Technology, Engineering, and Feminism: The Hidden Depths of Judy Chicagos Minimal Art
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In 1968 Judy Chicago worked on a number of dome-shaped sculptures, each consisting of three acrylic hemispheres arranged symmetrically on a square surface. Made with new industrial materials and techniques, works such as Iridescent Domes #2 and Bronze Domes fit within the formal-aesthetic discourse of Minimal art. During the 1970s, Chicago and feminist critics positioned these sculpturescharacterized by round forms and evanescent colorsas unconscious expressions of what they conceived as a feminine sensibility, which they opposed to the angular and cold language favored by male Minimalist artists. Here I argue that Chicagos dome-shaped works were protofeminist due to their associations not with traditionally female forms but with contemporary engineering structures. I show that Chicagos hemispherical sculptures, and her Minimal art more generally, referenced civil engineering projects at the forefront of technological innovation that sought to advance human society and improve living standards for all. I thus expand the concept of protofeminism beyond notions of radical subjectivity, as theorized for art made by women during the 1960s, to a broader sociopolitical attitude intent on building a more just world. Interpreting Chicagos Minimalist sculptures within the historically specific context of engineering, however, associates them with Western ideologies of modern progress that since the late 1960s have been questioned, reformulated, or discarded. Indeed, from the perspective of second-wave feminism, these ideologies not only seemed out of date but morally objectionable. The essay reveals both the promises and pitfalls of Chicagos techno-aesthetic, protofeminist practice.
