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

Home , Allan Kaprow, Cheri Gaulke, Empathy and Prostitution, Faith Wilding, Seven Easy Pieces, Suzanne Lacy

INTRODUCTION

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 feminists, 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 neighborhood 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 performing, 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 concerning 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 language, democratization, and social change. We [women] took a profound departure, 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 vampires.16 At the same time, “Body Contract” (chapter 3) is a dry, legalistically worded “contract” drawn up by a lawyer, making possible the purchase of Lacy’s trans- plantable body organs as works of art.17 In 1977, she plays further with various modes of writing when she invents the voice and memories of a “bag lady,” derived from Lacy’s firsthand en- counters with an actual homeless woman in San Francisco intertwined with her own childhood memories.18 This essay (chapter 5, “The Bag Lady: On Memory”) reflects her deepening interest in assuming the persona of an old woman/crone in her performances and simultaneously engaging with actual older women in real life.19 It was also at this time that Lacy began to develop the analytically self- aware and speculative artist-theorist voice in her writings as she mulled over the relationship between the arts and broad social theories and issues of equity.20 Ethnicity and voice in particular were from the beginning a central

xxii | Introduction 4. Evalina Newman, shown here with Lacy, was a friend and collaborator in a series of performances and installations that explored living in Watts: Evalina and I: Crime, Quilts and Art, Suzanne Lacy and Evalina Newman, Los Angeles, 1977. Photo by Lacy. theme in Lacy’s performances, organizational strategies, and analytical writings: “Even when a performance is not specifically about race, like The Crys- tal Quilt, there’s a deep commitment to having multivocal work that includes many different ethnicities.”21 Around 1976, Lacy met James Woods, a cultural entrepreneur who was developing low-income housing in Watts—at that time a largely working-class African American neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles, still recover- ing from the Watts Riots of 1965. In early 1975, she began working at Woods’s Guy Miller Homes as one of several artists in residence. Through 1978, she collaborated on a series of installations and performances with an activist resi- dent there, Evalina Newman, an African American woman in her mid-fif ties.22 Also in 1977, Lacy addressed the topic of race conflicts and misunder- standings in The Life and Times of Donaldina Cameron, created with the actress Kathleen Chang. Their live performance was a mixture of scripted and im- promptu exchanges between their two opposing characters: one a historical figure, Donaldina Cameron, a Scottish-h eritage missionary in San Francisco

Three Decades of Performing and Writing | xxiii (played by Lacy), and the other a fictional Chinese immigrant, Leung Ken-S un (played by Chang). Through their respective characters, Chang and Lacy addressed “issues of racism, sexism, imperialism and aesthetics, which arose in the collaboration. . . . Each presented a different point of view on the issue of the missionary woman’s intrusion into the Chinese community’s prostitution trade.”23 The performance began with audience members (I was among them) on a boat, headed for Angel Island, from which we saw two costumed, silent figures—Lacy and Chang—on a schooner at a distance. After we landed on Angel Island (a major entry point for Asian immigrants from the 1880s to the 1940s), we followed those figures to the top of a hill and witnessed their en- actment of presentations from Donaldina Cameron and Leung Ken-S un. The performance ended with a discussion between the performers and the audience. In their subsequent essay, “The Life and Times of Donaldina Cameron” (chapter 6), first published in 1978, Lacy and Chang further explored the challenges of working cross-r acially at that time.24 Between 1977 and 1981, Lacy collaborated with Leslie Labowitz (a Los Angeles–based artist who had just returned from Germany, where she had studied with Joseph Beuys) on a series of groundbreaking media performances on violence against women. In 1977, she organized Three Weeks in May, an extended performance tracing the incidence of rape in Los Angeles; in December of that year, the sexually motivated murders committed by the Hillside Strangler inspired Labowitz and Lacy (working in conjunction with Bia Lowe and women from the Woman’s Building, the Rape Hotline Alliance, and Women Against Violence Against Women) to create In Mourning and In Rage (see chapter 7), with its towering red-an d-black costumed figures stand- ing on the steps of the Los Angeles City Hall. Lacy and Labowitz formed Ariadne: A Social Art Network, a coalition to bring artists together with television and print journalists, city politicians, and activists to focus on violence against women in art, the media, and public law.25 Other productions of this organization included large-sc ale public art performances with complicated collaborative authorships: Record Companies Drag Their Feet (performance by Labowitz and colleagues, 1977), Reverence to Rape to Respect (performance by Lacy/Labowitz and colleagues, 1978), Take Back the Night (performance by Lacy/Labowitz and colleagues, 1978), and The Incest Awareness Project (project by Labowitz and colleagues, 1979). In addition to organizing projects and making art together, Lacy and Labo-

xxiv | Introduction 5. Two maps installed in a downtown Los Angeles mall under City Hall were the focus of an extensive and geographically sprawling performance exposing rape occurrences in that city: Three Weeks in May, Suzanne Lacy, with performances by Leslie Labowitz, Cheri Gaulke, Barbara Smith, and others, Los Angeles, 1977. Photo by Rob Blalack.

witz coauthored four important essays in which, drawing from their own performance experiences and readings in current relevant literature, they mixed theoretical and practical insights.26 In one of these essays, “Feminist Artists: Developing a Media Strategy for the Movement” (chapter 9), the two artists offer extremely pragmatic advice about how to draw the attention of the media. In another essay, “Learning to Look: The Relationship between Art and Popular Culture Images” (chapter 8), they write analytically about the need for deconstructing public visual “mes- sages,” cautioning their artist readers about the seductive “new playground” that is the mass media: “As activist artists, the critique we form of visual culture is paired with creating our own images, because our goal is to change the basis of our relationship with images so we can begin to make our environment rather than allowing it to make us.”

Three Decades of Performing and Writing | xxv This mixture of voice, from the pragmatic to the analytic, characterizes a continuing trajectory in Lacy’s art and writing as her practice progressed into the 1980s.

Of Writing and Performing in the 1980s

“There are two drives—aesthetic and political—that come together for me when making a work of art: my need to create form is a very powerful drive, as is outrage at injustice, resulting in a desire for communication across differ- ence, for a connectedness through empathy. What pleasures me are aesthetic moments; otherwise, I wouldn’t do this kind of work. I would do straight politics.”27 I have always felt that Lacy’s writing, like her art, has been driven (sometimes in almost contradictory directions) by these two forces, the political and the aesthetic. There is, on the one hand, her ardent desire to describe, ana- lyze, and theorize the relationship between art and social intervention. And on the other hand, there is her pleasure (almost abstract) in language, and her embrace of the rhythm and play of words. This unusual combination of social analysis and verbal delight is at the center of Lacy’s honed, elegant, and passionate prose. There is, as I see it, an increasingly fluid interaction over the years between Lacy the artist and Lacy the writer. They inform each other. She creates a piece, and afterward will often write self-critically and reflec- tively about it. The writing then affects the creation of her next piece. In 1982, I witnessed this process very dramatically when Lacy and I briefly shared the same space (my home in Southern California) in order to write about our respective reactions to Freeze Frame, a collaboration between Lacy and Julia London. On August 13, 1982, this performance brought together seventeen very different groups of women—among them prostitutes, nuns, bridge players, Filipinas, artists from San Francisco’s Mission District, women with disabilities, corporate women, and elderly Jewish women—who met in an elegant furniture showroom in San Francisco to discuss their lives and the topic of survival. I responded quickly with “A Family of Women?”—a wildly enthusiastic and somewhat poetic account of the evolution of this extraordi- nary piece.28 Lacy, on the other hand, wrote “Beneath the Seams,” a sober, self-examining xxvi | Introduction 6. Professional women in black-and-white suits, seated in front of a black-and-white Plexiglas wall frieze, discuss their professions as one of nineteen groups exploring women’s survival strategies: Freeze Frame: Room for Living Room, Suzanne Lacy and Julia London, International Sculpture Conference, San Francisco, 1982. Photo by f-stop Fitzgerald. text (chapter 15).29 In it, she placed Freeze Frame in the context of her other recent large-scale public events in which diverse women were brought together—most notably, River Meetings, Lives of Women in the Delta, a 1980 performance-action in New Orleans created by Lacy, Jeanne Nathan, and Laverne Dunn, along with many other women, which referred to Louisiana’s failure to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.30 River Meetings had evolved out of a lengthy community-building process, so characteristic of Lacy’s work (in this case a chain of private dinners in homes), and ended with a magnifi- cent potluck performance event for five hundred women in the historic Old Mint Building in the French Quarter. As Lacy described it at the time: “We had young and old, rich and poor, black and white, all sitting together and feeling enormous pride and joy in their collective history and current achieve- ments.”31 But Lacy then goes on, in “Beneath the Seams,” to articulate for herself and for her readers what she sees as three ongoing problems in the sustainability of such works as River Meetings and Freeze Frame. “First, there was no single person . . . whose sole function in that city was the production of the work. . . .

Three Decades of Performing and Writing | xxvii 7. One hundred fifty-four women over the age of sixty explore aging in a performance before an audience of one thousand people: Whisper, the Waves, the Wind, Suzanne Lacy with Sharon Allen, soundtrack by Susan Stone, San Diego, California, 1984. Photo by Margaret Frye.

Second, the goals for a later performance were . . . gradually subsumed by more immediate, familiar, and personal goals. Third, there was no national vision . . . [that] these groups in separate cities could connect to.” Lacy continued for the rest of the 1980s to create performances—many of them hugely ambitious in terms of scale, energy, finances, and vision—that drew together women of different ethnic, class, and educational backgrounds to speak in front of large audiences, in a combination of live and prerecorded voices, about issues in their lives. At the same time, Lacy continued her practice of analyzing these works in various published texts. In addition to River Meetings and Freeze Frame, Lacy’s performances of the 1980s included Tree, Ithaca, New York (1981); Immigrants and Survivors, Los Angeles (1983); Whisper, the Waves, the Wind, La Jolla, California (1984); The Dark Madonna, Los Angeles (1986); and The Crystal Quilt, Minneapolis (1987). Whisper, the Waves, the Wind was created with Sharon Allen. A year and a

xxviii | Introduction half in the making, it involved 150 women between the ages of sixty and one hundred who, dressed in white, ceremoniously walked down steep stairs to gather on a beach in Southern California.32 An audience of about a thousand attended, listening from the top of the beach cliff to prerecorded tapes (scored by Susan Stone) of the women talking about their lives, while, from this distance, also observing real-time conversations taking place on the beach.33 At the end of the performance, audience members could walk down to the beach and converse with the performers, integrating themselves into the event. Two years later, Lacy, Anne Bray, Carol Heepke, and Willow Young shaped The Dark Madonna around the themes of immigration, racism, and women’s relationships; the work comprised a conference, a series of intimate conversations in women’s homes, and a tableau performance staged in the Franklin Murphy Sculpture Garden at the University of California, Los Angeles (see chapter 16). On Mother’s Day, May 10, 1987, Lacy directed the hour-lon g Crystal Quilt, a sequel to Whisper, the Waves, the Wind. This time, however, the performance was staged indoors, in what is known as the Crystal Court (a space normally occupied by kiosks and a café) in the IDS Center, a downtown Minneapolis

8. Four hundred thirty older women applaud the audience at the conclusion of the performance, just before the audience of three thousand flooded onto the stage set. The Crystal Quilt, Suzanne Lacy, Phyllis Jane Rose, Nancy Dennis, Sage Cowles, Susan Stone, et al., Minneapolis, 1987. Photo Peter Latner. skyscraper designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee. The Crystal Quilt was the most ambitious and complex of all of Lacy’s 1980s tableaux vivants, as she often describes these grand, large-scale productions. In order to make this work, she moved away from Los Angeles for two years to live and teach in Minneapolis, working with existing Minnesota organizations as well as creating a new one expressly for this project.34 I attended the event, and described the experience at the time:

Watching these preparations, I had the sense of being on a Hollywood set. The feeling of a movie set continued as we watched the stately arrival of some 400 older black-clad “actresses,” who had been recruited from throughout the state. From highly diverse racial, cultural, and class backgrounds, they provided a compelling sight as they waited in the “wings” of the Crystal Court, while an audience of more than 3,000 people assembled above on the balconies. Accompanied by taped sounds and conversations that flooded the entire space, the 400 women . . . assumed their seats around small tables and unfolded the black covers to reveal red and yellow tablecloths. . . . Viewed from the balconies, the vision below was of a black, red, and yellow “living” quilt.35

How should an artist proceed from such an astonishing and rich event? Stay in Minneapolis to continue the work there? Extend the project nation- ally, and build a leadership network, even a curriculum, with older women?36 Or move on—thematically and/or geographically—elsewhere?

Of Performance and Pedagogy: Oakland, California, 1990s

“I find myself drawn to teenagers, particularly the dilemmas faced by inner- city teenagers. They’re a group about whom I know very little, except what I see in the media. . . . I’m at a low point in terms of energy, a state of question- ing, really. . . . Every ten years or so, I seem to take some time to sit back and wait for a shift in the form of my work.”37 In 1991, when she made this statement (in an exchange with Rachel Rosen- thal, ironically titled “Saving the World”), Lacy had already settled in the Bay Area, where she would live for fifteen years (from 1987 to 2002), before re- turning to Los Angeles.38 In Oakland, she had assumed the deanship of the Fine Arts School at the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC), which meant that for the first time in her career, Lacy held a high-p owered position as an upper-echelon administrator at a mainstream art school, a situation that xxx | Introduction allowed her access to institutional support and required, as part of her job, that she orchestrate public art dialogues and examine, invent, and develop educational programs.39 Lacy already had extensive teaching experience.40 But beginning in the 1990s, she analyzed professional art education and, concurrently, institution- alized “public art” training courses and programs, which would have a signifi- cant influence on her writing and general thinking about public art, its history, its current scope, and its future possibilities.41 During the 1990s, Lacy was—in addition to her administrative duties at CCAC—producing a prodigious amount of art, not only in the Bay Area but also elsewhere in the United States as well as abroad. In the United States, she created Cancer Notes: Seven-Day Genesis (1991), based on hourly interviews with patients, doctors, nurses, researchers, and administrators at a cancer research hospital in Buffalo, New York (see chapter 22). Two years later she started on an eight-part series, collectively titled Auto: On the Edge of Time, about family violence, using the metaphor of cars, installed at various sites between 1993 and 1994. In 1993, she was invited to be part of Cul- ture in Action, the ambitious Chicago public art program curated by Mary Jane Jacob. Lacy’s contribution was Full Circle, an overnight installation of one hundred half-ton rock monuments on the sidewalks of Chicago’s Loop, each bearing a plaque honoring a Chicago woman, and Dinner at Jane’s, in which fourteen well-k nown feminists from around the world gathered to exchange ideas over dinner at the city’s Hull House Museum at the University of Illinois. Abroad, Lacy created with various collaborators The Road of Poems and Borders, in Joensuu, Finland (1990); No Blood/No Foul, an installation for the Atopic Site Exhibition, Tokyo (1996); Under Construction: The Turning Point, in Van- couver, Canada (1997); and The Skin of Memory, Medellín, Colombia (1999). Together, this new art work and her new administrative job provoked Lacy not only to write about the “shift in the form” of her own work and her ideas concerning the training of public artists but also to organize and edit Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, published in 1995, a fascinating and broad- ranging anthology that has been widely influential in schools and the field.42 It was in Oakland, however, that Lacy committed to a passionate exploration of new genre public art in one of her most expansive projects to date. Young people, male and female—rather than exclusively women, as in much of her earlier work—were the focus for ten years of performances and installations on the politics of youth culture. A key work in this development was Code 33: Emergency, Clear the Air (1997–99), produced and directed by Lacy,

Three Decades of Performing and Writing | xxxi 9. One hundred fifty youth and one hundred police officers discuss their differences on the rooftop stage: Code 33: Emergency, Clear the Air, Suzanne Lacy, Julio Morales, and Unique Holland, Oakland, California, 1999. Photo by Chris Johnson.

Unique Holland, and Julio Morales (members of T.E.A.M.).43 After witnessing a rehearsal for Code 33, I noted the following about the interchanges between Oakland teenagers and police, two groups involved in the project that typi- cally viewed each other with suspicion, or worse:

There is a highly tentative, speculative sense of trust in the room that could be withdrawn on either side at any moment. . . . The man, a powerful- looking black Oakland policeman in off-duty casual clothes . . . is describing an imaginary encounter taking place late at night on an Oakland street between police and teenagers. He is addressing the equally tough-looking black Oakland teenager, wearing a headband and dressed in baggy pants, who sits opposite him. . . . In the small circle of police and teenagers there is a momentary silence. Eye contact. Tension. Who will speak next? The teenager stands up to demonstrate with a slightly ironic air—taking his hands out of his pockets—that he is not carrying a gun.44

Code 33 evolved over the course of two years, beginning with a series of art workshops and video productions, facilitated confrontational workshops between youth and police, media reports, and community discussions. It con- xxxii | Introduction cluded on October 7, 1999, when an audience of more than a thousand people observed the astonishing finale, staged in a floodlit, downtown, open-roofed garage, with a hovering helicopter, low-rider and police cars, and hip-hop dancing—a set that framed the intense verbal exchanges (sometimes confrontational and argumentative, sometimes surprisingly sweet in tone) between some 150 youths and 100 police officers arranged in small groups. True to form, shortly after the production of Code 33 Lacy began to critically examine its structure and impact in several contexts.45 For example, despite the success of the piece, Lacy speculated that she had “spent so much time on the institutional relationships and community building that laid the foundation for the performance, that [she] often wondered if there would be any art left. Conversely, the extravagance of the final performance and the economic expenditures in making it aesthetically powerful made it questionable to some community activists, although their political goals were similar to ours.”46 In another self-refle ctive text, “What It Takes,” written in 2002 with Ann Wettrich (chapter 23), Lacy laid out succinctly the many questions raised when artists collaborate on public art projects with youth in community settings, including issues related to aesthetics, shared authorship, control, collaboration, support, cross-racial relationships, and the need to listen.47 (Art- ists venturing for the first time into this realm could benefit greatly from studying this insightful text.) At the same time that her Oakland projects were culminating in Code 33, Lacy was also working in South America with Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, a Colombian anthropologist, now based in Canada. Riaño-Alcalá’s scholarship involved her long-term collaboration with an interdisciplinary team of scholars, activists, and educators in a small barrio with a long history of violence in Medellín, Colombia. In 1998, Riaño-Alcalá invited Lacy to help create a public art piece as part of this work. The result was a 1999 installation in a school bus that traveled around the neighborhood for ten days and housed some five hundred objects (accompanied by letters) collected from the barrio Antioquia residents—objects that were associated with traumatic memories. In “The Skin of Memory/La Piel de la Memoria” (chapter 24), a text they coauthored, Riaño-Alcalá and Lacy trace the process and ideas of the project, and examine the factors underlying its success: “The neutral space of art [was used] to create a public place that allowed people to sort through their past pains and concepts and imagine reconciliation. . . . It is also true that to call something ‘art,’ and through this challenge the social landscape, is to create a ‘new’ territory. For a brief period of time, at least, the new was neutral.”48

Three Decades of Performing and Writing | xxxiii 10. A moving museum installed in a school bus stopped at different places throughout the ten-day exhibition so that all residents of the violence-prone and territorialized community could safely visit: Skin of Memory/La Piel de la Memoria, Suzanne Lacy and Pilar Riaño-Alcalà, Medellín, Colombia, 1999. Photo by Lacy.

Of Debated Territories

“In the 1990s, a divide between activist practice and theory appeared to re- solve itself. . . . I felt it was time to articulate the originating premises of social justice within the developing public art discourse.”49 Since the late 1970s, in addition to writing about her own work, Lacy has published texts about and exchanges with other artists and writers with whom she has a strong affinity, including Leslie Labowitz, Judy Baca, Rachel Rosen- thal, Lucy R. Lippard, and myself, among others.50 At the same time, she had been putting her mind to “mapping the terrain” on a grander scale, sketching out histories of feminist, performance, and so- cially engaged art practices and various complications of these histories. Over the course of six years (1989–95), while in Oakland, Lacy gathered together critics, curators, and artists to map—in conversations and presentations in public and private, individually and collectively, and eventually in essays for Mapping the Terrain—their notions concerning “engaged, caring public art.”51 She wrote the book’s rich and lengthy introduction, “Cultural Pilgrimages and xxxiv | Introduction Metaphorical Journeys,” and also contributed an essay, “Debated Territory: Toward a Critical Language for Public Art.” In the book’s preface, she explains: “With this book, the other authors and I hope to make concrete a discourse that, while part of a thirty-year history, is reinvigorated today by the idealism of young artists and students. The tre- mendous recent interest in engaged, caring public art demands a context in art history and present criticism. It demands as well the guidance of its prede- cessors who can pass on strategies that allow the wheel to move forward, not suffer endless reinvention.”52 Over the last ten years, since Mapping the Terrain, Lacy has continued to de- bate in public (in lectures and at conferences) and in published writings about issues in these new territories. She has addressed new genre public artists’ intentions and expectations, questions around effectiveness (can art transform public life?), and the complexities (often involving cross-cultural and cross- class relations) of work and community situations in which these artists, including herself, operate. For a time she explored such ideas through her work with the Animating Democracy Initiative (ADI), an ambitious multiyear project (2000–2004) to explore and foster “civil engagement through arts and culture.”53 In 2001, Lacy participated in a three-day “Learning Exchange” in Chicago with some hundred other artists, community leaders, and scholars, organized by ADI. In “Seeking an American Identity (Working Inward from the Margins)” (chapter 25), Lacy outlines issues, some contentious, brought up during the ADI discussions—and observes: “For me it [the Exchange] was in fact a civic dialogue in form as well as content, the same volatile subjects simmering just under the skin of public life.”54 She investigates this notion of “civic dialogues” by studying a wide range of projects that included the 1999 restored “Slave Gallery” (part of the Lower East Side Community Preservation Project), the Jewish Museum’s Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art exhibition, the Andy Warhol Museum’s Without Sanctuary exhibition of lynching photographs, and Perseverance Theater’s production of Moby Dick in Alaska. With superb judiciousness, Lacy lays out the complex issues that such loaded material inevitably stirs up, revolving around two broad questions: First, how does one handle the innate “messiness” of such material? And second, how does one develop the necessary “transparency” in the presentation of it? Lacy ends her essay eloquently, stating that pivotal to discourse are “values and listening and inclusion. Within this paradigm, getting people to talk with each other, and perhaps as a result think or act differently, is a critical role for artists, creating meaningful rituals of our civic life.”

Three Decades of Performing and Writing | xxxv Leaving Art?

Lacy has given this book a provocative title: Leaving Art: Writings on Perfor- mance, Politics, and Publics. Certainly it is true that Lacy’s texts address performance, politics, and publics, but I would argue that, no, Lacy has not “left” art. As I see it, she is particularly inclined at the moment toward studying and writing about the arts in a broad set of contexts, through which she wants to understand and position more fully her own practice as an artist. Thus the last four essays in her book superbly articulate critical frameworks, ranging from “engaged” Buddhist practice to experimental political theater to public art and finally to Allan Kaprow’s role in these contexts. First comes “Cop in the Head, Cop in the Street” (chapter 26), in which Lacy relates her own practice and that of other feminist performance artists to the sophisticated and theoretically driven international experimental theater of the Brazilian director-theorist Augusto Boal.55 Attracted to Boal’s “efforts to transform theater from the ‘monologue’ of traditional performance into a ‘dialogue’ between audience and stage,”56 Lacy examines his Invisible Theater techniques intended to reach audiences outside the theater.57 She comments on Boal’s balancing act—how he manages to establish “a clear paradigm of dif- ference between his work and traditional theater while retaining enough of its aesthetic inheritance to clearly situate himself in the trajectory of theater scholarship.” Lacy invokes Boal in order to “demonstrate common ground” with feminist interventional performances prevalent in the 1970s, although she stresses that she was not introduced to his work until the 1990s.58 Nevertheless, Boal’s ideas (which she interweaves with Kaprow’s) now offer an interesting new lens through which to examine such work. Lacy notes that although she and Boal both use performance to challenge power, she suggests that “an even more fundamental similarity can be found in the underlying forces of urgency and opportunity that shaped our aesthetics.”59 The result is a fresh investiga- tion of certain early feminist work, including her own collaborations with Evalina Newman in Watts in the late 1970s and her T.E.A.M. work in Oakland in the 1990s, which culminated in engaging, literally, the “cop on the street” in Code 33. This text is followed by “Having It Good: Reflections on Engaged Art and Engaged Buddhism” (chapter 27), in which Lacy makes parallels, based on her own experiences and research, between U.S. engaged art and engaged Bud- dhism.60 (She has been a Buddhist since the mid-1980s, when Allan Kaprow xxxvi | Introduction introduced her to his teacher, Joko Beck.) The net she casts in this essay is wide. Although there are differences among Buddhists concerning the defini- tions of “engaged,” what all Buddhists have in common is the belief, as Lacy phrases it, that “the existence of suffering evokes a feeling of universal responsibility that compels action to alleviate that suffering.” Comparing this feeling of social responsibility to similar impulses felt among artists, Lacy traces a shared genealogy: “Both engaged Buddhism and engaged art found particularly fertile ground in the United States during the 1960s, a politically charged time when social justice, activism, and community engagement were being redefined by issues of race, war, gender, and economic equity.” As with all her textual explorations on the nature of public art making, Lacy continues to draw contrasts and parallels with other forms of practice in the hopes of teasing out new insights. With this essay she squarely raises a question avoided in most discussions of contemporary social art practices: Is art a form of public service? Her response: “Engaged Buddhists understand service as a practice of mindfulness that leads to an awareness of unity, which in turn regenerates the desire to serve. . . . The longing to serve is akin experi- entially to the yearning to create.” The third essay is “Hard Work in a Working-Class Town” (chapter 28), in which Lacy describes her rather undramatic, almost quixotic relationship with a small town in Kentucky. For six years, Lacy, Susan Steinman, and Yutaka Kobayashi worked on and off in Elkhorn City, a small town in the Appalachian Mountains. Its Main Street is “a conglomeration of vacant lots, old brick build- ings that hint of lost character underneath boarded windows, parked trailers, and a few new entries . . . [and nearby] the Big Sandy River . . . wanders lazily through town in the shape of a horseshoe.”61 The three artists regularly visited this “working-class town,” which Lacy compared to her own working-class background and her father’s Appalachian heritage. With literally a lot of “hard work” (they relied on relatively little funding and sporadic help from occasional students and the townsfolk), the artists designed and constructed benches, murals, gardens, and trails—whatever appeared to be needed.62 “This is an area that’s been deeply impacted by the ex- traction industry, the multinational coal and other corporations, so our goal was to create a kind of ecological sensibility there . . . to reconnect the people with their river, their memories of the river, their present treatment of the river.”63 In the course of “Hard Work in a Working-Class Town,” Lacy takes us from a meticulous description of the town, its aspirations, its inhabitants, and the

Three Decades of Performing and Writing | xxxvii 11. The Riverfront Park, featuring native plants, trees, and granite/concrete benches, was the centerpiece of the Blue Line Trail created over several years by the artists: Beneath Land and Water, Suzanne Lacy, Susan Leibovitz Steinman, and Yutaka Kobayashi, Elkhorn City, Kentucky, 2000–2005. Photo by Susan Leibovitz Steinman. surrounding landscape to an ending composed of a dreamlike series of images. She imagines that one evening toward dusk, storytellers and fiddlers will sit on Main Street, and that a choir of some two hundred white-clothed figures will station themselves on the bridge to sing shape note music. Lit candles in mason jars (alluding to the area’s history of brewing illegal moonshine), held together by a fifty-foot net, will be lowered onto the river to float. Lacy concludes her essay by saying that this possible future performance will be like an Appalachian quilt, but the work also carries another reference for her: “A Buddhist allegory of interdependency, Indra’s net spreads over the universe with a brilliant jewel at each node, the movement of any point affect- ing all the others.”64 Why did Lacy concentrate so much time and energy on this rather remote and small stage? After all, she lives in Los Angeles and has a long track record of orchestrating huge projects in metropolitan settings (Oakland, Minne- apolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles). She speculated in an earlier draft of this text about her motives for such a choice: “Wrestling with the complexity of scale—of the world’s problems, of art and its impacts . . . [projects] taking place at a grassroots level in local communities . . . offer metaphors and prac- xxxviii | Introduction tices of local resistance important in an era when governmental and corporate actions sometimes seem unstoppable.”65 These three essays—“Cop in the Head, Cop in the Street,” “Having It Good: Reflections on Engaged Art and Engaged Buddhism,” and “Hard Work in a Working-Class Town”—provide rich insights into a transitional period of an artist with an amazingly fertile mind. Is Lacy’s work in Elkhorn City a Buddhist practice of mindfulness? A form of theater? Is this a hint of what we might have in store? The fourth and final essay inLeaving Art is “Tracing Allan Kaprow” (chapter 29), written shortly after the death of Kaprow on April 5, 2006. Artforum asked a number of art historians and artists, Lacy among them, to meditate on his legacy. In her text, Lacy argues that “the case can be made that Allan Kaprow was an important influence on public art. . . . But you’ll never get there if you ignore his influence on feminist performance art in the seventies.”66 She also argues that Kaprow played an important, “but as yet uninvestigated role in the development of what would later be a performance-based public art practice.”67 Her picture of artistic Los Angeles in the 1970s challenges the reading of the period as presented that same year in Paris at the Pompidou Centre: Los Angeles 1955–1985: Birth of an Art Capital.68 Lacy’s recollection of this scene was a “messy and intertwined” mixture of “performance artists, conceptual- ists, feminists, Marxists, and artists of color.”69 Lacy, along with many other American artists and critics (myself included), attended the opening of the Pompidou exhibition. While there she began a series of interviews in small cafés with Swiss curator and critic Hans Ulrich Obrist (co-director/director of International Projects at London’s Serpentine Gallery). Clearly in a reflective mood, she describes the ambience of her early years in Los Angeles: “As performance artists . . . we were peripatetic. I met Annette Messenger, Ulrike Rosenbach, Marta Minujin from Argentina, [and] Iole de Freitas from Brazil.”70 In her discussion of Kaprow’s support of feminist artists, she talks about their shared “interest in the discourses and distrust of the institutions around art,” concerns that she and Kaprow had explored in multiple recorded conversations over the years in similar small cafés.

Looking Back, Looking Around, Looking Forward, 2006–2009

Lacy is at one of her creative turning points (just as she was at the end of the 1970s and 1980s), involving a balancing act between performance and its intense engagement, and writing and its solitude. She is working on her next

Three Decades of Performing and Writing | xxxix book, Imperfect Art: Working in Public, a case study of her Oakland projects in the 1990s that she is undertaking in the context of a doctoral program with the On the Edge Program at Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland. But the pull toward the action of making new work remains. In the fall of 2006, Lacy and one of her earliest collaborators, Leslie Labowitz, began to organize a selection of their archives that centered predominately on the years 1970–1980.71 Not content with rearranging historical documents, “we decided . . . rather to do a project about our archives—to place them as a performer within the work. . . . I suggested we interview—crude camerawork and all— twelve young women as they rustled through our archives with white gloves, selecting what was of interest to them.”72 In March 2007, I saw the first installation of this project, The Performing Archive: Restricted Access, at the 18th Street Art Center in Los Angeles. It con- sisted of shelves of labeled banker boxes (for example, Box 23, “Ariadne Pho- tos,” and Box 24, “Lacy, Performance Relics”) and, inserted among the boxes, twelve small television monitors that displayed video interviews with young women artists born during the 1970s or early 1980s. These women addressed their own relationship to feminism, and singled out what had interested them in the archives. For example, one woman held up a mask of the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (a relic of a protest against the museum in 1980), and then placed it mockingly on her face. The installation was for me one of the most imaginative and original expressions of the complex relationship between different generations of feminists (currently a much discussed topic), allowing members of a younger generation to “read” work by an older generation and to interpret it in their own terms. Lacy’s reexaminations are taking place within, and are obviously influ- enced by, the context of multiple exhibitions of women artists here and abroad and a current fascination with early performance restagings and reframings.73 Among the most prominent of these are Marina Abramovic’s Seven Easy Pieces (Guggenheim Museum, New York City, 2005) and recent re-creations of Allan Kaprow’s Happenings and installations. Lacy herself has been involved in restagings of her early work, such as Stories of Work and Survival (Los Angeles, 2007)74 and also Kaprow’s. In 2008, the architect Michael Rotondi, the media producer Peter Kirby, and Lacy created Trade Talk, an installation and performance for Kaprow’s retrospective, Allan Kaprow: Art as Life, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The title was a play on Kaprow’s Trading Dirt, a 1988 project in which he traded buckets of dirt with neighbors and xl | Introduction friends. The artists installed a square platform of packed dirt under a float- ing metal and cloth canopy, with a small circle of chairs lit by hanging un- covered light bulbs and a phone booth—two favorite props in Kaprow performances. Audience members and invited guests engaged with the installation by providing audiotaped reminiscences, planned and spontaneous, of the experience of being in a Kaprow event. Of the reflective process set in motion as people gathered in the installation, Lacy remembers, “While sitting in the circle of chairs over several days, listening to and videotaping Allan’s friends and colleagues, it occurred to me it was like sitting shiva, reflecting on the meaning of Allan’s life and work.”75 As I muse, yet again, on the art and writing of Suzanne Lacy in the fall of 2009, while we edit and proof this anthology, it feels singularly appropri- ate that the book is being published in 2010. This present juncture in Lacy’s art and thinking—combined with the current exhibitions and critical activity taking place around women artists and feminist art, together with the re- staging of Happenings and performances—makes it a perfect moment for the publication of Leaving Art, providing an opportunity for reflection, a moment of suspense, not only for Lacy but also for us, her public. I’m not particularly worried about whether Lacy “leaves” art or not, but I am deeply interested in what she will do in the future with her brilliant imagi- nation, her constant curiosity, her restless energy, and her engaged politics. By the time this book is published I suspect we’ll know the answer to the question: What does Suzanne Lacy think is needed in the world these days, and what can she contribute?

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