CalArts students at Klubnikin Packing Co., downtown Los Angeles, in Maps, 1973. Happening in Los Angeles, CA. Courtesy of Suzanne Lacy. Photo: Susan Mogul.

In this interview Suzanne Lacy offers a thorough discussion of the development of feminism in California and the California art world in the early 1970s. She describes her introduction to Judy Chicago and her subsequent involvement in the Feminist Art Program at Fresno State and later at CalArts. She describes the development of her own performance-based work and discusses the influence of other artists such as Faith Wilding and Allan Kaprow.

SUZANNE LACY: I discovered feminism in ’69. I then applied to graduate school at Fresno State and—

MOIRA ROTH: Why did you single out Fresno State?

SL: I think I had a boyfriend going there. [laughs] Some real profound reason. Fresno had a fairly decent grad program in psychology, and I got right in. At that point, feminist organizing was beginning in psychology. I went to the founding meeting of the Women’s Psychology Associates at an American Psychological Association annual conference in Washington, D.C. I met a lot of women psychologists who were just starting to ask questions about Freud’s attitudes toward women, etc. In graduate school, I taught a course in feminist psychology, which was very new then, for my graduate peers, and rabble-roused as much as I could every time Freud came up in a class, and I was known as “that angry woman.” 
At Fresno, I ran into Faith Wilding, who was there as a graduate in English literature. Her husband was a teacher. She was probably the only other person at Fresno that knew anything about feminism. We proceeded one day to stick up signs all over campus saying, “Feminist meeting tonight.” There must have been over thirty or forty women who showed up. Faith and I sat there dumbfounded and looked at each other and said, “What do we do now?” We did what has become, I think, a kind of strategy. We began talking about sex.

Read the full interview here.

Coco Fusco. Observations of Predation in Humans: A Lecture by Dr. Zira, Animal Psychologist, 2013 (still); performance. Courtesy of Walker Art Center. Photo: Gene Pittman.

Even when you are naked in a performance, you are in costume. Everything counts about how you look, because you are the instrument, whether it’s your body or your voice. Of course I am masquerading, but I am not acting in a traditional sense. I am not thinking about masquerade; I am thinking about making a performance and what I have to do.

There was a Brazilian filmmaker, Wagner Morales, who made a documentary titled I Like Girls in Uniform (2006) about my work for the 2005 Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival. He was looking at my performance Bare Life Study #1, in which the performers are all dressed in orange prison jumpsuits and I’m in fatigues. I’ve done a lot of pieces in which I am in uniform, such as for example a maquiladora worker’s uniform, because a lot of women go to work wearing uniforms. I’ve done many pieces about the kinds of work that women do.

This performance came about because I was using these films in an undergraduate class on Afrofuturism at Parsons School of Design in New York. I had students who had never heard of this stuff before. It’s not like I said, “Planet of the Apes!” and they were like, “Yeah!” They were really taken with the films, though, and that was a good sign.

Read the full article here.