journey to Brooklyn was not easy; as ever, the path veered between controversies and neglect, from controversy to canonization 247 with sudden bursts of national media coverage followed by years of silence as the work stayed crated. The nearly twenty years between the end of the tour and the permanent opening in 2007 inexorably moved The Dinner Party into history, a place that proved far more welcoming and restorative to Chicago’s initial animating vision than the rough road to get there. Three historical developments converged in the 1990s to change the reception of The Dinner Party. The first unfolded in Washington, dc, where congressional debates over funding for the arts doomed Chicago’s efforts to gift the piece to the University of the District of Columbia. Congressional debates in 1990 over whether Chicago’s vulva plates constituted “3-d ceramic pornography” followed on the heels of two more widely covered congressional attacks on “obscene” art by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano in 1989. This bruising chapter of The Dinner Party’s history was a particularly difficult way to end its tour. The piece went into storage with no clear plan of how to return it to display. The second development that contributed to The Dinner Party being recast as a relic of “history” was the rise of postmodernism in feminist art theory . This new form of feminist theory offered a sophisticated critique of the pitfalls of essentialism and specifically the limits of Chicago’s 1970s-style feminism. This shift came into sharp focus at a 1996 conference, Sexual Politics : Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party” in Feminist Art History, which displayed The Dinner Party for six weeks in a show designed to evaluate its place in the ongoing feminist art movement. The conference solidified a new set of oppositions in the viewing of The Dinner Party—postmodernism/ feminism, gender/woman, performativity/embodiment—that added to the work’s status as a relic, falling as it (chronically) did on the less-valued side of the feminist binary. Together with the University of the District of Columbia scandal, postmodern feminist art theory deepened The Dinner Party’s invisibility and the perception of its irrelevance. The third and final element that altered the reception of The Dinner Party was the steady growth of feminist-themed popular culture in the 1980s and 1990s. This development proved advantageous for a generational reviewing of The Dinner Party. Take, for instance, the growth of woman-centered theater starting with Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Contemplated Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1975), followed by the onewoman stage show written by Jane Wagner and performed by Lily Tomlin...

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