Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz-Starus
Interviewed by Elana Mann
Radical pedagogy in California has a long and varied history, both in academic institutions and artist practice. The proliferation of experiments in radical pedagogy began in the late 1960s, bolstered by public policies such as the 1960 Donahoe Higher Education Act, which resulted in giving working class people, people of color and women access to a college education.
Starting in the late sixties two prominent artistic voices were also beginning to experiment with alternative pedagogical structures: Judy Chicago and Allan Kaprow. Chicago and Kaprow’s influence on art education, radical pedagogy and experimental art cannot be understated. Chicago revolutionized art education through the Feminist Art Program at California State University in Fresno (1970-1971) and at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) (1971-1973). In 1973 Chicago co-founded the Woman’s Building and Feminist Studio Workshop with Arlene Ravine and Sheila de Bretteville. A few years earlier, in the late 1960s, Kaprow approached the Carnegie Foundation to look at how artists and Happenings could transform the K-12 school systems. He started Project Other Ways[i] (September 1969-June 1970) with educational theorist Herb Kohl[ii] to reach inner city youth in Berkeley, California. Kaprow continued his radical pedagogical experiments at CalArts in Valencia, California in the early 1970s before moving to the University of California, San Diego.
In this two-part interview Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz-Starus consider the history of radical pedagogy in both Southern California and Europe, as well as their collaborative experiments in art and pedagogy in the 1970s. Part one of the interview consists of a dialogue with Lacy about her experiences of the radical pedagogical strategies of Chicago and Kaprow, and how she began to develop her own teaching methods at the Woman’s Building. In part two of the interview, Labowitz and Lacy describe their collaborative work harnessing media attention to change public consciousness around issues of violence against women, work that constitutes a form of artistic public pedagogy.
PART ONE
Elana Mann: Recently you have been researching and writing about critical pedagogy during the time period of the late sixties through the early seventies You and I both went, at different times, to CalArts which was originally founded as an educational experiment, or a “new Bauhaus.” What are your thoughts on the relationship between critical pedagogy and political art?
Suzanne Lacy: When I was researching Paulo Freire, I realized that he didn’t actually publish Pedagogy of the Oppressed until ’68 and the English translation was published in ‘70. What’s interesting to me is that there were two artists, Allan Kaprow and Judy Chicago, who were very significantly involved in experiments in education at the same time. Both moved to CalArts[iii] and I followed Judy there after being a student of hers at [California State University in] Fresno. As a grad student at CalArts I worked for Sheila de Bretteville as a teaching assistant in the Women’s Design Program, one of a series of feminist educational initiatives. There were at least five programs before CalArts ended them, including the Feminist Art Program, a feminist performance class, something in Critical Studies, Deena Metzger’s writing program and Sheila’s design program. Judy’s radicalism was in feminist education. She created strategies in feminist pedagogy that were later adopted by critical pedagogy theorists like Peg Speirs.[iv] Speirs, among others, were interested in how women-centered art educational models like Chicago’s might be applied within the feminist critique of critical pedagogy theory at the time.[v]
EM: When you talk about the feminist pedagogy of Judy Chicago, what did that consist of?
SL: Judy’s model very specifically engaged consciousness-raising, literature review and art making. And it had a good healthy dose of practicality, like learning to build your own environment through carpentry. At Fresno State, at Womanhouse, and again at the founding of the Woman’s Building, women students constructed the studios and exhibition spaces.
EM: What’s literature review? Was that comprised of reading theoretical texts?
SL: We called it philosophy. We were desperately looking for the very few pertinent things written about and by women. We trolled bookstores, but all that you see now wasn’t remotely available then. I was aware early on of a tract published by the the American Association of University Women and, of course, we found The Second Sex [by Simone de Beauvoir] and Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique. There was some literature in psychology (my field at the time) on women, from psychologists that ranged from Freud to Karen Horney and people in between, like Marie Bonaparte. We also needed to locate historical feminist texts, works like The Yellow Wallpaper[vi] and Vindication of the Rights of Women[vii]. Our access to resources back then was extremely limited, which is completely different than the entire sections of books on Women’s Studies we have today.
EM: And the art making?
SL: We developed a critique methodology that was personal and emotionally resonant for women makers. It was an empowerment process through recognizing unconscious patterns, desires and impediments (like suppressed experiences) in one’s work. In terms of our consciousness raising (CR) processes, it perhaps wasn’t strictly CR per se, but more like encounter groups which were popular at the time. I had some issues with the process as I was coming from a background in psychology, but in general, I think it was beneficial for most of the women. Judy also drew upon theater exercises and role-playing, including assignments for enacting dreams, as material for art. So there was a focus on psychodynamic processes, which was in keeping with the influences of places like Esalen[viii] and the impact of psychotherapy on California culture at the time.
EM: As opposed to Judy’s pedagogical strategies, Kaprow was interested in direct experience, but perhaps not in a political or gendered kind of way?
SL: Kaprow was very open-ended in the conversations he held after each event we did as a class. His classes were pedagogic experiments, while at the same time the site for his (and our) actual work. In that way, he made teaching into artworks. In each class we enacted a set of instructions and anybody, including him, could provide these; for instance, I did the piece Maps for the class with students as participants. At the end of each enactment of instructions, Kaprow developed this strategy of going around the circle and asking each participant to share an experience. He said he got this idea from consciousness raising. But rather than going one-by-one around the circle on a specific topic, like we did during CR groups, Kaprow invited people to enter into the conversation when and how they wanted to. It was basically experiential reportage. Sometimes some of the feminists were critical and attempted to add some political context to the actions, such as instructions like cleaning the floor with a toothbrush. But Allan pretty much took that in stride and didn’t get defensive.
EM: Was the purpose of the reportage to understand what you learned and how you learned together?
SL: It wasn’t framed as how we learned, it was more like, “What did you experience?” But you could say it’s learning, although certainly not learning “together”. Kaprow’s was a dispassionate and non-judgmental reflection, whereas Judy’s was an intensely personal and highly politicized conversation.
EM: I feel like part of the objective of consciousness raising is also cohesion, feeling like you’re part of a group or you’re part of a larger social issue. For Kaprow, was the reportage about understanding humanity?
SL: For Allan, experience was a question of almost spiritual dimensions. What meaning did we make of our actions? It presaged his long involvement in Buddhism with Sensei Joko Beck in San Diego. Contemplative Buddhism is concerned with questions of reality, removed from political assessments (as opposed to “Engaged” Buddhism which tries to integrate activism, but that was not part of Kaprow’s practice).
EM: Right. So Kaprow’s model was: “I experienced it, therefore I experienced it.” You were so politically plugged-in at the time, was that dissatisfying for you?
SL: Feminists called out what we saw as sexism, with him and all the men with whom we interacted. Allan, at least with his students, thought he could learn from every situation and he approached experiences with openness and curiosity. Basically, he was very curious about ideas, and that’s certainly why I was comfortable with him.[ix]
EM: How did all of these pedagogic experiments play out in terms of the Woman’s Building, or ways that you saw yourself as a teacher later on?
SL: Before the creation of the Woman’s Building, Sheila, Arlene, and Judy met for a year at Sheila’s house as the first year of the Feminist Studio Workshop (FSW). I joined them in the second year to teach performance when they moved to the Woman’s Building. The FSW was a school within the Woman’s Building with classes in performance, art history, reading, printmaking, general studio art, large group meetings and regular critique reviews with two or more faculty members. You could get a degree from Antioch or Goddard with FSW faculty who were recognized as faculty in that program, or you could take a non-accredited pathway. When I first went to work at the FWS, Judy, Arlene, and Sheila sat me down and said, “We’ll hire you, but on one condition: you cannot side with a student against a faculty member. And, in fact, you cannot even discuss a faculty member with a student. If a student comes to you with a problem with another faculty member you have to tell her to go speak directly to that person.” By that time they had figured out that women in groups had devious ways of aligning with or protesting against power. We wanted to promote a directness in communication: if you had a problem with someone, discussing it directly was better than gossiping and creating unhealthy alliances. We began to notice other dynamics that we thought might be specific to the ways women were raised and their experiences with each other. As you might imagine, women’s modes of achieving power – e.g. negotiation, rebellion and identification with perceived leaders -- were all on display. We interpreted their challenges as a road to personal authority. In general we tended to read individual actions through the lens of gender politics.
EM: I teach at an all-women’s school, Scripps College in Claremont, California, and what you’re saying really resonates with me. Is there a way for me to say, “Here is what I see happening right now,” and connect a student’s thoughts or feelings to a broader political context? What would you do nowadays?
SL: Well, you could try naming it in terms of gender psychology, for instance, but it might be harder now. Remember, the milieu in which we operated offered a strong emerging feminist movement and the formation of women’s institutions. From the beginning, the Woman’s Building was framed as a political and pedagogical initiative – not just for us, but for everyone. It’s purpose in the world was to raise consciousness about women and society. We lived in a specific political moment. If you try to connect your students now, in that same way, to a bigger picture, they’ll probably say, “Women are already equal, right? Old issue.”
EM: One of the focuses of this book is utopia. When I hear you talk about these times, I wonder how you engaged with that term.
SL: We engaged with utopia as a concept in two ways: through the work of Sheila de Bretteville and Dolores Hayden[x] and other scholars and artists interested in ideas of a utopian society. The various political movements of the seventies were basically utopian in the belief that change, even radical change, was quite possible. Dolores had written about nineteenth Century Utopian communities, and Sheila was engaged with utopian design ideas. We tried to live appropriately to those ideals, each in our different ways, from lifestyles to teaching methodologies. Equitable power relationships were fundamental to this utopian model. In a sense, the entire culture of leftist progressive politics was engaged with utopia in that we felt we could change things and gain a perfect equity. I think utopia is a more problematic word now: your generation has seen that we didn’t change everything. We changed a lot, but big power structures, the multinationals, the CIA and the government, they didn’t change; they only got stronger.
EM: So the grand thinking behind the Woman’s Building utopia was gender equality and teaching women to be empowered, to be artists?
SL: Yes, but not just equality for women. Most of us felt that equality between the sexes was also part of a fundamental questioning of equities in class and race. In that sense, women around the Woman’s Building were practicing what was known as “radical feminism” that called for a fundamental rethinking of society rather than just getting a slice of the pie for women.
EM: For my community of artists and activists in Los Angeles, making small changes that accumulate into monumental global shifts feels more relevant and possible. I don’t think it is necessarily less ambitious, but you could call it “radical pragmatism”. Can you talk about the Feminist Art Movement’s development of performance art and conceptual art?
SL: Performance art gave women students a way to re-enact traumas and to try out different endings, particularly important for the one out of four students who had experienced sexual violence. We used art, particularly performance art, as a platform for the rehearsal of personal issues that were ultimately political ones. We engaged with healing in the context of educating larger publics. Performance art was a major form of art at the FSW. It was supported by exhibitions, lectures and conferences. Performances were presented throughout the Woman’s Building by students, artists from outside and even occasionally by men. Healing was an important concept and Arlene Raven articulated how, if we dealt with violence against women, we couldn’t ignore the fact that a good portion of our audience had experienced this sort of trauma. Remember, at this time, rape was highly mythologized; many didn’t believe it was even possible to rape a woman, rather that there had to be some form of invitation implied. So we incorporated conversational strategies with the audience in the work, which expanded the concept of performance participation. As a result, we developed a new way of relating to audiences. These conversations laid the groundwork for today’s social practice themes of audience responsibility.
EM: Can you describe the local context in which you were working? How was the Woman’s Building connected to a broader avant-garde art world?
SL: There was a moment when the Woman’s Building was deeply connected to the local avant-garde arts community; a lot of CalArts colleagues and teachers came to our openings, people like Baldessari and Kaprow. The international performance scene was so small that people often knew each other. At some point our professional colleagues, artists like Ulrike Rosenbach and writers like Lucy Lippard, made their way to the Woman’s Building. Many collaborative groups emerged from FSW alumni, who became leaders and teachers themselves, like Sisters of Survival, The Waitresses and the Feminist Art Workers. These collaborations were accepted as part of the SoCal performance vanguard. Other artists like Nancy Buchanan, Barbara T. Smith, Rachel Rosenthal, Linda Montano, Eleanor Antin and many others were associated with us in different ways. The Woman’s Building was one of the few cultural centers that featured performance. And it wasn’t only women; we were also inspired by men artists like our colleagues Paul McCarthy and Rudy Perez, and our teachers David Antin, Allan Kaprow and Newton and Helen Harrison.
EM: What about issues of race, ethnicity and class diversity within the Los Angeles art community at the time?
SL: Of course, it was the awakening of national consciousness on racial equity, and it impacted artists in the culturally diverse SoCal area as well as feminists at the Woman’s Building. This was a central issue in my politics since I was a child. I worked in different racial communities in Los Angeles. There was a community of artists operating within a critical visual arts and mass media context who were interested in justice issues, including Ed Bereal, Judy Baca, Luis Valdez, The Royal Chicano Airforce, Ulysses Jenkins, Senga Nengudi and James Woods, to name just a few. Performance and direct intervention was an activist form of art, which was being developed and innovated by black artists like Bodacious Buggerillas and Latino artists like Asco, concurrent to my collaborations with Leslie Labowitz-Starus and many others. Our work was all linked to having a voice in the public sphere.
EM: In this early form of socially engaged art, functionality seemed important. Did things need to have a specific function or not?
SL: I think there was a really strong ethic toward change, but there weren’t many prescriptions about how that might be accomplished. I see a lot more unfounded judgment in today’s critiques around political performance. I don’t think that art students are as well educated in pragmatic politics as we were, coming from our experience in civil rights movements. There was a lot of political strategy in the air, so to speak, in the seventies. Also, it wasn’t so much that art had to have a function, it was that you had to pay attention to whether it did, or did not. And if it did intend to operate on public levels, you had to take contexts and audiences into account. Remember, many of our early performances were done for each other; small audiences consisted of other performance artists, and thus a lot of the early performance works were pretty wild, with a decidedly anti-audience focus. I did this type of work as well, but for those works which were public, we were focused on communication and community organizing, as well as aesthetics.
PART TWO
EM: Leslie, you were educated in an early MFA program at the Otis College of Art and Design, in Los Angeles, and then went to Germany to continue your studyies. Can you talk about what it was like to encounter a different kind of politics, art pedagogy and artwork in Europe?
Leslie Labowitz-Starus: My art education at Otis from 1968 to 1971 was a much more traditional MFA program than the CalArts Model. It was basically a Painting and Drawing program. Performance Art was a genre that was in its very formative stages. After graduating I got a Fulbright to study with Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, Germany. Beuys was certainly in line with the CalArts visionaries with his founding of the Free International School for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research in 1974, a conceptual performance he set up at Documenta and elsewhere. At the Kunstakademie there were no classes per se, only artist professors like Beuys and Gerhard Richter who had students under them in the Master/Student model. When I got there I was disappointed to find out Beuys had just been fired for staging a "sit in" in the school's admissions office to protest their entry requirements to his classes. He continued to occupy his studio at the Kunstakademie and work with his students there during that period.
EM: Were there other artists who influenced you during your time in Europe?
LLS: I studied various political artists from the Russian Constructivists, to German Expressionists and Bertolt Brecht. But theoretically speaking, the most influential ideas were the art and culture Marxism of the Frankfurter School, including Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. At the time, these theories were instrumental to me in formulating a feminist art that would change culture.
EM: You knew about the feminist art education experiments at CalArts, and Judy Chicago in Los Angeles. What did you find happening around feminist art in Germany?
LLS: I expected to find a strong feminist movement there. On the contrary, the Kunstakademie was a hotbed of Marxist/Socialist activity, very anti-American, anti-Vietnam War. Even in the farthest left political circles women were marginalized unless they followed the party line. The feminist concept “the personal is political” was virtually unknown in these highly politicized realms. Menstruation was a taboo topic, so it was controversial when I did my second version of Menstruation Wait[xi] in the hallway of the art academy. I was committed to being a feminist artist by that point and it was my mission to change the world for women that took me to the streets. Valie Export was the only feminist artist at the time who did her work in the public sphere, but Ulrike Rosenbach, a student of Beuys’, was also a feminist and we formed a Women’s Video Group. I also worked with feminist political groups to stage performances in public squares focused on the education of issues like gender roles and abortion. When I came back to the United States in ’77, Eleanor Antin directed me to see Suzanne Lacy who was organizing Three Weeks in May and inviting other artists to take part. It seemed like a perfect fit to do my four-part performance, Myths of Rape[xii], in the city mall near Suzanne’s rape map. I purposely used materials that were ordinary and accessible and referred to the iconography of social activist events like demonstrations.
EM: In the Lacy-Labowitz collaborative projects, you worked with the media in new ways. Where did that interest come from?
LLS: After doing the Myths of Rape series, I determined that doing anything publicly in LA was a waste of time, because there is no one on the streets. We did the Myths of Rape performance in the mall and people were there on their lunch hour, but there just weren’t enough people to make enough of an impact. In the final analysis, I found the effectiveness too limited. In the United States, and LA in particular, the only way reach masses of people was through the control of our message in the media. And that’s how my interest in media began.
SL: For me, my influences were from American and Canadian media theorists and sociologists like Erving Goffman and [Marshall] McLuhan. From an American perspective, it was apparent that our media was altering realities globally and influencing the way people thought about things like the Farm Workers Strike and the proper role of women in public life. Working with the media, whether as a critique or as a platform, was a new way of working. Several artists were experimenting with cable TV, portapaks and critique from political, as well as experimental perspectives, such as Paper Tiger (DeeDee Halleck)[xiii], Ant Farm[xiv], Ulysses Jenkins, Paul McCarthy, Jerri Allyn and the Women’s Video Center at the Woman’s Building. Leslie and my work was different in that it took actual mainstream media—newspapers, television news, and so on--as a platform for this critique.
LLS: Both of us were interested in how to communicate effectively with mass audiences, to “teach” them, in essence. The Frankfurt School had deep resonance with sociologists, cultural theorists and artists. They analyzed images and how economics affects buying patterns and how one views gender. Their analysis encompassed fine art, commercial art and visual culture in general, which offered new roles for artists.
EM: The two of you developed very specific strategies for artists to engage with the media. How did that come about?
SL: I had been working for some time, since the early seventies, in the area of gender violence, both as an activist and as an artist. Three Weeks in May[xv] was a kind of breakthrough performance for me. It was the first time I took the issue to a broad audience through media, community organizing and policy work. Basically, it was a performance that took place over an extended period of time (three weeks) and in a large space (the city of Los Angeles), comprised of various events by activists, artists and politicians. Media was an extension of the pedagogy, a way to reach large audiences with new information on women. It was based on notions of expanded pedagogy. When I met Leslie, she was a kindred spirit and she not only began to plan her own four-part performance, but she also joined the central organizing committee I’d formed for the project.
LLS: When I came back to LA, I was still very much an anti-establishment radical. Suzanne was definitely working with the establishment, which was the thing that amazed me about how she involved the city, the mayor and everybody in her events.
SL: Leslie and I became extremely good at getting media coverage. We thought through how media made something public. Of course, other artists were figuring that out, too. That’s why Chris Burden did Through the Night Softly. The difference is that he bought media; we co-opted existing news and feature programs. We came together around this notion of “public pedagogy”, although we didn’t call it that at the time. We were aware that we were constructing ways for society to learn and platforms for acting on new knowledge. We specifically thought about how art could enter the public realm around these important issues of violence against women, and what art could actually offer. Did we think an artwork would actually stop a rape? No, but we thought we could educate policy makers and law enforcers and build coalitions between artists and women’s organizations. It was art, activism and mass audience education.
LLS: They were also revolutionary acts that were related to revolutions all over the world. Militancy was part of the art. Myths of Rape used images of protest, strong women marching around the mall who then stood in positions of self-defense. The performance addressed the audience with a subject linked to victimization of women. Changing from a victim to a survivor is a very powerful shift in consciousness, one taught in the FSW. Following Three Weeks in May, I started working at the Woman’s Building with Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW), which was founded by Julia London, a student of Suzanne’s from the Feminist Studio Workshop. WAVAW taught people how to deconstruct imagery of women that perpetuated violence against women. They were starting a boycott against record companies and they needed to get the word out. So we designed a media event/performance, called Record Companies Drag Their Feet, which was a mock demonstration because we only invited TV news and press. We considered the performance highly successful due to the amount of coverage and the accuracy of the political message. In effect, it was an educational moment via television for a national audience. At that point I was also the director of PR at the Woman’s Building. In my work collaborating with Suzanne, our media strategies were most successful with In Mourning and In Rage[xvi].
SL: In addition to its mass media presence at the time, In Mourning and In Rage was successful in terms of its reach as a pedagogical model in the art world itself. It is the work of ours that is most cited in texts on this era, and it is often used to represent women’s activist art. We used imagery, performance, placement, context and media strategy to produce a performance that was covered pretty much the way we intended, throughout the state.
EM: Were you conscious then of the pedagogic ramifications of your work?
SL: Absolutely, although we didn’t use the word pedagogy but rather “education”. We analyzed the pedagogy inherent in media imagery and the myths of women and violence that these images supported. Our contribution as artists was to take educational concepts from feminist art at the Woman’s Building into the public realm and conceptualize strategies of mass audience education, which is why our collaborative artwork, Ariadne: A Social Art Network, is so important. Ariadne was a conceptual artwork that clarified and distilled the pedagogic model from our earlier works that were single performances with overt imagery. It made a framework for how to create such artworks and exemplified the deep multi-year conversation around the Woman’s Building on how art participated in social change through pedagogy. After we had done a couple of pieces together--I think it was around ’78—Leslie and I said, “How do we expand the effectiveness of our performances through the combination of art and organizing that we have been exploring?” Remember, we both were trained by conceptual artists, although Ariadne’s actions were concrete and pragmatic in the public sphere. We designed the project as a model for working collectively across sectors--with politicians, feminists, activists and artists--to stop violence against women. We were quite serious about its dual operation as conceptual art and as political action.
LLS: We were particularly interested in how women from different disciplines analyzed media coverage on violence against women and formed direct actions within their own spheres; politicians had one set of roles, journalists another, and so on. We explored how artists could play a significant role in public action. In that way I think you also need to see this work in context of, for instance, the Artists Placement Group in England, Group Material and other initiatives exploring art in everyday life. We were slightly different in that our collaborators were not a fixed group of artists, but a broad group of people we’d worked with in prior performances including journalists, politicians and many women artists from the Woman’s Building.
EM: In hindsight, what were the forces underlying the separation between the early seventies experience of feminist art you are describing and later feminist activities during the eighties and beyond?
SL: Well, there are many, of course. However, there was a significant divide that occurred around the notion of essentialism that I think was destructive to the development of feminist art activism for a time. As Reagan came in and a conservative movement in the United States was underway, it became more fashionable to reject activist feminism. Susan Faludi coined it a “backlash”. Women artists were finally getting jobs in academia and I think it was to their advantage to separate themselves from seventies feminists and align with European theory. Of course, as you can see from our own histories, these theories informed all of us, but there was, in the early eighties, hostility toward direct activism as art. Now, however, these ideas have been strongly embraced through social practices. The influences of feminism and activism on our thinking as artists today requires acts of making connections. To me this is part of the teacher’s role.
[i] Kaprow, Allan “Success and Failure when Art Changes,” Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, edited by Suzanne Lacy, Bay Press: Seattle Washington, 1995, pgs. 152-158.
[ii] Herbert Kohl (b. 1937) is a teacher and theorist who has written and edited over twenty books on teaching, learning, and education. One of the primary focuses of Khol’s career has been advocating for the education of poor and disabled students. Kohl writes: “At the center of all of my work is the belief that a quality education for all children is a pedagogical imperative and a social justice issue.” (http://herbertkohleducator.com, last accessed August, 19, 2014)
[iii] Besides feminism, CalArts was an important site for the development of the conceptual and performance art movements. CalArts was founded as a Bauhaus-like pedagogic experiment, as Janet Sarbanes most recently elaborated on in her article A Community of Artists: Radical Pedagogy at CalArts, 1969-72, June 5, 2014, (http://www.eastofborneo.org/articles/a-community-of-artists-radical-pedagogy-at-calarts-1969-72, last accessed, July 2, 2014)
[iv] Speirs, Peggy, and Gaudelius, Yvonne, Contemporary Issues in Art Education, Pearson, 201
[v] Saul Alinsky (b. 1909, d. 1972) was an American political organizer. Alinsky wrote the book Rules for Radical: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals in 1972. He spent his life working on issues of race inequity and poverty. Alinsky was very influential during the 1960s and was an important and influential mentor to organizers and politicians such as Cesar Chaves, Dolores Huerta and Hillary Clinton.
[vi] The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story by American author Charlotte Perkins Gilman (b. 1860, d. 1935) that was originally published as a serial in the New England Magazine in 1892. Gilman was a utopian feminist and the book critically investigates nineteenth century societal expectations of women and the treatment of women’s mental health.
[vii] Wollstonecraft, Mary, Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792 is one of the earliest feminist philosophical texts, arguing for the importance of women’s education, and the equal rights for women in society.
[viii] The Esalen Institute (Esalen), located in Big Sur, California, is a non-profit that was founded in 1962 by Michael Murphy and Dick Price. Esalen is an important center for the New Age Movement in America.
[ix] Two other important pedagogic structures at CalArts were tai chi (with Marshall Ho) and co-counseling. Both were seen as ways of knowing and one could see people practicing both methods throughout the halls of CalArts. Co-counseling fit in very well with feminism as it was a non-authoritarian psychotherapeutic model. (From interview between Suzanne Lacy and Elana Mann conducted on May 2014)
[x] Dolores Hayden is an award-winning urban historian and author whose research is on the shifting American landscape and the politics of place. Hayden has written books on the role of gender in the American dream, feminist design and early utopian movements.
[xi] Menstruation Wait, 1972, was a conceptual performance piece by Leslie Labowitz-Starus in which she posted signs with pictures of her birth control pills.
[xii] Myths of Rape, 1977, Los Angeles City Hall Mall, was a public performance piece in four acts by Leslie Labowitz-Starus and eight performers that took place over four days as part of Three Weeks in May, 1977 by Suzanne Lacy. It educated the public on the reality of rape culture, challenging the women as “victim” image to one of empowerment.
[xiii] DeeDee Halleck (b.1940) is a media activist who founded Paper Tiger Television in 1981. Paper Tiger Television (PTTV) pioneered alternative community media and public access television. PTTV was also an innovator in the developments of video art and media critique.
[xiv] Antfarm (1968-1978) was an avant-garde utopian art and architecture collective, founded by Chip Lord and Doug Michels and included Hudson Marquez and Curtis Schreier. The group created countercultural performances, media spectacles and monumental public artworks.
[xv] Three Weeks in May, 1977 was a multi-platform citywide artwork by Suzanne Lacy which involved rape maps, performances, workshops and press events. The intent was to create a stage upon which to explore both private and public responses to violence against women.
[xvi] In Mourning and in Rage, 1977 was a collaboration between Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz-Starus which critiqued media coverage of the Los Angeles Hillside Strangler after his tenth murder, and constructed a performance on the steps of City Hall that challenged conventional portrayals of such atrocities.
This inview was originally published in the book:
In the Canyon, Revise the Canon: Utopian Knowledge, Radical Pedagogy and Artist-run Community Art Space in Southern California,
Ed. Geraldine Gourbe
Co-published with ESAAA, Ecole Supérieure d'Art de l'Agglomération d'Annecy
Out on Apr. 01, 2015
http://shelter-press.com/061-In-The-Canyon-Revise-The-Canon-En