Group Think

Along with disco and Watergate, the 1970s are remembered for a societal trend of individualism in America. As the historian Bruce Schulman has argued, the concept of diversity that emerged following the civil rights era ushered in a proliferation of new cultural identities and personal awareness, facilitating a turn toward narcissism and privatization.¹ Six years in, the journalist Tom Wolfe dubbed the 1970s the “‘Me’ Decade” in a cover story for New York magazine. In contrast to prior movements based on the collective rights of citizens and workers, Wolfe reported, the 1970s were rife with “Me movements” that splintered off from mainstream culture and the public sphere to congeal around identity — whether New Age or Born Again, yogi or druggie, black or grey panthers (a geriatric empowerment group).

Following Carol Hanisch’s insistence that “the personal is political” in 1970,² the Women’s Liberation Movement — which took Hanisch’s call for the redistribution of patriarchal norms of public and private as its slogan — was caught up in this legacy of individualism that has informed identity politics. For Wolfe, feminism was so much egotistical “drama” derived from an overinvestment in the personal: “One’s very existence as a woman — as a Me — becomes something all the world analyzes, agonizes over.” ³ On the contrary, what was remarkable about many of the feminist “dramas” of the 1970s — the era in which performance emerged as a primary medium for female artists — was the way in which they interrogated the parameters of the individual to experiment with formations of identity and community.

This fall, New Yorkers (notoriously individualistic, ourselves) were offered a glimpse of two such performance practices that developed out of the 1970s in California, where conceptual art was often inseparable from feminist experimentation. In contrast to the narcissistic “drama” described by Wolfe, Suzanne Lacy and Eleanor Antin — artists and old friends based in Los Angeles and San Diego, respectively — have mobilized the collaborative production and role-playing of theatre to explore dimensions of the personal vis-à-vis a society characterized by diversity and difference. If narcissism is a form of identification that shores up the individual through the suppression of difference, Lacy and Antin open identity as a site of ambiguity, fragmentation, and empowerment that is as public as a front stoop or intimate as an individual psyche.

On one level, the oeuvres of Lacy and Antin are totally distinct. Beginning in 1977 with Three Weeks in May, an expansive piece that addressed sexual violence through a series of actions and other activities framed as performance (political speeches; radio interviews; self-defense classes), Lacy has organized large-scale, public projects about politically charged issues. Antin, meanwhile, has framed herself as an extended performance: devoting most of her career to the production and inhabitation of a series of fictionalized “selves” based on cultural roles and aspects of her personality, including a king, a ballerina, and a nurse. Lacy’s projects often involve hundreds of participants, while Antin has divided herself into multiple subjects. It is in this sense that both artists may be said to work with groups. Bringing the contours of the individual artist into tension with provisional group identities — delegating outward and splitting within — Lacy and Antin continued to test feminist performance strategies forged within and against the “‘Me’ Decade” during their recent appearances in New York.

Hearing Voices: Eleanor Antin’s “Selves”

When it comes to her self-image, Eleanor Antin is fond of paraphrasing Walt Whitman. As she recited in an interview with Emily Liebert — the curator of Multiple Occupancy: Eleanor Antin’s “Selves,” on view this fall at Columbia University, where Liebert recently completed her dissertation on Antin — “We contain multitudes. We just have to listen.” ⁴ Liebert...