The Reflective Life

There are many artists today experimenting with collaboration and socially organized art, but very few who have practiced it for as long and seriously as Suzanne Lacy has. Performance artist, writer, community organizer, and political activist, Lacy now has published a comprehensive collection of her well-written essays entitled Leaving Art: Writings on Performance, Politics, and Public, 1974-2007. The book covers a little more than three decades of her work and is usefully framed by art historian Moira Roth's introduction and cultural theorist Kerstin Mey's afterword. The book may be approached in several ways: as a document of the artist's work, as the artist's perspective on performance and politics, and as a tracing of West Coast performance art and political engagement from the mid-seventies to 2007. This makes it more than a mere grouping of a single artist's activities; it offers a broader view considering activist art, collaboration, and the conditions that have shaped this category of art-making in the second half of the twentieth century.

The book is chronologically organized into four sections. The first, "Learning to Look: The Seventies," consists of Lacy's early writings. It addresses themes connected to understanding societal expectations of women, the body in relation to women's lives, and women's experiences within their communities. In the second section, "Political Performance Art: The Eighties," Lacy broadens the feminist discourse to include basic individual needs and rights. By expanding her content, she concentrated at this time on transforming communities through the strategies of intervention, advocacy, and collaboration. Lacy moves away from traditional art institutions to focus on working directly within local communities in the book's third part, "Debated Territory: The Nineties." In this section, she also more closely examines the correlation between practice and textual argument. The last group of essays, "Leaving Art: After 2000," conveys a more contemplative tone as the author draws from her own practice. Calling these writings "case studies," Lacy reflects on differences between the present decade and when she began working in the field.

Lacy's background and professional trajectory structure the book into its four parts and weave through the period's key artists and theorists. In the late sixties she was a graduate student in psychology at California State University at Fresno. Lacy was already engaged in feminist discourse when she began studying in 1970 at the university with Judy Chicago, who had opened her Feminist Art Program there. In the following year Chicago, joined by Miriam Schapiro, moved to the California Institute for the Arts. Lacy also transferred to CalArts where she participated in the Women's Design Program, led by Sheila de Bretteville, and, very significantly for her artistic development, she became a student of Allan Kaprow. Kaprow's orientation toward art, his linking of performance to the everyday, and his involvement in Buddhism, greatly influenced Lacy's ideas about art-making. The author dedicates her book to Kaprow and also includes "Tracing Allan Kaprow" (2007) as her concluding essay, like two bookends of Leaving Art. Kaprow as personal mentor to Lacy, as an influence on generations of artists, and especially his relationship to feminist art at a time when women artists were largely under-represented within the art world, is heartily expressed by Lacy. She writes:

Allan's articulation of a vision where the boundaries of art and life were blurred offered a significant aesthetic "way out" of an increasing dilemma for feminist artists whose identity politics and critical stance vis-à-vis culture and its production demanded the production of an activist avant-garde—art that went beyond simple protest politics and engaged the public sphere in multiple and open-ended ways. His well-thought-out boundary blurring gave us permission for framing life—domestic life, political life, relational life, and public life—as art. By extending what could be called art, who made it, and where art could occur, Allan's ideas, meant originally to challenge the art establishment, were mined by activist artists to...