Making Time at Human Resources: Suzanne Lacy

Coinciding with the annual meeting of the College Art Association in Los Angeles, The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is hosting the offsite working session "Making Time at Human Resources" on February 22, 2012. Participants have been invited to post some brief thoughts on the topic in advance of the event. This guest posting is by artist and Otis Professor, Suzanne Lacy.

TWO WORKS I'm thinking about:

1) Otis Public Practice at CAA: Radical pedagogy and educational critique are key concepts in current debates on artistic public practices.  Pedagogical models are explored, re-imagined, and deployed by art practitioners in highly diverse projects comprising laboratories, discursive platforms, temporary schools, participatory workshops, and libraries. Artists are revaluing the collective knowledge and agency of communities through processed-based works that mix the aesthetic with the social and political. In the west lobby atrium of the Los Angeles Convention Center, Otis Public Practice MFA students occupy a prototypical classroom where changing and spontaneous groupings of students and faculty “perform” discussions on politics, relational and public practices, and the experience of learning. A changing series of presentations and discussions will be open to casual and immersive participation over three days. 

2) Three Weeks In January: End Rape in Los Angeles was a contemporary exploration of Lacy’s 1977 performance, Three Weeks in May (1977), created for the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time and produced by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. In partnership with Los Angeles student and arts groups, political organizations and civic institutions, Lacy recreated key aspects of the original work but focused on where Los Angeles is now, forty years into the anti-rape movement, and included new organizing strategies including social media. I Know Someone, Do You? #RapeEndsHere was a twitter campaign launched at the beginning of the project.

At the center of this expansive and durational performance, a Los Angeles Rape Map was installed in front of the Los Angeles Police Department and marked daily with the prior day’s rape reports. The form and structure of the performance consisted of activism, education, media, city politics and art, and featured approximately 50 private and public events. As with the original work, art was the platform to organize a series of presentations that collectively brought renewed focus to the effort to end rape. The project concluded with two performances directed by Lacy: Storying Rape, an exploration of solutions at the top of City Hall communicated through social media, and Call to Action/Candlelight Vigil, a rally-as-performance that dedicated the “assets” of the entire project to a year-long international campaign, Billion Women Rising.

In this video short, Myths of Rape, an original 1977 performance by Leslie Labowitz, was recreated by artists Elana Mann and Audrey Chan.