Carolina QuotesArt without content is like sex without intimacy: technically sufficient, but emotionally empty.
Judy Chicago Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Describing modernism and formalism in an interview with Ann Stubbs on New York City's WBAI (1981)
- form
- interview
- year
- 1981
Cite this record
“Art without content is like sex without intimacy: technicall…” Judy Chicago. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-CE7393B9B0. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/ce7393b9b0
More from Judy Chicago
As we know, by and large women's life experience has not been represented. It has been men's life experience that has made up the body of art history. At least, as we know it now; and there are all these categories and words that diminish women's expression. So that if it's done by a man, it's "high art"; if it's done by a woman, it's "decorative". If it's done by a man, it's "art"; if it's done by a woman, it's "political". There's all these words, you know? For example, images by men, of women are "art"; images by women of men are "political". Abstract patterns by men are "art"; abstract patterns by women in fabric are "decorative"; they're called quilts. So there's all these kind of double standards and all these kind of words that prevent women's experience from entering—even when they express it—from entering the mainstream of art.
The history of art is that there have been alot of artists who have always been socially engaged and art comes out of both a desire to define the meaning of life and a kind of rage and railing against human limitations.
At a certain point power becomes very frightening, and to really begin to reconstruct civilization means to really act in a powerful way. And power is the thing that women have been taught is a real taboo.