1. Judy Chicago: Revelations at the Serpentine Galleries
The world was originally a matriarchy, centered around birth and creation until men, learning to kill, rebelled and took over. The primordial religion was directed towards a great goddess, who like Isis, was said to have many names. During the ensuing patriarchy, some chosen women acted as disciples, passing on the secret teaching.
This is the basic premise of Judy Chicago’s exhibition Revelations, which was hosted at the Serpentine Galleries earlier this year.
It is a textual show. Chicago, an artist who excels across a range of media, means this to be read like an illuminated manuscript. In an interview with the Serpentine’s Hans Ulrich Obrist, she even confirms it’s her bible of the Goddess.
Chicago uses books as a complement to her art and a way to reach out and create a new audience. The book of Revelations, explores in more detail this mystic teaching, calling forth apostles and disciples to spread the new gospel and providing new visions of the apocalypse when Earth will become Eden once again.
It is a powerfully affecting show, with beautiful art and complex ideas around gender, history and spirituality that invites deep reflection and slow engagement.
Alongside Revelations, the show displayed highlights from her oeuvre including photos of her smoke installations in the 1960s, the Dinner Party (1974-79), the Birth Project (1980) and In the beginning (1982) which explored women artists, and the experience of birth. During her six decades career, she has also returned back to themes like the great goddess and the female divine (the 250 foot long installation at the Musee Rodin, just one highlight).
It is an impressive career, but not one without pushback. She writes:
“At a certain point—after The Dinner Party, after the art world tried to kill me—| realized I would have to be very, very isolated in order to continue down the path I had eked out. And as I got older and my energy began to wane, I wasn’t happy about the fact that I had to do everything myself. But that was just the way it had to be. I had to do it myself because I had to build what didn’t exist: a language for talking about women-centered art, a structure for showing it, a critical apparatus. I had to do that. There was no context for my work. I had to build it myself.”
This is art as world building, a form of fantasy that does not negate the ‘real world’ or ignore it, but rather actively engages with and challenges it.
The book of Revelations also contains short biographies of important women from antiquity including Hypatia, who is said to be initiated into the mysteries of Isis, and the Empress Theodora, a defender of women’s rights. This section of the book is fascinating, but makes me a little uncomfortable. Historically powerful women, while impacted by lack of opportunities and patriarchal oppression may themselves sometimes have been oppressors. Elizabeth I presented here as instigating a modern goddess cult, was also responsible for genocide in Ireland and instigated colonial expansion into North America, which under later British monarchs resulted in industrialised genocide of Native American and First Nation people and slavery.
I would argue that while many of the women chosen by Chicago are worthy of highlighting, they are not figures to venerate uncritically.
Given its apocalyptic intent, it is intriguing that the book does not highlight lesser known non-elite women, like Joanna Southcott, who with her penchant of feminist theology and revelation was genuinely disruptive, if not radical. Such stories are harder to find, perhaps, but much more important to tell.
Nevertheless Chicago’s celebration of noted women, is a way of countering male-focused history that also permeates Art. My focus on the literal also obscures Chicago’s more spiritual and abstract tendencies. In an interview with Jennifer Higgie about her abstractions of Great Women, Chicago said:
“I have often said that until the advent of abstraction, there was no way for women artists to directly express their own experiences-their only choice was to work within the existing art-historical tradition, to make their work fit into the canon. Artemisia Gentileschi, for example, expressed her feelings about male power using the conventions of the day. Abstraction allowed women to invent their own forms, which led to female-centered art.”
“Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton’s use of color is very akin to mine-high-key, thin, washed, the fusion of color and surface. It’s not a material object; it’s like a spiritual form, and I wanted to achieve that.”
Revelations is an astonishing installation, that shocks with instant impact, and permeates through the soul like glacier water through a mountain, accreting intellectual nutriments with each revisit or re-read.
This exhibition was also twinned with Suspended States by Yinka Shonibare CBE which explored the ecological impact of colonialism.\
2. Tavares Strachan: There is light somewhere at the Hayward Gallery
Tavares Strachan’s encyclopedic installation at the Hayward Gallery encompasses deep history and the far future, travel and home. It is the art of exploration that highlights the field’s toxic history by neatly sidestepping it, focusing instead on black astronauts and sailors (like Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line).
Tavares uses Classical African Art and Craft to examine identity – personal and cultural – and the roots that tie us not just to the past, but to the stars above.
For an installation about travel and mobility, this felt more like an arrival, the arrival of a huge talent of great importance.
3. Beatrice Offor at Bruce Castle
A small but fascinating exhibition in Tottenham’s bijou Bruce Castle museum and gallery space, exploring the life and art of Beatrice Offor. Trained at the Slade School of Art, she was plugged into the magical and politically radical circles of the time, whose ideas inspired her work. Enchanting.
4. Hew Locke: what have we here? At the British Museum
An artist-led intervention into the holdings of the British Museum, foregrounding the violent colonial history of items whose histories are normally presented either as neutral or in terms of being ‘saved’ by European scholars.
5.The Horizon of Khufu
Not really an exhibition, but an entertaining and educational immersive experience that points to new ways of doing history. More please.
6. Entangled Pasts, 1768 – Now at the Royal Academy of Arts
A necessary show, informed by the Royal Academy’s research into its colonial origins, this exhibition brought together important artists including Yinka Shonibare CBE and Hew Locke.
7. Silk Roads at the British Museum
Exploring objects from across the silk roads. A British Museum blockbuster of the old school, a return to form akin to Disney’s reimagination of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals. Beguiling, expansive and seductive.
8. The Glass Heart: Art, Industry & Collaboration at Two Temple Place
An exploration of how craftspeople reinvigorated the ancient art of glass, first perfected by the ancient Phoenicians. A bewitching exhibition.
9. If not now, when? Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain 1960-2023 at the Saatchi Gallery
A genuinely epochal show highlighting a vital loose group of artists working in a field of media and inspired by various ideas of which the ancient was just one ingredient in a heady roux of creativity.
10. Legion: Life in the Roman Army at the British Museum
Full of fascinating objects, it was let down by a lack of confidence in its own story.
Extra: Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind at Tate Modern
Sometimes you eat the art, sometimes the art eats you. At this show, I embodied sacks, climbed ladders, danced and entertained the exhibition attendees; unintentionally, as a result, becoming an artwork now owned by the Ono Corporation.
What was your favourite exhibition this year? Share in the comments.
Rhakotis 