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Elke Krasny Archive, Care, and Conversation: Suzanne Lacy's Elke Krasny Archive, Care, and Conversation: Suzanne Lacy’s International Dinner Party in Feminist Curatorial Thought Elke Krasny Archive, Care, and Conversation: Suzanne Lacy’s International Dinner Party in Feminist Curatorial Thought Acknowledgment First and foremost, I am deeply grateful to my supervisor Dorothee Richter for her endless support. I appreciate the ongoing conversations around feminist curating. I am especially thankful to Susanne Clausen and Alun Rowlands for their support throughout. This book is lovingly dedicated to my wonderful family. Elke Krasny Archive, Care, and Conversation: Suzanne Lacy’s International Dinner Party in Feminist Curatorial Thought The present study was accepted as a dissertation at the Department of Fine Arts of the University of Reading. Prof Dr Dorothee Richter advised the dissertation. This publication is based on the dissertation as part of the PhD in Practice in Curating Program, a joint doctoral program of the Zurich University of the Arts and the University of Reading, supported by “swissuniversities.” Published by ONCURATING.org Proofreading: Stephanie Carwin Set and design: Biotop 3000 © 2020 ONCURATING.org, and the author. The rights of this publication remain by the author. The publication is openly accessible on the website www.on-curating.org and can be downloaded and shared under the restriction of crediting the author and/or OnCurating.org. The Publisher is granted a non-exclusive right of use in respect of the online publication of the work without the obligation to make use of this right. The Author is entitled to make a PDF version of the work publicly accessible online via his/ her personal website, an institutional server or a suitable subject-based repository once it has appeared in book form. This usage of rights is in compliance to the requirements by the of Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). ONCURATING.org Pfi ngstweidstraße 96, 8005 Zurich, Switzerland www.on-curating.org ONCURATING.org is an independent international journal supported by the Postgraduate Programme in Curating, ZHdK. CONTENT LIST ISBN: 9798645807054 2 Acknowledgment 4 Imprint 7 Introduction 39 Feminist Thought and Curating: On Method PART 1 The Subjects of the International Dinner Party: A Feminist Cultural Analysis 69 The Emancipated Spectatress in Conversation with Equal Listeners 103 Putting on the Map: International Dinner Parties PART 2 The International Dinner Party in Feminist Curatorial Thought 121 The Salon Model: The Conversational Complex 140 Emergent Archives of Conversations: Feminist and Queer Feminist Practices 184 Conclusion 193 Bibliography INTRODUCTION 7 Introduction Art is a potential link between differences. It can be constructed as a bridge between people, communities, even countries, such as my 1979 project the International Dinner Party. — Suzanne Lacy, The Name of the Game, 1991 Sisterhood cannot be assumed on the basis of gender; it must be forged in concrete historical and political practice and analysis. — Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Under Western Eyes, 1984 This publication examines Suzanne Lacy’sInternational Dinner Party. On March 14, 1979, “a simultaneous world wide dinner happened on the eve of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, this global project was offered as a gift to Judy Chicago, one of Lacy’s mentors.”1 While Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party has since been recog- nised as a widely celebrated, at times most controversially discussed, icon of feminist art, which since 2007 has been permanently installed as the central piece of the newly founded Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Femin- ist Art at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City, the International Dinner Party has remained one of Suzanne Lacy’s lesser known works. Numerous events celebrated the 1979 Dinner Party exhibition opening. “Poetry readings, panels, and workshops ran throughout the weekend. […] On Saturday, an all-day conference titled ‘A Celebration of Women’s Heritage’ took place at a nearby Holiday Inn. Art critics Lucy Lippard and Jan Butterfield, art historian Ruth Iskin, Lacy and Geldon led a panel discussion in the morning on the subject of ‘women’s art as a vehicle for social change.’”2 The International Dinner Partywas just one among many other events. This may have contributed to the fact that it 8 INTRODUCTION has taken a very long time for Suzanne Lacy’s 1979 art project to become recognised as a work in its own right. So far, no study has been devoted to the International Dinner Party. This book presents the first in-depth feminist cultural analysis of the International Dinner Party. It is structured in two parts. First, it offers first an analysis of the subjects of the International Dinner Party, then going on to extend some of the insights uncovered through its analysis over time. The initial focus is on the subjects of the International Dinner Party: the 2,000 women who staged international dinner parties and sent tele- grams to the museum where their arrival was marked by Lacy on a large black-and-white map of the world. I argue that the International Dinner Party exists in the following three modes: first, as a living artwork; second, as an installation result- ing from Suzanne Lacy’s performance at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; third, as an archive of feminist messages from 1979. The first part of my argument explores both the living artwork and its represent- ation as the artist’s performance-installation via the documents kept by Suzanne Lacy in the International Dinner Party Archive. Here, historical research and a theory-based approach are brought together to analyse this example of conceptual social feminist art practice. I examine the his- torically gendered division of art production and art reception and intro- duce the concept of the “emancipated spectatress.” I argue that the map is the ideological pivot through which feminism’s entanglement in his- torical conditions and power relations becomes legible. I claim that the unresolved paradoxes of participation that can be identified in the differ- ences between the living artwork and the artist’s performance-installa- tion play out on the map. The second part of my argument extends the 1979 art project tem- porally, first toward the past and then toward the contemporary moment. I do so by placing the International Dinner Party within feminist curat- orial thought.3 The structure of this artwork reveals a model of art-mak- ing based upon conversation with others. Such art-making differs pro- foundly from the concept of the artist-as-genius as the sole producer of art. The International Dinner Partybridges the domestic sphere and the public sphere. This inspired my search for a historical model of art as con- versation bridging the domestic sphere and the public sphere. I suggest here that the historical precedent of such a model presents itself in the women-led Jewish salon culture of Berlin and Vienna around 1800. The salonière provided the space and the knowledge, the material and imma- terial support necessary for conversations as artmaking with others. In today’s institutional frameworks and the languages of the globalised art world, the historical subject position occupied by the salonière becomes legible as the curator of conversations. Yet, museum studies and writing INTRODUCTION 9 on the history of curating have so far never considered the inclusion of the salonière. I propose here the salon model and its conversational com- plex. This is an intervention into the hegemonic narratives of the histori- ography of curating. I claim that today the International Dinner Party, understood as an ad-hoc and collectively produced archive, affords a search for 1979 feminism. I took this as the point of departure for the concept of my PhD exhibition. The exhibition Suzanne Lacy’s International Dinner Party in Feminist Curatorial Thoughtplaces Lacy’s work in the con- text of four different 21st-century feminist and queer feminist artistic and curatorial collectives who engage archivism to raise consciousness and reclaim agency under the economic and political conditions of the austere and precarious contemporary moment. The four collectives are Aktion Arkiv, radical practices of collective care, Red Min(e)d, and Queer- ing Yerevan. My PhD exhibition sought to test feminist exhibition making as a conversation-based practice that could be constructed as a bridge between past and contemporary conversations via the archive as its method of search and action. The curatorial intent differed from chro- nological feminist group shows or survey shows, as well as from feminist monographic exhibitions. Here, feminism is made legible as an ongoing location-specific and situation-specific project across aesthetic, social and political relations—as much a conversation with past feminism as with feminism’s future.4 Getting to Know the International Dinner Party While other works by Suzanne Lacy, particularly Three Weeks in May (1977), In Mourning and in Rage (1977), and The Oakland Projects(1991- 2001), have become canonical examples in art history and art theory, more specifically the histories and theories of activist art, community art, feminist art, performance art, and socially engaged art, the same is not true for the International Dinner Party. This artwork has remained lesser known and has not yielded much scholarly analysis.5 I first read about the International Dinner Party in Suzanne Lacy’s 2010 Leaving Art: Writ- ings on Performance, Politics, and Publics, 1974–2007. In this volume of collected writings, she mentions the International Dinner Party once in her 1991 essay “The Name of the Game.” Here, Lacy states the following: “Art is a potential link across differences. It can be constructed as a bridge between people, communities, even countries, such as my 1979 project The International Dinner Party.” 6 This sentence, which serves as the epi- thet to my introduction here, provoked my initial interest.
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