Archiving Photographs and Thinking about Performance Art

As I filed folders away in the warm light of the afternoon, I came across a set of photographs from Suzanne Lacy's "Three Weeks in May." While I had seen many of these types of photographs before, it was the first time I was able to see and hold the originals.

Since I was a girl, I have always been interested in primary documents. My mother, an incredible woman and librarian, taught me the value of good source material from a young age. I used to go up to the third floor of her library, get on a step stool, and pour over back issues of The New Yorker Magazine from the 40's. Then I would go back to her office and take out the oldest book she had in there, just for the sake of holding it. I soon began to realize that there is something magical about archives. This past year, I worked for the Urban Archives at Temple University. My job responsibilities ranged from scanning photographs, to cataloging, to fixing up old reels of 16mm film.  I loved being able to hold these documents that were decades and sometimes centuries old. There could be a story behind each photograph, and yet there is only a certain amount of knowledge I can get from one glance.

I began to organize the photographs in her drawer, putting them in archival slips and carefully placing them into piles. The images began to resonate with me more than they had before, and my mind wandered to performance pieces that I had done. In the fall, I began researching the feminist art movement and specifically performance based pieces. My research paralleled my own self discovery of using my body to explore and occupy space. Over time I began to understand why so many women artists use performance as a way to create a dialogue about their bodies and their sense of being a female. There is a power in performance art, there is an immediacy. Somehow, this power was able to be carried through Suzanne's photographs. Holding these documents I felt a connection to the pieces and to these individuals who were strangers to me.

At some point Suzanne and I had a quick conversation about feminism today and how no one really wants to talk about it in art school. Critiques fall flat as people avert their gazes and talk about other aspects of the piece. My sense is that most women (or at least college age women) don't see that there are still issues present, so acknowledging feminism in art is a mute point in 2012. She remarked how that was sad, and that women should be able to have dialogues about feminism. Without these conversations we wouldn't be where we are today. Hopefully, by doing this project I can share the work these women have done and inspire other women to continue investigating these topics.

Tomorrow I will be going to talk to Janet Owen Driggs and Andrea Bowers. While doing some preliminary research I ran across this interview of Andrea and this one question fit very nicely in with the conversation Suzanne and I had :

Despite innumerable museum shows of “feminist art,” a lot of young artists eschew the term for fear of being ghettoized. What is the future of feminist art?
The fear that you speak of is exactly the reason why we need feminism today. However, in my experience there are so many young artists who proudly participate in the feminist movement and address it as subject matter in their work. Until we have gender equality, until LGBT youth live without fear, until women have equal pay, until woman have control over their reproductive rights, until violence against women ends, it will be essential that we have a feminist movement and feminist art.