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