Suzanne Lacy

This is a great day for me to be here, because Judy and Amalia and I go way back. Our common interest in social issues, activism and education brings us together today. By now you have probably sifted through enough examples to begin to understand that there is a common language we are using, including words such as audience, public space, temporality, relationship, collaboration, meaning, values and social change. This rapidly growing sector of practice has developed in the past twenty-five years a common language. Today we are at the point where we can have a shared dialogue. One of the more difficult issues around this work is one of assessment. When I started, the question was, "Is this art?" Now the question is, "How do we evaluate this? Do we evaluate it in terms of its effectiveness as a change agent? Its appearance of political correctness? Its visual properties? Or do we evaluate it in terms of its originality, the coherence of the model or in terms of its ability to transform paradigms?"

I'd say the fundamental thing we have to ask is, "What is the ability of this work to transform paradigms?" This is not a new idea. Another question we should ask about this work is where did it come from, because we want to know on what ground it stands, what political context it comes out of, what social and political forces have brought it to the fore at this time. How are artists' practices located in the current social and political cultural themes? One of the things I think is important about this work is that more or less consciously, most public art is an attempt to transform, challenge or sustain certain kinds of paradigms of social space, of relationships that occur in the space, of identity, cultures and differences and of ethics. This work is a challenge to what we have known as art prior to the last two decades. It comes out of a heritage of challenges to the status quo, art called avant garde art. Most public art acts on how we perceive the world.

A paradigm is a mind set, how you see and arrange and conclude and therefore, how you will act. It is the map to the territory. It helps you negotiate and interpret the territory. In the seventies, when Carolee Schneimann pulled a scroll out of her vagina and read a statement questioning why the female body was excluded from that particular film series, she was challenging the right of the female body, presence and mind to be there. She was rearranging the map. In 1977, when I did "Three Weeks in May," with a huge map of the city of Los Angeles, on which we stamped the rapes that occurred every day, we were rearranging people's perceptions of Los Angeles and safety for women.

What we call public art today is what I would call a map. It is a new set of concerns that have been progressively built for at least twenty-five years. It's a map that most clearly articulates the current issues within which we explore art's relationship to daily life, to public meaning and social justice. As such, it is a politicized terrain.

How do you evaluate public art? I ask you again. By asking questions about the social origin of the ideas, the context in which it takes shape and the operating paradigms of the individual artist. These questions will be political as well as aesthetic. One might be, "What does the artist believe to be true about public life?" After Judy's talk you will be able to tell me what she believes to be true about public life. You will know her position and her operating paradigm. You also can often see what the artist believes to be true about the role of art. I don't mean this to be judgmental; don't leap into political correctness. That is not a good way to evaluate art, which is a special field, one of great exploration. With exploration you need space to make mistakes. It is hard when you are operating in the public realm, because mistakes cost more. When you come to an art work, you should have an open, questioning mind.

My operating way of looking at art is as a process of inquiry on both personal and collective levels. It's pedagogical and can be an agency for social change, but doesn't have to be. It is unpredictable, mysterious and operates with and without rationale.

I would divide my work from the early seventies into roughly three areas of inquiry. One is the self. The questions about the self are fundamental to art making, but they include my self and another person's self. It includes questions about memory, body, experience, identity and purpose in life. The second area is relationship, what happens in the space between people. In the seventies, a lot of us conceptualists talked about the notion of the intangibles that exist between me and you. That became not only the space for art but also the subject of art and often the art itself. Relationship includes personal as well as social relationship, perception of and attitudes toward others and ethics. The third issue includes the self in the context of others—questions about representation, race, gender, public space, systems, public policy and social justice.

Rather than show you a few recent works, I am going to show you some of the ways in which I got from your age to where I am now and how those questions in each work leads naturally to the next form of work. I think all your work should include a question. Then the work becomes the attempt to find the answer. Coming from pre-med studies in the late sixties, my early inquiries were about the physical body. Why do I have to die? What does it mean to be born into a woman's body? Who is a self when the parts of the body are so transplantable?

It's a short step from wondering about the body to wondering about relationships with others. This is part of a series of works on aging. What is the role of empathy in contemporary art? What kind of art would express the intangibles of empathy? Relationships are politicized arenas, as feminists brought to our attention. Body, self, relationship—in the context of the seventies, the women listened to women talk about hidden experiences.

I began to wonder about what was happening to women's bodies, which took me into social investigation. This is a series of works called "Prostitution Notes," which I did to understand the relationship between my experience and hookers' experience. The outgrowth of questions about the self and the body led to the notion of the transgressed self and violence against the body. This is called "Ablutions," in 1972, on rape. Those questions about violence led to questions about how the media represented violence. This is part of a series that went on for about five years, that took art concerns about violence against women into the public arena. In 1972, no woman talked about being raped. You kept it as a secret. By 1977, we were part of a massive public movement. This is called "In Mourning and In Rage," a media event by Leslie Labowitz and myself, on the news coverage of sex murders by the Hillside Strangler. The performance was designed for the media.

Looking at how media operated led to questions about public space and the creation of art works that attempted to address the entire environment, like "Three Weeks in May." It consists of a city-wide series of environmental activities to talk about the work. It was driven by the imperative of our own values for social change that we moved from the gallery into the street. Why talk about rape in a gallery when on your way home you could be assaulted? The topic of the work demanded that we invoke a broader audience.

Leslie Labowitz and I formed "Ariadne, a Social Art Network," which, for three years, hosted art works, dialogues between news media, artists, women of different ethnicities, activists and elected officials, concerned with violence against women.

Education was another important strategy. At the Women's Building we looked at how forms that were intrinsic to female culture. Dinner parties, for example, were templates on which you could structure work, like the International Dinner Party, a performance action for 2,000 women that I created to honor Judy Chicago on the opening of her Dinner Party.

In conceptual and performance works, everything was up for grabs. Many of us operated outside the arena of the art world, so we could do pretty much what we wanted. In the eighties, we were becoming increasingly competent in scale. Scale became an issue for a number of artists including me, Judy Chicago, Judy Baca, Lynn Hershman. We began to move into public space and assume a lot more space because our passion about the issues demanded an engagement with a broad public.

Finally, we wondered how change actually occurs. Questions about audience begun in the seventies became in the eighties much more complicated. Who were they? How did we partner together? What did they believe? What was the significance of cultural difference? How could artists help transform attitudes? How could we provide an intimate experience in a large public space? This is the "Dark Madonna," a project featuring about 200 women for the Franklin Murphy Sculpture Garden at UCLA. We positioned it as a discussion between women of various ethnicities during media controversy about immigration.

By the late eighties, my questions had become these: How to understand and intervene in various social systems? how to operate in a very large media environment, like Los Angeles? how to operate over time? how to encourage other artists to collectively work with me? how to provide frameworks for other artists and exhibition opportunities? how to develop models for various forms of collaboration and audienceship? how to produce works that were like extended performances in specific places?—for example, one week in a hospital in upstate New York, meeting with administrators, nurses and patients on their experiences with cancer and their understanding of the institution—for instance, in Finland, a project that used the theme of borders in the context of an international music festival on world peace. People read in different languages in the streets. People met in the market and traced the outlines of their meetings on the ground, so that by the end of the day there was a portrait of the city on the ground. Finally, 215 teenagers met to transgress the border between the land and the water in a ten-minute piece that took a year to prepare.

Now I'd like to shift to tell you in detail about a few pieces I have done since the late eighties. "This Crystal Quilt" was a performance that culminated in 1987. The complexity and longevity and audience for this work is part of the work. In a conceptual performative framework, you begin the performance the day you walk into town. Two years later you may end it with something that people recognize as performance, but every interaction, every meeting, the media campaign are all part of the performance. This one took two and a half years and was an hour in presentation. In studies of mass media, one of the single most unrepresented groups is older women. Media representation of men and women in their sixties is vastly different and underscores attitudes that find their way into public policy. Between 1985 and 1987, I worked in Minnesota with the Humphrey Institute's "Reflective Leadership Program," the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and the Minnesota Council on the Aging. We had classes in local colleges, a leadership seminar for older women, public screenings of videos and so on, until the final performance on Mother's Day, which was broadcast live and featured 430 older women, (including my mother). The quilt designed by Miriam Shapiro and soundtrack by Susan Stone were part of the project which featured seventeen artists working together on the subject of older women.

The next two works are like this work in terms of the premises they are founded on, the paradigms out of which I am working. Although these bear little formal reference to each other, they are connected in their participation in an ambitious project to shift social attitude. They all have extensive preparation periods and all are attempts to address a ubiquitous social prejudice. The paradigm is shaped by the built environment in which women are largely absent as makers. In each case, redressing public absence with presence is one of the major strategies. At the opposite end of the spectrum of older women is teenage girls. Three years ago, I met with a group of women from the Vancouver Park Board who wanted a model community organizing project. The theme that most interested them was difficult to articulate at the time, "girl culture." We decided to do a project on the relationship between young women, their health and well being in an environment that is rapidly undergoing transformation. (Vancouver is growing rapidly due in part to Chinese immigrants leaving Hong Kong.) This project was a couple of years in the making, beginning with a workshop with thirty young women, between fifteen and eighteen years old. We worked together to create zines, posters, a media campaign and a performance called "Turning Point." The audience arrived and came through fence holes into a live construction site and witnessed the young women talking about their lives. One of the metaphors of the project was the building, the construction.

Another similar project is "Full Circle," done in Chicago a few years ago, curated by Mary Jane Jacobs as part of the Culture in Action project. The physical environment of Chicago is incredible in terms of public monuments. There is not a single piece, except the one currently in process by Louise Bourgeois, by a woman or that reflects a woman's image from a female sensibility. There are some portraits of women who represent ideals, like hope of justice. This is in spite of a rich history of activism in Chicago, including Jane Addams and the Hull House. Chicago is a very activist community today as well. We put out a call for nominations in the various communities for women who should be honored and selected 90 women. Then we took another ten women from the past and put the names of all 100 women on plaques and we shipped 100 boulders in from a woman-owned quarry in Oklahoma. Then, one night in May, we loaded the boulders on two skip loaders and placed them on sidewalks around the Loop. The boulders were the same limestone that the buildings were made of and the next morning, when the Chicagoans woke up, they thought their infrastructure was falling apart. The news media picked it up. The boulders stayed in place for three months. At one point, we celebrated the women, who went to their rocks and had mini-celebrations. Eventually they became part of the public surround and stayed in place for four months. Then we removed them. The second part of the project was to invite fourteen important women from around the world to reenact the kinds of dinners that women at Hull House had at the turn-of-the-century.

The next project is called "Auto on the Edge of Time." In the seventies, we had a lot of trouble convincing people that social and politicized experience were an appropriate material to make art from. Now we understand that is something you can do. In the early nineties, homelessness was, for a while, the topic of countless student art works. Then the topic shifted to inner city teenagers and to battered women. I think that using social issues is an important move in art schools. But in earlier work on topical social issues, the art work often preceded public recognition of the problems. In fact, we intended that the art work would expose the issues. Now it seems as if the media is giving us the ideas of what we ought to be doing work about. There is nothing wrong with that, but this shift in the relationship of the art work and public awareness means our role is no longer to make people aware.

I began to wonder what the next role for art would be. I thought about how we condense an identity into a social topic. A battered woman has a very complicated identity, made up of all sorts of things: class, gender, social position and so on. She is not simply "the battered woman." In making this kind of art we often condense identity into a single victimized position. The question might now be, how can we deconstruct our own tendency to reduce identity? So I developed "Auto on the Edge of Time." It is a cross-cultural, cross-age, cross-gender conversation about family violence. It extends into about seven sites in a series of installations across the country. We began with the question: How can we talk about family violence without stereotyping battered women? We used the car as a metaphor. This is the first project, in Pittsburgh, at the Three Rivers Arts Festival. It's named in honor of the underground railroad that operated there. Along this track are three cars, each representing different aspects of women's experiences. At the end is a phone booth in which women can talk to a lawyer, doctor and so on. They could also listen to the stories of women and choose to leave their own. Many left their own experiences.

We then moved the project to Bedford Hills State Prison in New York, a maximum security prison. It was hard to get three wrecked cars and a bunch of power tools into that prison, but we did, because there is a progressive woman warden there. For two weeks, we worked with a group of fourteen women who produced three more cars, based on their experiences. The battered car, which first looked like the body of a battered woman, at Bedford Hills became expanded. As a metaphor, it was also the site where violation of women took place. The inmates transformed these cars and learned how to use power tools. This is Audrey's car. She had thirteen kids and lived in a car in which she was gang raped. We took Audrey's car and made a little house inside. Every item of the house had written on it what had happened to a woman in that group with one of those objects. We created a brick wall car, which is what happened when they went for help. There is the myth that women don't go for help, but when you really listen to women or children you see that for years they have tried to get help. Embedded in the wall are objects from these women's lives and their prison sentences are stamped on there. Etched in the glass window are the stories. A huge proportion of the women and men in prison have been assaulted or abused in their homes. Finally, they insisted on the healing car, which has family portraits, an altar to the experiences that made them. Women prisoners are different from men prisoners in many ways. They don't try to escape as often, in part because they are connected to their families.

They told me to talk to the children, so we went to Niagara Falls and created an installation of all six of the cars and on the walls inside the gas station children did drawings of their experiences. Then we went to Cleveland and worked with young kids in a family shelter. Those kids made drawings that were put on this car. In this continuing conversation, we had a series of cars installed on the streets of Staten Island, a parody of the way the borough president put wrecked cars out to caution against drunk driving. Finally, a group of young women from Oakland created street signs about domestic violence made by the Department of Transportation.

I have one more project to show you, a series with youth in Oakland. I am beginning to work with an anthropologist on retrieval of memory and its role in a small part of the city of Medellin. The violence in Barrio Antiochia is everywhere, but most disturbing is the violence toward the young people. Young people in that context, like in Oakland, start becoming teenagers at about nine. This project in Colombia is too new to talk about, since I am just beginning it, but the questions it evokes are the same questions that prodded me to begin working in Oakland. The most important is, what are we doing to our children? The young people of this world are the canaries in the mines of our culture. When the canaries drop dead, you know you are in trouble. Young people in particular are demonized by the media. In beginning to work with young people in Oakland, it became impossible to ignore the systems with which they interface. The second question of this work is, how deeply and effectively can artists work within systems and institutions? Can artists affect public policy? Those are the questions that have led this work.

In 1992, Chris Johnson, a colleague at California Arts and Crafts, volunteered to work for a year in an Oakland high school. We knew only what the media told us about the youth that walked by our school each day. Oakland is a community that is very young. One quarter of the population is under twenty-one years old. The public schools of the city are 55% African American, 20% Latino, 20% Asian American, 5% white. It is an energized city, the birthplace of a lot of youth culture, a politicized environment. The police chief is black, the mayor is black. It is the environment out of which the Black Panthers came. It is a very exciting, aggressive political environment. In this context, the young people are the new demons of society.

We volunteered to work in a media literacy class for free at Oakland Technical High School. At the end of the year, we created a small performance with the kids that was picked up by the media. The next year, we developed a media literacy class for fifteen professors from different high schools in the area. We talked to the teachers about incorporating media literacy into their classrooms. Out of that, teachers and students formed a planning committee and we did this performance called "Roof is on Fire." It took place at dusk on a roof in downtown Oakland, with 120 kids. The audience listened to the young people talk about a set of pre-selected topics they had developed. "Shut Up and Listen" was the youth title for the performance. After the performance, the kids wanted to deal with the police. So we did a small project called "Youth, Cops and Videotape." We developed a training film for the Oakland Police Department that is now being used. From this, Oakland City Council member Sheila Jordon decided to develop a youth policy that gave money and credence to the rights of young people. I worked on that planning committee for a year. Out of that came a performance called "No Blood, No Foul."

Early studies indicate that girls and boys that go into the criminal justice system are themselves victims of crimes at an early age, but the girls who do not go into the criminal justice system as a result, go into the health care system with premature pregnancy, STDs and depression. We began doing work within the area of education and team parenting and developed a six-week summer class for thirty-six teenagers with the Alameda County Office of Education. After that, the girls and I worked on deconstructing Pete Wilson's public policy statement. We did an installation at Capp Street Gallery that was a twelve-foot-high crib, around which were drawings by the girls about their experience of pregnancy. Inside the crib was a deconstructed school room, the chaos that represents public pedagogy. There is also a sound track of Pete Wilson's state of the state address, talking about welfare reform and the role of teenage girls.

Analysis by Jodene Eikenberry

The language of public art has been evolving over the past twenty five years. Audience, public space, collaboration and social change are just a few of the words integral to the vocabulary of public art. This evolution brings up issues around assessment. How do we evaluate the art?—through the works ability to effect political change? Through the aesthetics of visual structures? Through conceptual implications?

Suzanne Lacy's answer is through the ability of the work to transform paradigms. She believes that, as an artist, she is a member of society. Community involvement is integral to her method and the critical dialogue that will come in part from the community. Her work traverses the ground between social activism and the performative spectacle. She seeks to provide discourses in public space to overcome fear and boundaries between individuals and groups of people.

For instance, in "Auto On the Edge of Time" Lacy worked with the theme of battered women. She constructed a piece that functions on many levels. Using the wrecked car as a metaphor—with it's dents and broken glass—she located a group of women marked by domestic abuse to transform several such cars into a sculpture. The women gained skills as well as created a forum for communication about their own experiences. The cars were then placed into the public context of the Pittsburgh Arts Festival. Included in the piece were several other components including a telephone booth where women could listen to recordings of others’ stories, leave their own, or call a live person to talk. The audience is, therefore, invited to participate with the work, where they become an integral part of its performative aspect. Lacy also does extensive media relations so that threads of the piece disseminate into mass culture. For Lacy, the work begins with the idea and the entire process of creation—"from educating the community, working with mass media, locating the work in its place, recruiting assistants and performers and networking with social institutions"—is the art in action.