Judy Chicago: Revelations review – cosmic cobblers from a pseudo goddess

Serpentine North Gallery, London
Her cosmological screed is tiresome and her blissed-out female figures are idealised beyond belief. But at least her musclebound men cavort, weep blood and urinate realistically

I always assumed Judy Chicago deserved the credit for her 1970s masterpiece of feminist art, The Dinner Party, an epochal installation in the form of a triangular table set with places for great historical women, including Theodora of Byzantium, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Virginia Woolf. This monumental attempt to give women their rightful place in history and culture, now on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum, is a consummately clear and bold expression of an idea only a bigot would argue with now.

But it turns out it wasn’t her idea after all. She received miraculous inspiration from above, or below – for, in her personal cosmology, the female divine power is also a Gaian earth spirit. As she worked on The Dinner Party, Chicago created an illuminated manuscript entitled Revelations that is now being published for the first time and is at the heart of her Serpentine show. It tells us, among other mystical nuggets, that it was not Chicago but “The Goddess”, who originally “created a great triangular table, open in the center and formed in Her sign, which She placed upon the sea of names that honored Her Disciples”.

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