The Art/Life Experiment

This essay was written as an introduction to Part I: The Art/Life Experiment section of "The Citizen Artist."

High Performance first appeared in the world with a woman on the cover, sitting on a dragster. It was so powerfully automotive an image that many people initially thought High Performance was a car magazine.

Front cover of High Performance #1, Spring 1978. Pictured: Suzanne Lacy in Cinderella in a Dragster. Performance by Suzanne Lacy, California State University at Dominguez Hills, 1976. Photo: Susan Mogul

The drag racer on the cover was a driver all right, the driver of a potent and exciting art scene in downtown Los Angeles: Suzanne Lacy. As we geared up High Performance, Lacy's work as an artist and a teacher at the Woman's Building was making news. She was one of the feminist artists who took advantage of the prevailing atmosphere of formal experimentation and firmly stirred social content into the bubbling aesthetic cauldron. The feminist dictum "the personal is political" might as well have been blazoned across her dragster like a corporate slogan. Addressing the burning issue of violence against women, she organized several notorious performance events in Los Angeles during 1977, ranging in scale from the intimate to the massive, and always proceeding from—and operating as—real events in women's lives.

Lacy's Three Weeks in May featured two enormous city maps of Los Angeles installed in City Mall Plaza, with the word "RAPE" stamped on them where women had been raped over the three-week period. She Who Would Fly was a gallery installation of women's shared memories of sexual assault, including a lamb cadaver with large white wings, suspended as if in flight; four women, nude and stained blood red, crouched like birds, intently watching the audience from a ledge above the space. In Mourning and In Rage... was a media event organized by Lacy and Leslie Labowitz and others, conceived as a response to their grief and rage over the incidents of rape-murder in Los Angeles connected with the so-called Hillside Strangler case, and as a demand for self-defense education in the schools. Nine women mourners, dressed in black and towering seven feet tall, emerged from a hearse at the steps of L.A. City Hall where they spoke, one at a time, in memory of the victims of violence wreaked upon women: "I am here for the rage of all women, I am here for women fighting back." Intended to manipulate the media into showing images of women acting powerfully and decisively in unison, as a counter to the images of fearful, terrorized and isolated women current in the media, the event was covered on six television news shows (one national feed) and several talk shows.

The Woman's Building was the intellectual gymnasium of the moment for Suzanne Lacy and her colleagues. At the time of our interview Lacy was teaching in the Feminist Studio Workshop graduate art program at the Building, then five years old. Acting Like Women by Cheri Gaulke, herself a student, then a teacher/administrator at the Building, precisely described the art/life method by which new art forms were forged there. Performance art, feminist education and consciousness-raising were the tools; the lives of the students were the materials. Only about a mile from the High Performance office in downtown L.A., the Building was a true hothouse of activity, and a magnet for women from all over the world. The art strategies, community-building techniques and coalitions created at the Building are models for art schools, women's action groups and community organizations far and wide, outliving the Building itself, which closed its doors in 1991.

So much of early feminist work made previously private realms public. Bonnie Sherk exemplifies the public artist whose material is private space. An environmental performance sculptor, her Public Parks were personal landscapes in which the public participated: a dead-end section of a freeway that for one day was covered with live turf and palm trees, and occupied by a cow and Sherk herself, "an oasis in the desert"; a picnic site on two concrete islands under a freeway, with cows, chickens and bales of straw; a downtown street closed for two days and covered with turf, trees and additional animals—sheep, goats, llamas. In her Sitting Still series, Sherk inserted herself in existing landscapes, such as a pool of water that had gathered in a disused parking lot, where she sat in an overstuffed chair to create a "frame" for the environment for passersby. When we interviewed her in Fall 1981, she had just completed her most ambitious piece to date, The Farm.

The space between two human beings became public art when two artists, Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh, galvanized the attention of the country by vowing to spend a whole year in New York City tied together at the waist by an eight-foot rope. During this time they agreed not to touch.

Montano's previous work included a variety of performances or actions during the 1970s that tested the boundaries between art and life: She was handcuffed to another artist for three days; she lived for four days with two other artists, calling all they did during that time art; she declared her house a museum, with advertised tours. Tehching Hsieh performed a series of one-year pieces in New York in which his life was labeled as art, with certain prescribed limitations or "frames." He spent one whole year in a cage inside his studio, during which time he spoke to no one and no one spoke to him. The following year he punched a time clock every hour. The year after that he vowed to stay outdoors without ever going inside.

For this interview, we turned to Alex and Allyson Grey, performance artists married to each other. In addition to their own diverse work in painting, they created a number of performances and environments in which they appeared as the embodiment of male and female halves of a whole, addressing stark and arresting questions about love and life and death. They seemed like the perfect couple of couples.

Rachel Rosenthal's eclectic methods of art making and workshop teaching focused openly on personal transformation. Her work speaks directly to the centrality of art and creativity in the life of the individual and the universe. Classically trained in art and theater, and exposed to the inner circles of the art world since her childhood in Paris, Rosenthal never stops growing, inquiring into new schools of thought, and scouring her own psychology for new insights to be used in her work. When we interviewed her in 1984, she was steeping herself in New Age philosophy and new information about the structure and function of the brain, and crafting new works about the well-being of the Earth. There was no telling where making art left off and the "mind/body spa" of The D.B.D. Experience began. People from all walks of life were flocking to her weekend marathon workshops for spiritual cleansing and creative rejuvenation. Nobody left her Los Angeles studio unchanged.

Barbara T. Smith is an artist whose artworks are, as she once wrote, "actual vehicles for personal transformation. They represent current art issues and reflect my inner personal developmental level at the same time." She has laid bare and literally experienced aspects of her life in performance, including Birthdaze, an examination of her relationship with men on her 50th birthday. This piece included an extended Tantric ritual with a male friend, for which they fasted for five days. Since the mid-'80s Smith has increasingly studied shamanic practices. Her article, written at the time of the Harmonic Convergence in 1987, discusses the uses of performance as potent community ritual.

Can community ritual actually create change? This has been a lifelong question at the heart of the work of choreographer Anna Halprin. A pioneer and innovator in the universal language of dance, Halprin has often changed our ideas of what dance and art can be. A legendary teacher in northern California, and founder of the San Francisco Dancers' Workshop (1955) and Tamalpa Institute (1978), she is known internationally for her community-specific rituals with large groups around the world. At the time of this interview she was working on Circle the Earth: A Dance in the Spirit of Peace, a dance for 100 participants. Here she discusses her deep belief in the power of art to affect essential change in human life on a universal scale.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles brought the "transformation" discourse down to earth, in an exceedingly practical exercise that related private matters to public life. Robert C. Morgan describes her motives in her massive real-time performance work, Touch Sanitation. During a pregnancy, Laderman conceived of a public artwork that would examine the caretaker role of women, and then caretaking itself. As part of the piece, she shook hands with more than 8,500 sanitation workers on the job in New York City. Morgan looks at the work both as traditional art and humanistic endeavor, laying down some basic precepts of the Art/Life Experiment.

In 1987 we published an issue on art and the environment, including the essay in this collection about the work of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison. The Harrisons are known for their large-scale projects that observe, comment on and alter our ecology. While their choice of subject matter leads to the assumption that they are environmental activists, we have placed them in this section on the Art/Life Experiment because their ultimate concern is the human environment—human well-being, human discourse, human interactivity.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña, in the first of many seminal articles he wrote for High Performance, directed our attention south of the border with "The Streets: Where Do They Reach?" We have excerpted sections on street performance from this lengthy report on performance art in Mexico City. Gómez-Peña discusses these prolific happenings as essential in the life of their culture, deftly relating them to the events of their time. An astute cultural commentator in both his essays and his own performance work, Gómez-Peña went on to win a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award and take his work to the most prominent art and theater venues in North America and Europe. His early work is described by critic Emily Hicks in "The Artist as Citizen" in the second section of this book.

These are only a few examples of stories in High Performance about the belief of artists that art is central to real life, and vice versa. We are firmly convinced that they laid the groundwork for other artists to attempt to affect real change, as activists and as members of their communities. Read on...

This essay was originally published in 1998 as part of "The Citizen Artist 20 Years of Art in the Public Arena: An Anthology from High Performance Magazine 1978-1998."

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002