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.

If you're in LA or NY go see this!

This was incredible.

Archiving and Upcoming Artists

Yesterday, I was able to meet up with Suzanne Lacy to help her with some archiving work. We met at the Otis Public Practice Grad Studio in Santa Monica. Somehow, I managed to avoid traffic and arrive twenty minuets ahead of schedule. Unfortunately though, I was pretty lost in the space. After wandering around for ten minuets I ran into a woman who I had met a week prior at the storage facility downtown. Apparently, the studio is part of a larger studio complex named 18th Street Art Center. This is the center's message off of their website:
"18th Street Arts Center is an artists’ residency program that provokes public dialogue through contemporary art-making. We value art-making as an essential part of a vibrant, just and healthy society. Through our artist residencies we are a contemporary art hub that fosters inter-cultural collaboration and dialogue. 18th Street’s residencies, exhibitions, public events, talks, and publications encourage, showcase and support the creation of cutting-edge contemporary art and foster collaboration and interaction between artists locally, nationally and internationally."

Since they have so many studios I wasn't quite sure where to go. The woman who I met happily led me to the studio space while introducing me to Leslie Labowitz-Starus, who collaborated with Suzanne in Three Weeks in May and Three Weeks in January, along various other projects.
The studio was spacious and comfortable, with a kitchen, a community table, a couple of blackboards, computers, and all the back issues of Public Art Review you could ever want. Suzanne arrived and we had a protein filled lunch of sausage and hard boiled eggs. Then we got to work organizing. Overall we got a lot done, but for me it was great to talk to her and be able to see glimpses into her work.

The rest of the day was spent sitting in traffic heading back to the Valley. In the evening though, I got to see an old friend from the east coast who moved out here with her parents a few years back. We had a lovely dinner in Studio City where we saw the youngest daughter from Modern Family eating with her boyfriend (?).... I am not one to follow celebrities but it was pretty funny.

In other news: tomorrow I am meeting with Sandra de la Loza to have a conversation and hear more about her work. An interesting project she did was installing "corrective" historical plaques and monument markers next to official plaques at certain sites. The idea was to investigate how one history becomes enshrined while another one is erased. This was formed through the Poncho Research Society.

On Friday, I will be meeting with Janet Owen Driggs (from the lecture last week) and Andrea Bowers. I will hopefully be helping Suzanne and Andrea set up for a performance in November at the Drawing Center.

It has been a busy week.

Carolina Caycedo Interview

This past Friday I conducted an interview with Carolina Caycedo. I entered her grad studio in Downtown LA around 10 am. A bit late because I ran into traffic on the 101 and missed my exit. Her studio was clean and organized, with books and a few collages hanging around. I showed her my interview questions and gave her a few minutes to look them over. I was hoping that we could get through the first few and the interview would flow into more of a conversation. I won't go into too much of the conversation itself, but highlight a few things that really stuck out to me.

She has gone between making objects, to doing performances, to staging interventions. When I asked about being a female and doing social practice she drew a very interesting connection that I hadn't thought of before. She talked about how women (within traditional gender roles) often do things that don't lead to a product, whether that be cleaning, taking care of your child on day to day basis, or gardening. In this same vain, social practice is an action that does not lead to a product. This kind of thought process reminds me of Mierle Ukeles and her maintenance art. As people, we do many "remedial" tasks that don't lead to an object but that doesn't mean these actions should go unrecognized.

Another interesting point that she brought up was the idea of Value. How we choose to assign values to things and we might challenge our own notion of value. She has worked with this idea through her bartering projects, challenging participants to think about what that object actually means for them, and for others.

What I found very fascinating about her work is that she wants to investigate daily life and how small actions can spark bigger ruptures in society. When we talked about notions of what Public meant, she brought up an interesting project she did in Spain where she created a collaborative project with people in the area. In this project she assigned collective ownership to the piece that was made which was a tent structure. The museum bought the piece but then participants could take the piece for a week at a time if they had an event they wanted to have it for, or just to have it for a little while.

One last thing that she taught me, was to be more open minded. I keep wanting to dismiss the gallery and institutions, but the fact is there can be room for those and for public work. There is a practical side to art making that needs to be recognized, because there are opportunities in all realms. 

Regina Jose Galindo

I ran across Regina's work a few months ago while doing some preliminary research. Unfortunately, her name is etched in some notebook from whenever, and I forgot that I had looked at her pieces. On Thursday though, I was reminded of her by a professor from the Otis public practice program.

She is an artist from Guatemala who does a lot of political performance pieces.

Here is an interview she gave to BOMB Magazine:
http://bombsite.com/issues/94/articles/2780


She also has a piece at molaa (Museum of Latin American Art) right now. And on Thursday she is doing a skype interview with the curator from molaa. If you're in the LA area you should go see it!

Incredible day full of incredible people

Today was one of the more intense days thus far. I finally, after great anticipation, got to meet Suzanne Lacy. She welcomed me kindly and gave me quite the day. It started by driving in LA for the first time, and seeing what traffic was really like. The NJ turnpike has nothing on route 101. After successfully following directions, I arrived at a storage unit in downtown LA. There, I met two women who had worked with Suzanne previously, one of which is the director at LACE, and the other, a researcher looking at Three Weeks in January. Suzanne arrived, and she got to work discussing her plans to archive Three Weeks in January. The conversation was fascinating, in that I got to learn how social practice artists, such as Suzanne, pick what will represent an entire project.

After the meeting, Suzanne invited me to go to MOCA with a few of her graduate students who had just completed their program. We all walked around the Land Art Exhibition which was very interesting. Surprisingly (or not), it was a fairly male dominated show with bits and pieces of Ana Mendieta and Judy Chicago mixed in. I would love to go back though and get a better feel for the exhibition as a whole.

The rest of the night was spent grabbing dinner, talking to wonderful MFA students, and hearing a fantastic lecture at MOCA. The lecture was with Janet Owen Driggs, Suzanne Lacy,

and mediated by Grant Kester. It was entitled: performing Activism: Mediagenic Art from Three Weeks in May to the Occupy Movement. Afterwards, Suzanne introduced me to some more fantastic women who I will be in touch with while staying in LA.

I am sure there are bits I am leaving out, but I am still on EST and tired as ever. To be updated soon with links and more information! 

Why do I want to do this?

On my way to work, my internship, school, I’d sit on the subways next to complete strangers, closer than if we were on our first date. There was monotony in these daily rides, but moreover there was a poignant sense of isolation. I found myself wanting to know who these people were, hear their stories and break through this isolation. Perhaps it’s because as a studio artist I often work in isolation,  that I felt the need to connect to my audience and to contextualize my work in real time and public space.  This drew me to a desire to learn more about community art and particularly the potential of using art as a tool for enfranchisement and social change within communities. I realized that I had a strong desire to  use my own art to work with those communities and create an exchange of knowledge and empowerment.

Motivated and impassioned to understand the experiences of isolation and marginalization I was drawn to the female artist  community. For the past few semesters I have been exploring gender roles and what it means to be a female artist today. I’m hopeful that my research will help me understand my own art as well as the art of other female artists especially those who engage in public and activist art. This project will provide me with the unique opportunity to study and to work at nexus of community and activist art with a particular emphasis on the subjects of feminism and urban social conditions.

Part of what led me to this field of research was a paper I wrote for my honors community arts seminar last semester on Suzanne Lacy. Lacy’s view of art  and the accessibility of art proved to be a powerful introduction into female activist art. At the same time, I felt that my views on art were very in tune with hers.
 Carolee Shneemann once called herself "A painter who has left the canvas to activate actual space and lived time."  This quote speaks directly to the type of artist I am and am trying to be. I want to be involved as an artist in real spaces.   

Much of the reason Suzanne's art took place in public space, and many other female artists at the time, was because they weren't being shown in the traditional art spaces, i.e. galleries and museums. These women created their own space, and played by their own rules. I was deeply inspired by their use of place and their ability to engage larger audiences outside of the art world. 

A lot of this project revolves around the idea of utilizing public space. I became enchanted with this idea as a kid, when I would drive home from school, looking out the window for something new. I’d get excited if something had been moved or something was a different color. This desire to exist outside of normalcy is common for artists, but shouldn’t we grant everyone the ability to live in a world outside their own? As artists, we can do this. We can create alternative worlds and spaces for everyone to inhabit, we just have to provide the tools.

My introduction to interventionist art began with the work of street artists. Plastering walls with their wheat pastes and graffiti they transformed spaces. Surrounded by a desolate streetscape, a small piece would be revived, something new within a muted world. They continue to create worlds that are right outside our doors.

On another note....

  I was also influenced by the work I did with the WOOP, Women Occupants of Philadelphia. I was dismayed by the dominance of the white male voice and the disenfranchisement of women and minorities in the Occupy Movement. While, I recognized that such an egalitarian movement was antithetical to discrimination on the surface, old problems of authority, marginalization and power remained. Inspired by Lacy, I proposed a relational aesthetics piece that aimed to actualize a space where female participants could share stories of injustice and receive words of empowerment in return. The project proposal centered on women participating in the creation of a quilt, by piecing together squares containing their own comments and illustrations and through the process sharing their stories.

I continued to do work with storytelling this past semester when I created a simple intervention. I put eight pieces of duct tape on the floor to create two separate boxes. I would sit in one box and wait for someone to inhabit the other. Once they sat down, I would ask them to share a story with me and in return could ask me anything they wanted. People really didn't take advantage of that last part. Anyways, the project was successful in that I explored different places, sat with various people, and had many conversations.

More recently I have been working with a colleague on “Femizine,” a monthly zine focusing on feminist issues around particular themes. There is a site where participants can submit poems, stories, and “spreads” relating to their personal perception of women. We are also in the process of reaching out into the general Philadelphia community for their input. We hope to provide an alternative to the mass-media depiction of women, while empowering female identified persons.  I have been engaged in other recent projects which involve the basketry technique of coiling to make sets of female breasts.  The objects were used in a performance piece to catalyze a discussion revolving around sexuality, domesticity, and gender neutrality.

These various projects are proving to be a personal introduction to women making activist art in public spaces. They have also made me realize the lack of knowledge surrounding these women artists.  I am frustrated by the lack of recognition they get for the work that defined an artistic movement. I hope that this project will raise awareness of these women and open up a dialogue between artists working today and the women.

 I transferred to Tyler because of its strong community arts program, urban studies, and excellent painting and sculpture program. The passion and the dedication of my peers and faculty has pushed me to explore the boundaries and assumptions of my own art.  My experiences thus far have drawn me towards these areas of activist and feminist art, but I am hopeful that this research will raise new questions to be answered and new open new pathways for my personal artistic growth.

disclaimer: 

I apologize if any of this is too haphazard. I am a bit jet lagged... but loving LA! I got to my Cousins house today, which is where I will be staying for most of my stay and met my baby second cousin who is four months old and too adorable to handle. Tomorrow, I am going to meet Ms. Lacy at her archives downtown and listen to a lecture she is giving at MOCA.