DOCSLIB.ORG

Suzanne Lacy: Three Decades of Performing and Writing/Writing and Performing

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Suzanne Lacy: Three Decades of Performing and Writing/Writing and Performing INTRODuCtion Suzanne Lacy: three decades of Performing and Writing/Writing and Performing Moira roth Of Her Early Years, 1960s–1970s “I wondered who they were, these women whose lives were such powerful icons for my gender. How did I carry their condition inside my own head?”1 Suzanne Lacy asks herself these questions in her essay “Prostitution Notes” (1974), the first text in this volume of collected writings, and such questions— spanning a wide range of women’s experiences, including the impacts of age, ethnicity, class, and violence—are the inspirations for and underpinnings of much of Lacy’s early performances and writings. Lacy had been deeply immersed in feminism since the late 1960s.2 She began graduate studies in psychology at California State University at Fresno in 1969. Here she and the artist Faith Wilding, a fellow graduate student, established the first feminist consciousness- raising group on the campus. Lacy was already working on a feminist discourse in the psychology depart- ment when Judy Chicago arrived in Fresno in the fall of 1970 to open her Feminist Art Program, with fifteen students, including Lacy and Wilding.3 A year later, the program moved to Los Angeles, where it was run jointly by Chicago and Miriam Schapiro and housed at the newly established Califor- nia Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Lacy also transferred to CalArts, where she enrolled not in the Feminist Art Program but rather in the Women’s Design Program, directed by Sheila de Bretteville, another influential figure for Lacy at this time, along with Allan Kaprow, who was then teaching at CalArts. His ideas about performance and about art- life practice would have a profound influence on Lacy: “Allan’s formalism was supportive to my own inclinations in that direction. Because he was working so closely with many of us femi- nists, Allan’s work gave us an aesthetic foundation for the move into ‘life’ that we were looking for. He gave us a historical rationale. I thought of them, humorously, as the passionate mother (Judy Chicago) and the affectionate, distant father (Allan).”4 In January and February 1972, the Feminist Art Program’s faculty and stu- 1. Lucy Lippard, Moira Roth, Suzanne Lacy, and Larry Fink on the per- formance set in The IDS Tower: The Crystal Quilt, Suzanne Lacy, Phyllis Jane Rose, Sage Cowles, and Nancy Dennis, Min- neapolis, 1987. Photo by Linda Brooks. dents presented the now- legendary dramatic installations and performances of Womanhouse, “a collaborative art- environment addressing the gendered experiences of women in the context of a real house located in an urban neigh- borhood in Los Angeles.”5 A few months later, in June, Chicago, Lacy, Sandra Orgel, and Aviva Rahmani created Ablutions, a multiauthored performance piece with a devastating sequence of images showing women immersed in tubs of eggs and blood, covered with mud, swaddled in cloth, and bound to each other, all accompanied by recorded voices of women describing their rape experiences.6 At the end of the performance, Jan Lester and Lacy (who had been energetically hammering some fifty beef kidneys onto the walls) slowly circled around the room tying together the bound figures, the tubs, and the kidneys. According to Lacy, “The only action [was] our roping and tying, the only sound the voices of raped women, until the performance stage was a spider web of entrapment. The last words on the sound track were ‘I felt so helpless. All I could do was just lie there,’ and the audience was left stunned, really stunned.”7 In “Time, Bones, and Art: Anatomy of a Decade” (chapter 10)—in which she reflects on the development of the feminist antiviolence movement and art during the 1970s—Lacy recalls suggesting to Judy Chicago that they tape- xviii | Introduction 2. Jan Oxenberg and Shawnee Wollenman bathe in tubs of cracked eggs, blood, and clay, accompanied by a soundtrack of women’s stories of rape: Ablutions, Suzanne Lacy, Aviva Rahmani, Sandra Orgel, and Judy Chicago, Los Angeles, 1972. Photo by Lloyd Hamrol. record women speaking about their rapes, a process that began in Fresno and materialized almost two years later in Ablutions. “Neither of us had ever heard women talking personally to each other about these things, let alone to an audience. Trained in sociological methods of interview, I wanted to hear di- rectly from these women.”8 Ablutions marked the beginning of Lacy’s long practice of seeking out, recording, and presenting women’s experiences through, often literally, their own voices. And shortly after this performance, Lacy began to experiment with voice in her own writings. From approximately 1971 and continuing throughout the decade, Lacy’s explorations of identity included viscerally graphic photos of slaughterhouses and entrails, body experiments, and performances in which she enacted, among other things, the drawing of her own blood with a syringe and slam- ming her body into walls. In 1974 (having graduated from CalArts the previ- ous year), Lacy began teaching at the Feminist Studio Workshop (1973–81), newly established by Chicago, de Bretteville, and Arlene Raven and housed in the Los Angeles Woman’s Building.9 By this time, Lacy was actively perform- ing, theorizing, organizing, teaching, and beginning to make contacts with other early women performers10—all in the thick of a marvelously exploding feminist art scene in Los Angeles.11 Along with the prominent exploration of women’s bodies, identities, and social conditions, artists, art historians, and critics were creating—one after the other, almost feverishly—feminist groups, organizations, art spaces, exhibitions, publications, and educational programs, and would, whenever provoked or thwarted, whip up lively protests and demonstrations at the drop of a hat. These were heady and dramatic times, and much was at stake. The Viet- nam War was almost at an end. Impeachment proceedings against Richard M. Nixon had just begun, when, on August 8, 1974, Nixon announced that he would resign the presidency; Vice President Gerald R. Ford was sworn in as president the next day. In terms of feminist politics, this period saw the legal- ization of abortion by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973 (Roe v. Wade), and by the next year, thirty- two states had ratified the Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA’s future, deceptively, looked promising: only six more states needed to ratify this amendment to make it a part of the U.S. Constitution.12 It was in this context, around 1974, that Lacy, in the midst of her prolific early series of performances, conceptual, and photographic works, began to engage in critical and descriptive writing as a part of her practice. As the xx | Introduction 1970s progressed, Lacy raised issues in her writings and public lectures con- cerning what she would later describe as “new genre public art.” “Our work was in many ways based on the same concerns explored by men and women colleagues: the body, identity, gender, art/life boundaries, performance lan- guage, democratization, and social change. We [women] took a profound de- parture, however, in courting an expansive audience, believing that the sepa- ration of artist from society neutralized the impact of art.”13 Looking back on this period in 1990, she remembered that she had gone through a shift from “thinking ‘I want to talk about rape’ to ‘Who do I want to talk about rape to?’”14 Such questions, including those addressing the nature of art audiences, emerged at this time, and she has grappled with them in her writings ever since: What sites—galleries or public spaces—are the most effective for staging these performances, and which audiences does one want to reach? Should one attempt to create public awareness with mass media, in an audience not physically present at a performance? And if so, how? How does one represent these live performances as subsequent exhibitions in museums and galleries? How can one encourage the continuing impact of “new genre public art” within a community once the “outsider” artist has left? Can art lead to substantial social change? In this work, is there a point of departure from “art” into life? In order to tackle these and other questions, Lacy consciously and inventively began to experiment in her writings with many different approaches and styles, voices and tones, ranging from the impassioned, playful, witty, poetic, and poignant to the speculative, didactic, prescriptive, and analytic. This wide range of textual voice has intriguing parallels to her equally wide range of visual representations at this time—vividly illustrated by the portrayals of her mercurial performative self in the first issue ofHigh Performance in 1978.15 On the front cover, Lacy appears nattily attired in a racing outfit (“Cinderella in a Dragster”), but on the back cover, she is a dejected “bag lady,” slumped outside a doorway, surrounded by shopping bags filled with urban refuse. Her 1974 “Prostitution Notes” (chapter 1)—written in a diaristic form interjected with italicized questions and statements as a series of drawings on large brown paper—contrasts dramatically in tone to another piece of writ- Three Decades of Performing and Writing | xxi 3. Lacy pushes a cart of garbage retrieved from Los Angeles dumpsters through a San Francisco exhibition exploring the urban environment: The Bag Lady, Suzanne Lacy, De Young Museum of Art, San Francisco, 1977. Photo by Terry Schutte. ing of that era; in “Falling Apart” (chapter 2), that strange, dreamlike image- text, she describes “a story gothic in nature,” about seagulls and
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Oral History Interview with Edith Wyle, 1993 March 9-September 7
    Oral history interview with Edith Wyle, 1993 March 9-September 7 Funding for the digital preservation of this interview was provided by a grant from the Save America's Treasures Program of the National Park Service. Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Interview EW: EDITH WYLE SE: SHARON EMANUELLI SE: This is an interview for the Archives of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution. The interview is with Edith R. Wyle, on March 9th, Tuesday, 1993, at Mrs. Wyle's home in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles. The interviewer is Sharon K. Emanuelli. This is Tape 1, Side A. Okay, Edith, we're going to start talking about your early family background. EW: Okay. SE: What's your birth date and place of birth? EW: Place of birth, San Francisco. Birth date, are you ready for this? April 21st, 1918-though next to Beatrice [Wood-Ed.] that doesn't seem so old. SE: No, she's having her 100th birthday, isn't she? EW: Right. SE: Tell me about your grandparents. I guess it's your maternal grandparents that are especially interesting? EW: No, they all were. I mean, if you'd call that interesting. They were all anarchists. They came from Russia. SE: Together? All together? EW: No, but they knew each other. There was a group of Russians-Lithuanians and Russians-who were all revolutionaries that came over here from Russia, and they considered themselves intellectuals and they really were self-educated, but they were very learned.
    [Show full text]
  • Allan Kaprow: the Happenings Are Dead, Long Live the Happenings
    1 ALLAN KAPROW: THE HAPPENINGS ARE DEAD, LONG LIVE THE HAPPENINGS Happenings are today's only underground avant-garde. Regularly, since 1958, the end of the Happenings has been announced--always by those who have never come near one--and just as regularly since then, Happenings have been spreading around the globe like some chronic virus, cunningly avoiding the familiar places and occurring where they are least expected. "Where Not To Be Seen: At a Happening," advised Esquire Magazine a year ago, in its annual two-page scoreboard on what's in and out of Culture. Exactly! One goes to the Museum of Modern Art to be seen. The Happenings are the one art activity that can escape the inevitable death-by-publicity to which all other art is condemned, because, designed for a brief life, they can never be over-exposed; they are dead, quite literally, every time they happen. At first unconsciously, then deliberately, they played the game of planned obsolescence, just before the mass media began to force the condition down the throats of the standard arts (which can little afford the challenge). For the latter, the great question has become "How long can it last?"; for the Happenings it always was "How to keep on going?". Thus, "underground" took on a different meaning. Where once the artist's enemy was the smug bourgeois, now he was the hippie journalist. In 1961 I wrote in an article, "To the extent that a Happening is not a commodity but a brief event, from the standpoint of any publicity it may receive, it may become a state of mind.
    [Show full text]
  • Are We There Yet?
    ARE WE THERE YET? Study Room Guide on Live Art and Feminism Live Art Development Agency INDEX 1. Introduction 2. Lois interviews Lois 3. Why Bodies? 4. How We Did It 5. Mapping Feminism 6. Resources 7. Acknowledgements INTRODUCTION Welcome to this Study Guide on Live Art and Feminism curated by Lois Weaver in collaboration with PhD candidate Eleanor Roberts and the Live Art Development Agency. Existing both in printed form and as an online resource, this multi-layered, multi-voiced Guide is a key component of LADA’s Restock Rethink Reflect project on Live Art and Feminism. Restock, Rethink, Reflect is an ongoing series of initiatives for, and about, artists who working with issues of identity politics and cultural difference in radical ways, and which aims to map and mark the impact of art to these issues, whilst supporting future generations of artists through specialized professional development, resources, events and publications. Following the first two Restock, Rethink, Reflect projects on Race (2006-08) and Disability (2009- 12), Restock, Rethink, Reflect Three (2013-15) is on Feminism – on the role of performance in feminist histories and the contribution of artists to discourses around contemporary gender politics. Restock, Rethink, Reflect Three has involved collaborations with UK and European partners on programming, publishing and archival projects, including a LADA curated programme, Just Like a Woman, for City of Women Festival, Slovenia in 2013, the co-publication of re.act.feminism – a performing archive in 2014, and the Fem Fresh platform for emerging feminist practices with Queen Mary University of London. Central to Restock, Rethink, Reflect Three has been a research, dialogue and mapping project led by Lois Weaver and supported by a CreativeWorks grant.
    [Show full text]
  • Heiser, Jörg. “Do It Again,” Frieze, Issue 94, October 2005
    Heiser, Jörg. “Do it Again,” Frieze, Issue 94, October 2005. In conversation with Marina Abramovic Marina Abramovic: Monica, I really like your piece Hausfrau Swinging [1997] – a video that combines sculpture and performance. Have you ever performed this piece yourself? Monica Bonvicini: No, although my mother said, ‘you have to do it, Monica – you have to stand there naked wearing this house’. I replied, ‘I don’t think so’. In the piece a woman has a model of a house on her head and bangs it against a dry-wall corner; it’s related to a Louise Bourgeois drawing from the ‘Femme Maison’ series [Woman House, 1946–7], which I had a copy of in my studio for a long time. I actually first shot a video of myself doing the banging, but I didn’t like the result at all: I was too afraid of getting hurt. So I thought of a friend of mine who is an actor: she has a great, strong body – a little like the woman in the Louise Bourgeois drawing that inspired it – and I knew she would be able to do it the right way. Jörg Heiser: Monica, after you first showed Wall Fuckin’ in 1995 – a video installation that includes a static shot of a naked woman embracing a wall, with her head outside the picture frame – you told me one critic didn’t talk to you for two years because he was upset it wasn’t you. It’s an odd assumption that female artists should only use their own bodies.
    [Show full text]
  • Revisiting Cyberfeminism
    AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR Revisiting cyberfeminism SUSANNA PAASONEN E-mail: [email protected] Abstract In the early 1990s, cyberfeminism surfaced as an arena for critical analyses of the inter-connections of gender and new technology Ϫ especially so in the context of the internet, which was then emerging as something of a “mass-medium”. Scholars, activists and artists interested in media technol- ogy and its gendered underpinnings formed networks and groups. Conse- quently, they attached altering sets of meaning to the term cyberfeminism that ranged in their take on, and identifications with feminism. Cyberfemi- nist activities began to fade in the early 2000s and the term has since been used by some as synonymous with feminist studies of new media Ϫ yet much is also lost in such a conflation. This article investigates the histories of cyberfeminism from two interconnecting perspectives. First, it addresses the meanings of the prefix “cyber” in cyberfeminism. Second, it asks what kinds of critical and analytical positions cyberfeminist networks, events, projects and publications have entailed. Through these two perspectives, the article addresses the appeal and attraction of cyberfeminism and poses some tentative explanations for its appeal fading and for cyberfeminist activities being channelled into other networks and practiced under dif- ferent names. Keywords: cyberfeminism, gender, new technology, feminism, networks Introduction Generally speaking, cyberfeminism signifies feminist appropriation of information and computer technology (ICT) on a both practical and theoretical level. Critical analysis and rethinking of gendered power rela- tions related to digital technologies has been a mission of scholars but equally Ϫ and vocally Ϫ that of artists and activists, and those working in-between and across such categorizations.
    [Show full text]
  • Discovering the Contemporary
    of formalist distance upon which modernists had relied for understanding the world. Critics increasingly pointed to a correspondence between the formal properties of 1960s art and the nature of the radically changing world that sur- rounded them. In fact formalism, the commitment to prior- itizing formal qualities of a work of art over its content, was being transformed in these years into a means of discovering content. Leo Steinberg described Rauschenberg’s work as “flat- bed painting,” one of the lasting critical metaphors invented 1 in response to the art of the immediate post-World War II Discovering the Contemporary period.5 The collisions across the surface of Rosenquist’s painting and the collection of materials on Rauschenberg’s surfaces were being viewed as models for a new form of realism, one that captured the relationships between people and things in the world outside the studio. The lesson that formal analysis could lead back into, rather than away from, content, often with very specific social significance, would be central to the creation and reception of late-twentieth- century art. 1.2 Roy Lichtenstein, Golf Ball, 1962. Oil on canvas, 32 32" (81.3 1.1 James Rosenquist, F-111, 1964–65. Oil on canvas with aluminum, 10 86' (3.04 26.21 m). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 81.3 cm). Courtesy The Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. New Movements and New Metaphors Purchase Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alex L. Hillman and Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (both by exchange). Acc. n.: 473.1996.a-w. Artists all over the world shared U.S.
    [Show full text]
  • Feminist Art, the Women's Movement, and History
    Working Women’s Menu, Women in Their Workplaces Conference, Los Angeles, CA. Pictured l to r: Anne Mavor, Jerri Allyn, Chutney Gunderson, Arlene Raven; photo credit: The Waitresses 70 THE WAITRESSES UNPEELED In the Name of Love: Feminist Art, the Women’s Movement and History By Michelle Moravec This linking of past and future, through the mediation of an artist/historian striving for change in the name of love, is one sort of “radical limit” for history. 1 The above quote comes from an exchange between the documentary videomaker, film producer, and professor Alexandra Juhasz and the critic Antoinette Burton. This incredibly poignant article, itself a collaboration in the form of a conversation about the idea of women’s collaborative art, neatly joins the strands I want to braid together in this piece about The Waitresses. Juhasz and Burton’s conversation is at once a meditation of the function of political art, the role of history in documenting, sustaining and perhaps transforming those movements, and the influence gender has on these constructions. Both women are acutely aware of the limitations of a socially engaged history, particularly one that seeks to create change both in the writing of history, but also in society itself. In the case of Juhasz’s work on communities around AIDS, the limitation she references in the above quote is that the movement cannot forestall the inevitable death of many of its members. In this piece, I want to explore the “radical limit” that exists within the historiography of the women’s movement, although in its case it is a moribund narrative that threatens to trap the women’s movement, fixed forever like an insect under amber.
    [Show full text]
  • Toward a Theological Response to Prostitution: Listening to the Voices of Women Affected by Prostitution and of Selected Church Leaders in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Middlesex University Research Repository Toward a Theological Response to Prostitution: Listening to the Voices of Women Affected by Prostitution and of Selected Church Leaders in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Jennifer Andrea Singh OCMS, Ph.D. August 2018 ABSTRACT This feminist, qualitative research project explores how the voices of women affected by prostitution in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and of selected evangelical church leaders in that city, could contribute to a life- affirming theological response to prostitution. The thesis engages sociological and theological sources to interpret the data gathered; contextual Bible study sessions provided access to the women’s voices, and semi-structured interviews revealed church leaders’ perspectives. During conversations with the women, six core themes emerged, reflecting their contextual understanding of the social and theological ramifications of prostitution: their entrance into prostitution; God; sin; humanity (Christian anthropology); justice; and the church. The women articulated that: 1) prostitution was a means of survival; 2) God is a protective figure in their lives; 3) sin is equated with prostitution and uncleanliness; 4) humanity is rejecting; 5) injustice is a normalised experience; and 6) they are unwelcome in the church due to their status as ‘sinners,’ and have few expectations that the Christian church or its leaders would help them exit prostitution. These themes reportedly resonated with interviewed church leaders, who expressed empathy for the women. Bringing both sets of voices together in a discussion of the Story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), however, revealed several theological deficiencies held by the evangelical church that currently impede the formation of a life-affirming theological response to prostitution.
    [Show full text]
  • August 19, 2022 John Dewey and the New Presentation of the Collection
    Press contact: Anne Niermann Tel. +49 221 221 22428 [email protected] PRESS RELEASE August 20, 2020 – August 19, 2022 John Dewey and the New Presentation of the Collection of Contemporary Art at the Museum Ludwig Press conference: Wednesday, August 19, 2020, 11 a.m., press preview starting at 10 a.m. For the third time, the Museum Ludwig is showing a new presentation of its collection of contemporary art on the basement level, featuring fifty-one works by thirty-four artists. The works on display span all media—painting, installations, sculpture, photography, video, and works on paper. Artists: Kai Althoff, Ei Arakawa, Edgar Arceneaux, Trisha Baga, John Baldessari, Andrea Büttner, Erik Bulatov, Tom Burr, Michael Buthe, John Cage, Miriam Cahn, Fang Lijun, Terry Fox, Andrea Fraser, Dan Graham, Lubaina Himid, Huang Yong Ping, Allan Kaprow, Gülsün Karamustafa, Martin Kippenberger, Maria Lassnig, Jochen Lempert, Oscar Murillo, Kerry James Marshall, Park McArthur, Marcel Odenbach, Roman Ondak, Julia Scher, Avery Singer, Diamond Stingily, Rosemarie Trockel, Carrie Mae Weems, Josef Zehrer In previous presentations of contemporary art, individual artworks such as A Book from the Sky (1987–91) by Xu Bing and Building a Nation (2006) by Jimmie Durham formed the starting point for issues that determined the selection of the works. This time the work of the American philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952) and his international, still palpable influence in art education serve as a background for viewing the collection. The exhibition addresses the fundamental topics of the relationship between art and society as well as the production and reception of art.
    [Show full text]
  • Dear Sister Artist: Activating Feminist Art Letters and Ephemera in the Archive
    Article Dear Sister Artist: Activating Feminist Art Letters and Ephemera in the Archive Kathy Carbone ABSTRACT The 1970s Feminist Art movement continues to serve as fertile ground for contemporary feminist inquiry, knowledge sharing, and art practice. The CalArts Feminist Art Program (1971–1975) played an influential role in this movement and today, traces of the Feminist Art Program reside in the CalArts Institute Archives’ Feminist Art Materials Collection. Through a series of short interrelated archives stories, this paper explores some of the ways in which women responded to and engaged the Collection, especially a series of letters, for feminist projects at CalArts and the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths, University of London over the period of one year (2017–2018). The paper contemplates the archive as a conduit and locus for current day feminist identifications, meaning- making, exchange, and resistance and argues that activating and sharing—caring for—the archive’s feminist art histories is a crucial thing to be done: it is feminism-in-action that not only keeps this work on the table but it can also give strength and definition to being a feminist and an artist. Carbone, Kathy. “Dear Sister Artist,” in “Radical Empathy in Archival Practice,” eds. Elvia Arroyo- Ramirez, Jasmine Jones, Shannon O’Neill, and Holly Smith. Special issue, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3. ISSN: 2572-1364 INTRODUCTION The 1970s Feminist Art movement continues to serve as fertile ground for contemporary feminist inquiry, knowledge sharing, and art practice. The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) Feminist Art Program, which ran from 1971 through 1975, played an influential role in this movement and today, traces and remains of this pioneering program reside in the CalArts Institute Archives’ Feminist Art Materials Collection (henceforth the “Collection”).
    [Show full text]
  • “My Personal Is Not Political?” a Dialogue on Art, Feminism and Pedagogy
    Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies Vol. 5, No. 2, July 2009 “My Personal Is Not Political?” A Dialogue on Art, Feminism and Pedagogy Irina Aristarkhova and Faith Wilding This is a dialogue between two scholars who discuss art, feminism, and pedagogy. While Irina Aristarkhova proposes “active distancing” and “strategic withdrawal of personal politics” as two performative strategies to deal with various stereotypes of women's art among students, Faith Wilding responds with an overview of art school’s curricular within a wider context of Feminist Art Movement and the radical questioning of art and pedagogy that the movement represents Using a concrete situation of teaching a women’s art class within an art school environment, this dialogue between Faith Wilding and Irina Aristakhova analyzes the challenges that such teaching represents within a wider cultural and historical context of women, art, and feminist performance pedagogy. Faith Wilding has been a prominent figure in the feminist art movement from the early 1970s, as a member of the California Arts Institute’s Feminist Art Program, Womanhouse, and in the recent decade, a member of the SubRosa, a cyberfeminist art collective. Irina Aristarkhova, is coming from a different history to this conversation: generationally, politically and theoretically, she faces her position as being an outsider to these mostly North American and, to a lesser extent, Western European developments. The authors see their on-going dialogue of different experiences and ideas within feminism(s) as an opportunity to share strategies and knowledges towards a common goal of sustaining heterogeneity in a pedagogical setting. First, this conversation focuses on the performance of feminist pedagogy in relation to women’s art.
    [Show full text]
  • NO BINGO for FELONS Arcadia University Art Gallery Exhibition Checklist August 28 – November 3, 2013 Height Precedes Width Precedes Depth
    NO BINGO FOR FELONS Arcadia University Art Gallery Exhibition Checklist August 28 – November 3, 2013 Height precedes width precedes depth. Frank Bender Anna Duval 1977 fiberglass, clay, paint, wig 12” x 8" x 10” Courtesy of Frank Bender Forensics, LLC World-renowned forensic artist Frank Bender began his career without any formal training in forensics. As a graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy and an artist interested in anatomy, he had the opportunity to see the remains of an unidentified crime victim presented to him by a medical examiner. Studying the victim, he believed he could render a reliable sculptural likeness solely from the remains. His attempt, included in this exhibition—Bender’s first reconstruction— eventually led to the successful identification of murder victim Anna Duval by a New Jersey State Police detective. It is one of dozens of busts by Bender that proved instrumental in solving crimes, demonstrating his uncanny instincts both with rendering the body as well as the psychology of the subjects with which he worked. Jennifer Bolande The Porn Series 1982/83 black and white photography 16” x 20" framed Courtesy of the artist Bloande's Porn Series is described by the artist as "cropped stills from 50s retro porn films by Irving Klaw. Watching them really fast, I noticed these ​ ​ ​ ​ moments of calm at the beginning or the end, with all of this ‘activity’ in between. It was this kind of aporia, with just an empty set, before that particular kind of narrative ride takes place." In these noir-ish images we see the spaces between transgression.
    [Show full text]