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@juliettebellocq on #sistercorita, me on #gerekavanaugh, @barbarabestor on #deborahsussman, @wildlosangeles on #sheiladebretteville, @madeinspacela on #aprilgreiman! Oh what a night @ladesignfestival @aigalosangeles (at Helms Bakery District)
CalArts Admissions Bulletin, 1973-74
Courtesy of the California Institute of the Arts Institute Archive
A Grand Melee of Radical Procedures: Miriam Schapiro on CalArts and the Feminist Art Program
Miriam Schapiro, ca. 1970s. Courtesy of the Flomenhaft Gallery.
In this interview, Miriam Schapiro describes her discovery of a new, more engaged way of teaching when she moved to Southern California from New York, and how that was inspired by what she witnessed visiting Judy Chicago’s class at Fresno State. This meeting led to the two artists collaborating on the Feminist Art Program at CalArts, and Schapiro discusses the program and describes some of the student projects, including Womanhouse and Anonymous Was a Woman. She then discusses her return to New York and her role in establishing the feminist art journal Heresies.
MIRIAM SCHAPIRO: We went to California in 1967.
RUTH BOWMAN: You went to the University of California in San Diego?
MS: Yes, Paul Brach went as a chairman, the originator of the present art department, and I accompanied him and taught in his department. Those were the days where the word nepotism was used as a pejorative word in academia, and as time has gone on, it’s become less major and less serious.
RB: So what was your status?
MS: Well, I left New York, my family, all my friends, my network, my gallery, André Emmerich, everything that I had going for me—the beginnings of my career and so forth—to trek westward with Paul, who had a job waiting as chair of this department. And what he told UCSD was that he couldn’t possibly take this job without some promise of work and a studio for me to paint in; he said I would be happy to be part of the university even on the level of lecturer, which is the lowest level you could be. And that was true; that’s the way I felt. I really wasn’t seeking status in academia. So they said that would be fine, and they got him out there, and they told him—I remember it was the first day he was there—they told him, no, they were sorry, but there really would be no job for me. And now, meanwhile, everything had been packed and shipped. Our son was nine years old, and he was in the act of being transferred to another school. So Paul said to his boss, who was the provost, “What do you mean? What’s happened? I was promised that we would both have a place here.” And the provost said, “Well, it’s just been rescinded, and there’s not much I can do about it.” Paul, telling this story later, said he played the biggest poker bluff of his life, which was that he said to the man, “I’m sorry, if she can’t be here, I can’t be here.” And he turned on his heel, and he walked toward the door, and he put his hand on the knob, and he started to open the door and leave, when the provost yelled after him, “Just a minute, just a minute.” Paul turned around, and he said, “Yes?” And he said, “All decisions can be reversed.” And Paul said, “Will this decision be reversed?” And he said, “I think so.” And so after all of this we achieved my lectureship.
RB: And you had a studio. They were separate buildings, weren’t they, from the department?
MS: Yes. Well, the curious thing was, we weren’t there very long, maybe a couple of years, when Paul got this letter from Herb Blau telling him they were starting a very interesting academic institution in Los Angeles and would he come up and talk to them because they wanted him to be the first dean of the art school at CalArts. And he did that, and he moved. I didn’t move with him because Peter had one more year before high school.
RB: So you stayed on as a lecturer?
MS: I stayed… No. The minute Paul left, they made me a professor.
RB: And you stayed another year—
MS: Yes.
RB: —and had this commuting back and forth. About 400 miles, I guess.
MS: Yes.
RB: And CalArts was then in Valencia?
MS: CalArts was in the old convent the first year.
RB: Oh, downtown.
MS: Near MacArthur Park, yeah. And then, the next year, the year I moved up to Santa Monica, CalArts moved to its new home in Valencia.
RB: And the commute was quite long. It was, what, about an hour? Up to hot old Valencia?
MS: Yes.
RB: And you, what were you doing? You didn’t teach at CalArts, did you?
MS: Oh, yes. You can’t imagine how many husbands and wives there were there. The deanship of dance was shared by husband and wife. A man would be in maintenance and his wife would be secretary to a dean, for example.
RB: So it was a family kind of experience.
MS: It was a family orientation, and Paul and I had no problem with that. He was the dean, and I worked for him. We didn’t have titles. We were called “member of faculty.”
RB: And what kind of subjects were you teaching? You were teaching drawing?
MS: It really was at UCSD that I began to form my philosophy of teaching. I began to see how restrictive a life it was to be a teacher. I felt that it was incumbent on me to know everything in order to inform students.
Well, you know what it’s like when you go to university, and your students don’t really know anything about art. I was teaching beginning classes for Paul. I would be teaching perhaps one-seventh of a class after the large lecture in the lecture hall, which contained all seven of these groups. These were enormous numbers of students that were being taught. And, remember, it ended up at Berkeley with the students’ revolution, where students cried, “We’ve become anonymous. We’re nobodies in this.” Sometimes the professor didn’t even appear, and his voice was recorded on tape, as a televised appearance.
RB: So the whole University of California system needed a shake-up. And you were there right in the crisis?
MS: We came right at that time. My sense of teaching was that I had a group of receptors who sat there, I was at the head of the class, and I felt—except for my insights and what I knew about art—I felt no more equipped to really be there in that position than the man in the moon. I mean, I felt that it wasn’t a logical or proper way for me to be teaching. It was at that time that I began to formulate different ways of teaching. RB: Now, there were other people that Paul brought or that you knew there like the Antins—Eleanor and David Antin?
MS: And Paul brought—
RB: Harold Cohen with him.
MS: He brought Harold Cohen and the Antins; he brought Newton and Helen Harrison—
RB: You. This was a community that you had there.
MS: Yes.
RB: And in the community, did you talk together about the problems of teaching in this way?
MS: No, because I’m not sure everybody felt as I did. The way I felt led to a revolutionary experiment that then took place at CalArts.
RB: Where you had the freedom to do that?
MS: Yes. Well, in the interim between my staying the extra year at UCSD and then leaving and going to CalArts, I met Judy Chicago. Judy came to San Diego to give a lecture, and subsequently she had me visit Fresno, where she was teaching, and give a lecture. The difference between the atmosphere that I was living in and the atmosphere that she had created was astonishing to me. I felt she was involved in an appropriate historical change. And I think that what I reacted to was really part of what was necessary for the future and was actually what the Berkeley students were up in arms about.
RB: And this was about 1970?
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Womanhouse catalogue, 1972. Courtesy of Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and the California Institute of the Arts Archive.
MS: It was just about ’69, ’70. The Berkeley students were decrying the loss of personal contact, any possibility of intimacy in teaching. And what was happening with Judy and her group is that she was reinstating all of that. Subsequently, we got together. And the way that happened was that I presented to the male group who were working for Paul at CalArts the possibility that Judy and I would team-teach a women’s class. They didn’t really know Judy, and she carried a very volatile mythology around her, so they were cautious. But I persuaded them that, since I was fifteen years older than she, I would be the leavening influence, and I told them I believed that this program could develop into something very important. And so by virtue of their faith in me and my past performances in terms of my career, and what they had seen of me as a teacher and so forth, they agreed to let us do that. That was a big move. However, as far as CalArts was concerned, it wasn’t so radical because at CalArts at that time they were doing the most amazing things. Victor Papanek, who was teaching design, had his students making radios for a penny each that could be shipped to Third World people. This was a radical notion. In the music department, they had imported dancers from West Africa, and they were constantly doing a chicken dance in the halls. They flapped their arms and spoke very little English. And then, again in the halls, starting at six o’clock in the morning, students and teachers practiced their t’ai chi. Ravi Shankar was another one of these people. Gene Youngblood was a brilliant analyst of film and movies, and he was there at that time. So it was just a grand melee of radical procedures. And our Feminist Art Program simply took its place.
RB: When you announced the course, what happened with the students?
MS: We announced the course and the students were shy and curious, and so we sat at a table and talked about what it would be like. We also talked to the faculty. I remember the whole faculty attending a retreat at that time. And the woman who ultimately taught the design program for women only—Sheila de Bretteville—explaining what her class would be like. Judy and I talked about what we had planned. I didn’t know at that time, nor did Judy, that we would do Womanhouse. Once we met the students in our class—there were 21—we talked about doing a community project and it turned out to be Womanhouse.
RB: And Womanhouse had a catalog?
MS: Oh, yes. Not only a catalog. Womanhouse was a phenomenon, a cultural phenomenon, not only in California but everywhere.
RB: It was nationally known.
MS: But it was also internationally known. When Womanhouse was finished, we were interviewed by Encyclopedia Britannica. An hour program was done on KPFK. We were written up in Time-Life. We received incredible publicity. And when you think that the young people, students in an art class, made and experienced this event, it was really quite extraordinary.
RB: Womanhouse was a building in which environments were made by each student?
MS: Well, it was an artistic project. And it wasn’t linear in the sense that when you enter my home you enter a vestibule and then you go into the living room. I mean, the sequence was unpredictable. We took over a house, and the house had many rooms. Each student was interested in a particular room, and so they created a sort of happening environment in each of their rooms. One woman painted enormous leaves on the wall. This was her expression of love of beauty and regard for nature. We called it the Leaf Room. It was very beautiful. And near that was a more traditional bedroom, where several students working together created a room patterned on Gigi, a story by Colette, the French writer. The room was the bedroom of a courtesan. It was a very elegant room. The women went to an antiques dealer and talked him into loaning them incredible Victorian furniture. They made a very dense, perfumed room with lace and satin and a vanity, I remember, with all sorts of encrusted silver hairbrushes, and so forth. But the point is that they created an atmosphere, an environment, which was specific to itself and that had nothing to do with the other rooms in the house.
RB: And each room was really separate—the kitchen, the bathroom?
MS: Every room was separate.
RB: And did they sort of draw straws for who got what room, or did it just fall into place?
MS: Well, the radical part of our teaching was based on consciousness-raising. So every day we would sit in a circle in a particular room, and the session I remember best took place in the kitchen. In this old abandoned mansion, we sat on the floor, had our talk time, and then we got our mops and cleaned it up. But the kitchen talk was one hell of a drama; that’s what I remember. Everyone told her story of growing up with her mother and her experiences in the kitchen. And I remember someone saying at some point, “These stories seem to add up to our relationships with our mothers like a metaphor for a bottle of milk. Is it half empty or half full?”
Robin Weltsch, Susan Frazier and Vicky Hodgett, Nurturant Kitchen at Womanhouse, 1972. Courtesy of the California Institute of the Arts Archive.
RB: Marvelous.
MS: That would ultimately be a description of their relationships with their mothers. It’s really very true, isn’t it? Was she giving or taking away in her nurturance?
RB: And to objectify all of that into an environment must have been quite a challenge.
MS: Well, here is the part where I asked myself, “A teacher? What kind of a teacher can I be?” But ultimately I accepted myself as a facilitator. My growing philosophy of education was based on the idea that they had as much to tell me, as I had to tell them. The only difference was in our ages—that indeed if I had lived longer than they did, which I had, I had more experiences perhaps. But they might have had denser experiences. Remember, those were the days of heavy drugs. And in our separate performances at Womanhouse, one of the groups made a marvelous theatrical piece about drug users, and that certainly wasn’t my experience.
RB: How did the academic deans, how did the management of the school react to all of this? What was their relationship to you? I mean, you were doing something, I’m sure, beyond what had been done before, ever.
MS: Ruth, remember we worked for the Disneys, who were considered not conservative but reactionary people.
RB: Right.
MS: So your question is well put. However, the one Disney (by marriage) who was head of the school had been converted in some way. He became enormously tolerant of this whole weird environment that was CalArts. And no one in management ever said anything. When you came into Womanhouse, to see the performances or went through the rooms, you knew immediately you were in the face of something you’d never seen before in the art world. There was Judy’s “menstruation bathroom.” My room had a dollhouse in it. Everybody made something quite different, and these rooms were all inspired by a woman’s point of view. We made a film of Womanhouse. Danny Selznick, who was on our board, brought the idea of Womanhouse, to the American Film Council, and they gave Joanna Demetrakis a grant to film Womanhouse. We have that as a record.
When we did Womanhouse, we were scared to death because it had never been done before—such a mammoth project, you know, on an idea that had never been set forth before. And the thing I think that impressed me so much, Ruth, and which gave a real backup to my democratic sensibilities was when I saw women walk into that house and just gasp! Some of them crying. Some of them—there was never a word said; it was always the expression on the face, “I know this. This is art, but I know what this is about. I know what this is about. I know what this is about.”
RB: So it was a parallel activity to the establishment, or what is art. It wasn’t really a challenge to what is art; it was another art form?
MS: It was a reinforcement for women also.
RB: Of those 21 students, how many stayed in touch with you? How many moved into the art world?
MS: About half of them. Robin Mitchell, Faith Wilding, Suzanne Lacy, Mira Schor—oh, a number of them stay in touch.
RB: Right, and are they still in California and still working?
MS: Faith and Mira are in New York and doing very well. Faith and Mira would always do well, in my opinion, but their journey was so different from that of David Salle and Eric Fischl, who were their colleagues at CalArts, because theirs was a woman’s point of view in the art-making process and that was not something that was really acceptable then. When you walked into my house earlier, did you see that piece on the wall that was like a dress? That’s Mira’s piece. It looks like a dress, reads like a book, and has secrets.
RB: In California, you were teaching at CalArts for five or six years?
MS: No, four.
RB: Four years. And you—Judy Chicago came down from Northern California. She came from Fresno for about two years and left.
MS: Two years and left. And I continued the Feminist Art Program in my own manner for two years after she left. I concentrated more on publishing. We published Anonymous Was a Woman, and we published another wonderful publication called Art: A Woman’s Sensibility. The cover of that publication was reproduced in The Village Voice, because we showed Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup, and up to that point, Ruth, almost everybody—
RB: Nobody knew she was a woman, right?
MS: Right. Which in a way was the point also of Anonymous Was a Woman, which was a poster, a book, and a celebration of women’s creativity at CalArts. As a book, it was a gathering of letters. The women in our Feminist Art Program sent letters to a variety of established women in the art world—critics, poets, curators, artists—and they asked, “How’d you do it? We’re young. We’re students here. We want to know.” And then this beautiful collection of replies came back, and we published them.
RB: Under the quotation from Virginia Woolf.
MS: Exactly.
RB: And was it Virginia Woolf’s life or just the quote that made you choose the title?
MS: Virginia really is a heroine to creative feminists, in the sense that her life is so instructive to us. Her devotion to her art. The fact that she was so original. Also the tragedy of her life. You know, these things belong to us. Like Sylvia Plath’s life or like Frida Kahlo’s life. It’s always somehow inspiring to think of someone who had great suffering and yet great achievement at the same time. We are inspired by their redemption. These women are all heroines. Certainly it was Virginia Woolf’s life as well as her work. And also her attitudes toward society and her particular way of being a feminist. For example, she had a lot of trouble joining groups. A lot of women have trouble joining groups. But that doesn’t stop you from expressing your point of view in whatever manner you choose to do it. That’s what she did. She made her little pamphlets, and she was a journalist. She published books, and she wrote her own books. She and her husband were a partnership; they published together. And ultimately she took her life. And all of that made for a genuine kind of myth for women who were at that time being so conscious of the fact that they were women and that they had a history. We needed to have role models. Everything came together at the same time: art and consciousness, myth and reality. You asked me before, and I don’t think we went into it, why did I think that California was a particularly fertile ground for all this to happen? I don’t think it could have ever happened in New York. New York is hell-bent on separating one person from another because of the competition. And in California there was some chance for us to get together. And it was as simple as that.
My life would never have been what it is today if I hadn’t had that eight years in California. My life changed there. The difference between the California women and the New York women was that the New York women were “head” women, and in California they were “body” women, which is not to say that the New York women weren’t involved with their bodies, but not in the same way. Because in California people are sun worshipers who live in a climate which emphasizes involvement with their bodies.
In New York that doesn’t happen. In the intellectual community or in the artistic community, the concentration is on what is mental. To give you an example, Judy Chicago would be a wonderful example of a “head-body” person and Lucy Lippard would be a wonderful example of a “head” person. And they were both important figures in the woman-artist movement.
RB: And when in this decade did the idea of making a special publication, Heresies, come up?
MS: Well, I brought that idea back from California, a continuation of the publishing ideas we had tried at CalArts.
When I left New York in 1967 and had a new development in my life—in my thinking, in my art—when all this happened, some people who had been my New York friends before California couldn’t quite handle it, and I lost a lot of friends. But one friend was faithful, Joyce Kozloff. So when I came back to New York with Paul—Peter, our son, remained at San Francisco State—I said I had a few ideas that I would like to present to the women artists of New York, and Joyce called a meeting and we presented the idea of a school or the idea of a magazine, and the idea of a magazine was the one that really caught on. Although there was a school, the Feminist Art Institute, which subsequently opened. I organized it with a group of women, including Betsy Damon. I worked there only six months.
Miriam Schapiro, Personal Appearance #3, 1973. Fabric, paper, collage, and acrylic on canvas, 60 x 50 in. Courtesy of the Flomenhaft Gallery.
But it was the magazine, Heresies, which caught on like wildfire and became one of the most interesting small publications in the seventies and eighties. It’s about to have its tenth anniversary. It is one of the best philosophical statements of feminist thinking. You know, the popular image of a feminist is as a bra burner, but there’s a hell of a lot more to it than that.
I think what we women did was to democratize art. I think today a lot of what goes on in galleries—I’m not saying it’s successful—is a democratization of art. For example, there’s an important movement toward recognizing ethnicity. Recently, I was amused because one of my paintings wasn’t permitted to go to Russia. The man who was organizing the show said, “Well, your work is not political so therefore you don’t qualify for this show, because we’re just showing political work.” In 1972, it was the reverse. I was excluded from shows because I was political. But now there’s a new politics, and the new politics calls for new laws and new rules. So what’s political today is that you have to be a nonmainstream ethnic, an outsider, and then whatever you do is considered political. I’m not putting this trend down. I’m just trying to point out how the shifts and changes go, and how complex it is, and how it’s all in the area of gray.
Right after Womanhouse, I glued fabric on the painted surface of the canvas. And that was really a no-no as far as New York was concerned. I had a show in 1973 at the André Emmerich Gallery, an enormous show of my work, and all the canvases had fabric on them. My colleagues were just astonished. In fact, Al Held said of me—I had a lot of New York admirers before I came to California—“Well, she left the true faith.” The fabric—which is really, in a larger sense, the fabric of my life—was so important to me. And then from that came my research into women’s traditional art and—
RB: The aprons.
MS: The aprons and the needlework and ultimately our producing that fabulous issue of Heresies called Women’s Traditional Art. I’m so gung-ho about Heresies because it really is an encyclopedia of everything I’m talking about. Every issue was different, and each issue was published by a new collective. So the process of publishing was different and the content was different.
Excerpted from East of Borneo. This is an edited version of a much longer oral history interview in the public domain. To read the entire transcript click here.
Suzanne Lacy on the Feminist Program at Fresno State and CalArts
CalArts students at Klubnikin Packing Co., downtown Los Angeles, in Maps, 1973. Happening in Los Angeles, CA. Photo: Susan Mogul. Courtesy of Suzanne Lacy.
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 30 or 40 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.
MR: [Laughs]
SL: We had a totally enthralled group of women, and the next thing you knew we had begun feminist organizing at Fresno State. In the meantime, Judy Chicago, looking for a way to start a feminist art program, came to Fresno from Los Angeles, approached Faith, and began to talk about organizing young women art students. I applied that spring, after a year of graduate school. I remember the interview with Judy sitting there with her straw hat and two or three of her little groupie girls around her. You know, I’d always done art, so I felt like this is a natural for me. She said, “No, I don’t want you.” I said, “What do you mean? I know all about creativity”—I’d just written a 50-page research of the literature on creativity, from psychology’s point of view—“and I’ve always done art.” She said, “That doesn’t matter. You are on the career track for psychology, and I’m only interested in working with women who will become professional artists.” I didn’t know what on earth she was talking about, but I did know I really wanted in that program. So for the next several months Faith and I strategized how to get me into the program, which we eventually succeeded in doing. I love to tease Judy now, because I’m probably one of the most successful of the artists from that time, along with Faith. We’ve always teased her about what bad judgment of character she has.
MR: Could you describe the program at Fresno that Judy Chicago ran? Who was in it, how she conducted it, how you felt about it.
SL: Well, once I got in, I was very excited. I was a second-year grad student in psychology at the time, and I was moving so far out of academic psychology by then that I was working in sociology and race relations and things like that. I think one of the major things I got out of it was my first real encounter with female sensibility. I had always had women friends, but I had been trained academically with men, had identified with them, and had found some things about women quite provoking. Mostly, their lack of freedom and inability to experiment, go places, and do things (which I thought was what men did). But when I got involved with that program, for the first time I began to appreciate not just particular women but all women.
In terms of the structure, Judy brought about fifteen students together. We had to make a major commitment of time and money. That is, we could take anywhere between three and twelve units of school credit. For many of us, over 50 percent of our schooling was this program. The first thing she did was ask us to buy work boots. Then she taught us how to deal with realtors, as we canvassed Fresno to look for an abandoned space to make into our studio. We found this huge old theater outside of town and, with our work boots, began to transform it. Judy taught us carpentry. I was certainly familiar with tools and stuff, but I’d never learned how to Sheetrock. We made flawless walls. We completely renovated this whole place. And in order to do that, we had to pay money; I think at that time it was $25 a month, which was a rather major commitment. I was freaked out, as I’ve always been since I’ve been an artist, about money. But nevertheless, we all did it to support the rent and utilities in our studio. We had a series of courses. We had reading studies, feminist art history, and studio art. That’s when we first started discovering people like Frida Kahlo, Mary Cassatt, and other women artists who were uncovered subsequently or simultaneously—I’m not sure which—by art historians. Several women we discovered by rooting through used bookstores. I remember when Nancy Youdelman came to class one time with the book of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the first Women’s Building. This was revolutionary to us. We poured over this and other books and found photographs in esoteric places.
Students of the Feminist art program at California State University, Fresno (1970-71).
Ti-Grace Atkinson came to Fresno, and we prepared a cheerleading reception for her. We went down to the Fresno airport prepared to do our “c-u-n-t” cheers—with the pink cheerleaders—and off came 40 or so Shriners as we were screaming, “Give us a c, give us a u.” [laughs] Right behind them came this giant leggy woman wearing sunglasses at six o’clock at night and carrying a cigarette holder. She had buckskin pants and a giant fur coat. That was Ti-Grace Atkinson, who sat there sort of bemused while we were performing madly for her. It was quite an evening. Judy and she had a real run-in. The gist of it was Ti-Grace felt that everybody, male or female, who had anything to do with patriarchy was completely screwed, and Judy’s position was to work with the men in your life.
MR: And you named your dog Ti-Grace.
SL: Yes. I had a dog named Ti-Grace, a dog named Simone—after Simone de Beauvoir—and a cat named Red Emma [after Emma Goldman]. They were fixtures of the early feminist movement. You’ll find their photographs in a variety of places, documenting the building of the Woman’s Building. The dogs, I mean, not de Beauvoir and Atkinson. So we built ourselves an art studio, and we spent a lot of time working on our art. Judy would give us assignments having to do with topics, for example, like rage. You know, like, “How do you feel when you’re walking down the street with men leering at you?” There was indeed a lot of anger that got expressed in those early performances. People turned to performance almost intuitively. It wasn’t as “sophisticated” as some of the Conceptual performance works at the time. For the most part, we didn’t know anything about that work, and I don’t think Judy knew a lot about it either. We were doing what I’d call skits. She intentionally steered us away from anything that was Conceptual, that was removed from a direct engagement with our feelings. We made art of our experience. I remember I put up huge pieces of paper on the wall, 8 feet by 6 feet, and I’d throw balloons full of paint at it, and slosh paint around. We were very physically engaged. As well, we had crits and we had consciousness-raising sessions.
MR: In crits, were the standards whether one was emotionally engaged? Were there aesthetic judgments made?
SL: There were aesthetic judgments, but it was based on the ability of the work to authentically reveal the self and one’s feeling states. It was probably not divorced, in some respects, from Abstract Expressionism, although the work was not abstract. Judy gave assignments having to do with emotional states or feelings about mothers or about other women. Of course, one could also just do art art. There was no prescription against that. But we were very caught up in a burgeoning awareness of what it meant to be a woman.
Those first consciousness-raising groups were incredibly intense. It was like uncovering, in a funny way, an entire new world within your self. I remember seeing the movie The Bell Jar, from the book by Sylvia Plath, and watching the scene where she’s almost raped by her date, and thinking, My God. While I have never been raped, I had certainly had rather forceful experiences with dates. The kind of pressure that you wouldn’t ever describe as attempted rape in the fifties and sixties. So our work together was like a continuing revelation. I did paintings, not much performance at that point. I did a lot of conceptual work, wrote, and I made sculptures. I guess one sculpture that stands out in mind is a life-size bride, which ended up looking like a cadaver, that was made with resin.
It looked like a macabre Kienholz, with birth control pills for her bridal bouquet and a gag over her mouth, and she was lying in a position like she was about to be raped. It was a papier-mâché figure with about an inch of resin meticulously layered, and then this cloth wedding gown that was also layered in resin. The whole thing had this rigid fifties look. And her eyes were popping out of their sockets. For a cunt she had a plunger with a pink lightbulb in it. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was an aggressive and frightening image of marriage as a trap. Lord knows where that came from. Needless to say, however, I’ve never gotten married. [laughs]
The consciousness-raising was interesting because it was borrowed from—this was the late sixties, early seventies—from the intensity of the Gestalt therapy movement. People all over the country were sequestering themselves away in little rooms and screaming at each other in the service of changing their psyches. [laughs] That was not much different than what we did, and at times that aspect of the program made me nervous. I would back out of it. Part of it was my psychological training. Some of it was quite good. People went through a lot of changes. Some of it I thought was a little destructive, though not any more so than any of the other encounter groups that I had participated in during that era. You know, in the sixties in California we were always mucking around in each other’s psyches—experimenting in psychology. Mostly it didn’t hurt anybody.
MR: How did you and Judy relate to one another?
Suzanne Lacy, Maps, 1973. Happening at CalArts, Valencia, CA. Pictured, Left: Bia Lowe, Stanley Fried, Susan Mogul, Vanalyne Green and an unidentified student; Right, Detail of Maps. Photos: Suzanne Lacy. Courtesy of the artist.
SL: In the beginning, Judy did not know how to take me. There was a way in which I was separated from the group and critical of it. I would interject psychological analyses of their psychological analyses—in the middle of an encounter group. [laughs] And I also wasn’t able to fully engage with my work as an artist. I was still inclined toward the methods of social science. Nothing overt was ever said, but in time I became very close with Judy. She began to trust me. I don’t know if it was a subliminal thing that happened.
Later, when the group was getting ready to leave for CalArts, a similar rapid transformation happened. Judy and Miriam Schapiro were going to do a feminist art program at CalArts, and everybody was preparing to go there and trying to get in, and I wasn’t because I was a second-year grad student in psychology, on my way to getting a master’s. One day, Faith Wilding said to me, “Have you thought about coming to CalArts?” and I said, “Well, no. Not really.” That night I just stayed awake for hours in a fever, tossing and turning, and the next morning I got up and immediately went to the phone. I called CalArts to apply for a scholarship—because I didn’t have any money at all. At that precise moment, Judy broke into the line. This was before call-waiting. Judy’s method of getting through to you was through emergency interrupt. At that moment, just when I was talking to CalArts, I get this emergency interrupt from Judy, who says, “Suzanne-y, I’ve been thinking. Maybe you should apply to go to CalArts. Have you thought about that?” And so I went to CalArts.
I think that the women did some very good work. I think that they uncovered some important historical information in that program. Many of those women went on to be artists. Some dropped out later in the years, but by and large I think it was a tremendously affirming experience to be with all women, to have such a charismatic woman role model in Judy. We talked a lot about role models. I think it organized people’s psyches in a different way and allowed them to move forward with a lot more courage. We got to a point where we were doing exhibitions for the Fresno State art department, and all the faculty and students came. They were blown away by what they were seeing. We took the show on the road a few times, and I remember one time (it was pretty funny) when somebody in the audience got up and slugged Faith. The presentations almost always ended in confrontation. There was a lot of antagonism men had to what we were saying.
MR: Hmm!
SL: We were really gutsy. I mean, we were really presenting a very tough female image—to the world through our art and our panels. Because of Judy’s connections, we were able to make presentations in Los Angeles, the art world, and at schools. There was one weekend when Larry Bell came, and Miriam Schapiro and Sheila de Bretteville—Vickie Hall did a performance there. She was a terrific performance artist who moved to Fresno to study with Judy. A lot of people from CalArts came down, and we would have these big powwows, art showings, slumber parties. They were very exciting and intense times. That’s when I met Sheila, who decided, prompted by Miriam and Judy, to do a feminist design program at CalArts.
MR: Did you also witness the beginning of Miriam and Judy talking with one another?
SL: Yes, that was during that time. Witness is a good way to put it, because particularly Faith and I, who were older, were privy to conversations with Judy, who is very open about her process. Judy’s a very, very fine teacher. She’s incredibly demanding, and she knows how to push through to the tenderest parts of your psyche, and she goes right for the jugular in her criticism, which I think is good. Not in a humiliating manner, as it is in some art schools, but in a very direct and compassionate way. Why talk about the form and shape of something to the exclusion of what somebody is trying to express about themselves? She’s also brilliant about historical context. The woman reads incessantly. Whenever she wants to know about something, she sits down and plows through scores of books. She’s also tremendously supportive of her students. Judy also had certain biases that were very problematic for me. For example, I remember once at CalArts, Arlene Raven came back from New York having just seen a big Conceptual arts show and said, “You know, Judy, I think Suzanne’s a budding Conceptual artist.” My ears perked up at that.
MR: [Laughs]
SL: I said, “What is that, Arlene?” Judy went into a fit about it, because in her mind Conceptual artists were people like John Baldessari—distanced, aloof, abstract. In fact, that is part of conceptualism, but nobody had at that time managed to integrate a feminist emotive consciousness into that form of art, which they subsequently did.
MR: And then, when you did finally decide to go to CalArts, how were you integrated within the programs?
SL: Personally, or how were the feminist programs integrated into CalArts?
MR: Well, both, I guess, because you were also working for Sheila de Bretteville.
SL: The feminist programs at CalArts were several. Miriam and Judy did the Feminist Art Program. Sheila did the Feminist Design Program. Deena Metzger did Women in Literature and Women’s Writing. In the social sciences program—I think it’s called humanities at CalArts—there was also a group of women working on women in sociology. At this point in time (1970, I think), there was a massive amount of feminist consciousness and activity there.
MR: And CalArts had begun of couple of what? A year or so before? It was a hot spot.
SL: CalArts had begun a year before at a temporary campus in Glendale, where such things as nudity in the swimming pool took place, and Alison Knowles’s flying helicopters distributed paper for an event and Ravi Shankar played in the halls.
MR: Yeah.
SL: Gene Youngblood was there, and Allan Kaprow—there was an amazing amassing of talent that happened in the early days at CalArts. And while that was Disney’s vision, it was Paul Brach’s doing, at least in the visual arts. He was head of the art department. But the Disney family was not Walt Disney, and it took them a while to figure out what they had done. Much more conservative, they tried to whip the school into shape. They moved to the new campus at Valencia. I had already made a liaison with Sheila, who liked my rationality—
MR: [Laughs]
SL: —felt more comfortable with it, I think. [laughs] She thought I could teach the theoretical aspects, the reading, and lead the group discussions, since I’d been through this process. She would do the design piece, and I’d be her teaching assistant. So it had nothing to do with being interested in design that I went into that program. As I looked around the school, it became clear I could go into the art undergraduate program, but by that time I had been through seven years of college. And I wasn’t real interested in being an undergraduate student again. But it turned out that the design program was run by Richard Farson, who was founder of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, a psychologist. And working on staff was Jivan Tabibian, who was a futurologist and urban planner. I knew Dick casually from when he had led a Gestalt workshop at Esalen. I worked out a deal where they would admit me—as a graduate—in something like urban design. And of course, once you got into CalArts, there were no grades, there were no required courses. It was a very unique, chaotic place, and it was very loosely structured. You just did whatever you did. That worked out fine for everybody I knew. I don’t know if that would work out fine now for people, but we all—Charlemagne Palestine was there, David Salle, Jim Welling—seemed to do fine. You know, Baldessari was one pole of the Conceptual world, and Kaprow was the other, and then there was Chicago and Schapiro, which was a very strong feminist influence. It turned out that the feminists who were conceptually oriented gravitated toward Kaprow.
Allan Kaprow (right), Bia Lowe and an unidentified student, in Maps, 1973. Photo: Susan Mogul. Courtesy of Suzanne Lacy.
The second year at CalArts is when I began to establish my interest in performance, and I worked with Allan Kaprow. I think Allan and Sheila and Judy formed three kinds of very important influences, with Arlene Raven and Deena Metzger being other influences. But the three of them, theoretically, the way they thought, was so different, and yet I managed to merge some of their forms of thinking and take what I needed from each of them. They gave me a very strong base for exiting from CalArts.
MR: What did you draw from Allan Kaprow?
SL: Well, first an incredible legacy of events, happenings, Conceptual work. He had collected an array of books at the CalArts library. Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner and fluxus history. Allan’s formalism was supportive to my own inclinations in that direction. I know it’s hard to see the formalism, because people aren’t used to assessing the formal aspects of time-based work. I’m concerned with the structures and shapes of things. I like very controlled works. Because he was working so closely with many of us feminists, Allan’s work gave us a foundation for the move into “life” that we were looking for in a political sense. He gave us a rationale for it. I thought of them, humorously, as Judy the passionate mother and Allan the affectionate, distant father.
Because Judy was all content. Obviously Judy is herself a strong visual formalist, but her teaching was for expression, expression, expression, whereas Allan’s teaching methodology was cool, discursive, anything was possible, everything was interesting to discuss. And Allan also was at a very interesting point in his career. I learned from that—quite a bit. We knew him as the founder of Happenings, the Abstract Expressionist of the time-based media, a very major figure who had suddenly dropped into obscurity. I think he was struggling with how to handle not only the move to the West Coast but the move from the grand, expressive gesture to a different kind of concern. He was just beginning to have a shape for those concerns then. So I watched him work with his body, work with his pulse. He’d spit on his hand and note how fast it dried. He’d put us through all these paces, too—just like we put him through paces in our pieces. I remember having a revelation one day. We were sitting in a group when Allan casually mentioned how when he was a child, he was so intensely allergic that even to this day, if he eats a nut, his whole body literally blows up. And I sat there thinking, My God, that’s what’s going on. This man has this relationship to his body that’s at once kind of quizzical and distanced and yet threatening, tragic. I could empathize with these incessant experimentations trying to uncover the range of unconsciousness that happens within the seemingly simple gesture—the sociology of the unspoken. It took him a while to find a form for that.
What I learned from him was not only that there is always an intimate psychological connection but also a level of self-investigation that goes on in most art. I also learned what it was like for somebody to deliberately walk away from a major career and rebuild it. I think the man has incredible integrity. It was, interestingly enough, in his vulnerability that I understood what kind of strength an artist can have. He also was the first person to introduce me to nontheatrical performance. Judy’s performance work was theatrical.
MR: Did you also have contact with people outside CalArts, such as Barbara Smith, Rachel Rosenthal, Nancy Buchanan—
SL: No, none of those people.
MR: —Eleanor Antin—
SL: Well, Ellie did a lecture for Baldessari. CalArts had a very active visiting-artists program, so I got to know who was who in the Conceptual world. But, no, Barbara Smith was probably just getting out of Irvine about that time, and Nancy as well, and so their activity was neither considered feminist—by them—nor reaching other than a regional audience south of Los Angeles. But we did in fact have contact with national feminist artists, because we had the East-West Bag conference at CalArts. A woman was raped on campus, and so that became a focus point; we had a panel discussion with the feminist Z Budapest. Judy kept us connected with the Los Angeles, even national, feminist art scene. Womanhouse was the production of the art program. I was in design program, so I did not participate directly in Womanhouse. Judy did a performance workshop, and I took that, along with other classes she taught.
MR: What kind of assignments did she give?
Suzanne Lacy, Cinderella in a Dragster, 1976, on the cover of High Performance, Vol. 1, Issue 1, (1978). Courtesy of Linda Frye Burnham, Suzanne Lacy and Susan Mogul.
SL: One that I remember with fondness was “Route 126.” We had to drive along this two-hour stretch of road between CalArts and the coast and at some point stop the caravan of cars and get out and do a performance that had to somehow be identifiable as done by a woman. That was the only guideline. So we stopped at a telephone pole, and Judy and Shawnee Wollenman tacked Kotex on the pole. We have pictures of them being chased away by the highway patrol, who made us take them down. Nancy Youdelman did this lovely piece at the beach where she draped herself in flowing scarves like Isadora Duncan and walked into the water until she disappeared. This old, abandoned jalopy in a wash had fascinated me, and I stopped the caravan there for my piece. I gave everybody pink paint, red velvet, and a big stuffed heart, and we transformed this old jalopy into a woman-renovated car, and then we left it. After years there, it was subsequently hauled away within a week.
We were involved with things like menstruation, breasts, ovaries, all the female anatomy parts. [laughs] I did one with Laurel Klick and Susan Mogul on mastectomy. We developed an image that we used later in a piece on mothers. We had a woman ace-bandaged around the chest, and somebody came in and cut her nipple off and blood came out. We were into blood and guts.
I had been nailing beef kidneys into the wall every chance I got. Almost got thrown out of CalArts for doing it one time, actually. I conned Paul Brach into giving me a space in the graduate studios and— Did I ever tell you this?
MR: Hm-mm.
SL: It was about half as big as this room, somebody’s studio. I layered plastic and beef kidneys and then strung cord through the whole thing. So if you went in, there was an experience of being inside a body cavity. I was to leave it up for three days, and I came back the second day, and there was Stephan von Huene, the big, tall sculptor, who taught there. He and this host of graduate students lined up behind him, had an aerosol spray that they were spraying in the air. [laughs] They were out to get Paul to throw me out of school. I wasn’t even a painting student. I think it had to come down early. All my beef kidneys were constantly getting cut down. I did one show at Womanspace. I thought it was quite elegant. It was four beef kidneys hanging with a string net, fence, in front of them. It looked Gestapo-esque. I would change the kidneys every couple days so they would stay fresh. I came in one night, and there had been a feminist meeting, and somebody had cut them down. Their four little strings were limply hanging there. [laughs]
MR: Could you talk about Ablutions? Because that was where you appeared fully formed as a performance artist.
SL: That was in ’72, so I believe it was in the same semester I was graduating. Judy never let us rest in terms of reaching audiences. In fact, we didn’t show at CalArts itself. We showed in classes to prepare the work, and then we were out there some place in LA, some school or a gallery. She wanted us to put it out. For some reason, I was always very conscious of violence—I believe it has to do with my relationship to being in a body and with understanding sexual violence as an invasion of the body as a sacred space. At Fresno I said to Judy, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if we tape-recorded stories of women talking about having been raped?” I imagined the audience would sit in a dark room, and we would play the stories for them. That’s not particularly interesting now, but you have to remember that in 1970 you could not find stories of women who were raped. They wouldn’t tell you. So Judy said, “That’s a very interesting idea. Why don’t we start collecting stories.” So Judy and I spent the next year tape-recording. We’d hear rumors about a woman who was raped, and we’d find her friend, and we’d— You know, it was literally having to go down dark streets and end up in strange places in the middle of the night, tape-recording these stories. Some women had never told anyone. We used seven women’s stories. Out of the performance workshop came many beautiful images. Sandra Orgel came in one day and showed us pictures of taking a bath in eggs. The slides showed the parts of her body—her breasts and her vagina—covered with these eggs with menstrual blood kind of running through them. It was a very beautiful image.
So we took these images and the tape recordings, and we put them together in a piece that was a linear narrative. The soundtrack was exclusively the women talking; really straightforward like, “I was walking down the street. I was pushing my child in a stroller.…” Just telling in great detail the whole story of the rape. We had three galvanized metal tubs and piles of kidneys and piles of rope, and Jan Lester and I in white T-shirts and Levi’s and white gloves came out and methodically pounded these beef kidneys in a row, starting from one side of the room to the other. In the meantime, a nude woman came out and took a bath, first in eggs, then in blood, then in clay. She got out, was wrapped in white, laid down on the ground, and then another woman did it. I think two women went through the ablutions. Two other women did some imagery where they were twinning. They were adorning each other’s hair with chains. This was very methodical and throughout women were talking about being raped on a sound system. At the end, Jan and I, like giant spiders, tied everything to everything: the beef kidneys to the people, to the trays, to the—and then we left the scene.
MR: This is when the two women who’d been nude were bound.
SL: Yeah. They were wrapped in white and bound. They weren’t bound really; they were wrapped in white and laid down, and then they were tied to everything. We went over the set, tying it together. And the last words on the soundtrack were, “I felt so helpless. All I could do was just lie there. All I could do was just lie there,” and the tape stuck on that ending. The audience was stunned. They were really stunned. It was in Laddie Dill’s studio, and so there was a fairly heavy-duty Venice art audience there. Apparently, several people just sort of gagged and ran for the door at the end of it. They had never been exposed—not only with that information at that level of detail, but to women’s perspective on it. And the rage and the intensity of victimization that was in the piece. In fact, a couple of the women who were in the piece, one of them had an emotional reaction to allowing herself to participate from the vantage point of the victim. She was one who took the baths. We did it just before we graduated from CalArts.
Ablutions was a kind of exit performance for us. It was moving from CalArts to Los Angeles. It was moving from graduate school into the professional community, so that our relationships then would be closer to Womanspace, as opposed to the school. The year before I graduated I had an important encounter with Judy. She had done Womanhouse, we had the performance program, and it was the last day of school, just before summer vacation. I had shown some sculptures in the crit class. I had taken some mannequins and put wax all over their faces, and then melted it, so that they looked like women whose faces were falling off. During the class, Judy said, “Suzanne, this has got real potential, this body of work. If you don’t stop splitting yourself between design and literature and this and that and the other and make a commitment to art, I’m not going to work with you anymore.” When I left class I ran around shaking and grabbed my friend Jill Soderholm and mumbled incoherently and ran off and grabbed somebody else. And then I just made this switch inside. I went out and caught Judy in the parking lot, and said, “Okay. I’ll be an artist.” I didn’t actually feel pressured; I didn’t feel like she was going to abandon me or anything. It had nothing to do with that. I knew that she was challenging me, which she had tried to do earlier, to acknowledge that I was an artist, not six million other things. And Judy knows about commitment, and I think that’s what the issue is, and she knows how to push you up against the wall, those of us who are more nervous about making commitments.
Judy Chicago, Suzanne Lacy, Sandra Orgel and Aviva Rahmani, Ablutions, 1972. Performance at Guy Dill's studio, Venice, CA, Valencia, CA. Photo: Lloyd Hamrol. Courtesy of the artists and the Getty Research Institute.
MR: Is this the point at which you exited CalArts?
SL: Right. I exited and became a carpenter, while Judy, Arlene, and Sheila started the Woman’s Building. Miriam and Judy had had a falling-out, and there was not enough money to hire me or Faith or anybody else at that point, so it was Judy, Sheila, and Arlene that started the first Feminist Studio Workshop. I became a carpenter and worked many hours, many days a week, and didn’t have a lot of time or energy to do much else. I stayed in close touch with them but was very despairing of ever making a living as an artist—or ever being an artist at that point—because I worked so hard as a carpenter. But I began framing things, so to speak. I “framed” a bathroom I was doing as a work of art, so that you could come visit it on certain days while I was doing the carpentry. At one point, I got a lawyer to draw up an actual thirteen-page legal contract on the transplantable parts of my body, which allowed me to sell my eyes, my heart, my kidneys, and so on. I continued to explore issues of the body. I was also working on bridging that gap between what I always felt to be the strangely esoteric and elitist environment of CalArts with the real world. I felt, as a working-class kid, like I was from the real world. I would sit at CalArts and listen to kids talking about going to the Bahamas for Easter vacation. Their frames of reference were very different. So when I got out of school, I was very concerned with those kinds of issues.
MR: And then the Woman’s Building was created in 1973?
SL: Well, no, it was created that first year. The following year, 1973, they expanded the staff and took on Helen Alm Roth to do printmaking, myself to do performance, and Ruth Iskin to teach art history. They took us on as faculty. And Deena Metzger. So it was Judy, Sheila, and Arlene and the rest of us. We became, for eight years or so, the staff of the Feminist Studio Workshop.
MR: How much did you get paid?
SL: The first year it was something like $90 a month, and then it slowly went up. The max we ever got, I believe, was maybe six thousand one year, working full-time. So, needless to say, none of us ever supported ourselves completely on that, although we were trying. I either did carpentry, or at one point, around ’75 or so, I began working in a medical clinic as an emergency medical tech. They were able to train me because of my background. So I would work long shifts and basically do 48 hours of work from Friday night to Sunday night. It sure cut down on my social life.
MR: [Laughs]
SL: But it allowed me to function as an artist-teacher the rest of the week, which I did.
MR: What was the structure of the Woman’s Building?
SL: The Woman’s Building was a grand experiment. It was located in the old Chouinard art school, which we took over. The Feminist Studio Workshop was the core, the heart of the place, and it had 30 or 40 students a year. There were also various galleries, plus Womanspace Gallery. Marge Goldwater was one of the early curators of Womanspace. We had, for a while, a printing press and sisterhood bookstore. Once again, we did a whole lot of carpentry, renovating the place. My skills increased.
MR: There’s a great photograph in Faith Wilding’s book By Our Own Hands that shows you as a carpenter.
SL: With Ti-Grace the dog. I led carpentry workshops for the students. I belonged to a cooperative gallery called Grandview Galleries, named after the street we were on. It would provide us with a one-woman show once every year or two. When mine came up, I did One Woman Shows, which was an expression of the women’s community. The Woman’s Building was becoming a community, a mixture of feminists, feminist artists, and artists who were not feminists. In its early days, the openings were crammed. Everybody in town would come to them, including all the male artists. Everybody would come and get roaringly drunk and dance; it was quite an event for a period of time. That slowly dissipated, and it became known as a woman’s place. Then the openings were largely women and I remember a lot of complaints that some of the lesbians did not want men around. There was a constant struggle about what role men would play. Something happened in the West Coast feminist art movement that I don’t think was the case in the East Coast movement. We had such a strong community sensibility and focused so intensely on our relationships with each other that, except for some slightly aggressive attitudes toward men by women who had been fairly seriously damaged by them, for the most part men were not central to our theorizing. Men were not central to our emotional lives with other women, even though most of us were living with and loving men.
MR: Were you?
SL: Yes. I lived for eight years with Robert Blalack, a filmmaker from CalArts. So rage, at least for me, dropped away fairly quickly. And the defensive posturing dropped away very quickly. What happened is we began to explore what indeed was a feminist—and woman’s—sensibility. Feminist meaning a politicized version of a woman’s sensibility, and politics being the evaluation of power and the attempt to distribute power equally, to reassess the nature of power. This caused some men, like John Duncan, to become exceedingly hostile—I think because of a feeling of being left out when what was really happening was he strongly identified with women. He subsequently went off and did some very weird performances. It was difficult, I think, for the men in our lives to make adjustments to what had been happening with us those few years. They certainly had to go through a lot of changes in ways of relating.
Excerpted from East of Borneo. This is an edited version of a much longer oral history interview in the public domain. To read the entire transcript click here.
A Grand Melee of Radical Procedures: Miriam Schapiro on CalArts and the Feminist Art Program
Miriam Schapiro, ca. 1970s. Courtesy of the Flomenhaft Gallery.
In this interview, Miriam Schapiro describes her discovery of a new, more engaged way of teaching when she moved to Southern California from New York, and how that was inspired by what she witnessed visiting Judy Chicago’s class at Fresno State. This meeting led to the two artists collaborating on the Feminist Art Program at CalArts, and Schapiro discusses the program and describes some of the student projects, including Womanhouse and Anonymous Was a Woman. She then discusses her return to New York and her role in establishing the feminist art journal Heresies.
MIRIAM SCHAPIRO: We went to California in 1967.
RUTH BOWMAN: You went to the University of California in San Diego?
MS: Yes, Paul Brach went as a chairman, the originator of the present art department, and I accompanied him and taught in his department. Those were the days where the word nepotism was used as a pejorative word in academia, and as time has gone on, it’s become less major and less serious.
RB: So what was your status?
MS: Well, I left New York, my family, all my friends, my network, my gallery, André Emmerich, everything that I had going for me—the beginnings of my career and so forth—to trek westward with Paul, who had a job waiting as chair of this department. And what he told UCSD was that he couldn’t possibly take this job without some promise of work and a studio for me to paint in; he said I would be happy to be part of the university even on the level of lecturer, which is the lowest level you could be. And that was true; that’s the way I felt. I really wasn’t seeking status in academia. So they said that would be fine, and they got him out there, and they told him—I remember it was the first day he was there—they told him, no, they were sorry, but there really would be no job for me. And now, meanwhile, everything had been packed and shipped. Our son was nine years old, and he was in the act of being transferred to another school. So Paul said to his boss, who was the provost, “What do you mean? What’s happened? I was promised that we would both have a place here.” And the provost said, “Well, it’s just been rescinded, and there’s not much I can do about it.” Paul, telling this story later, said he played the biggest poker bluff of his life, which was that he said to the man, “I’m sorry, if she can’t be here, I can’t be here.” And he turned on his heel, and he walked toward the door, and he put his hand on the knob, and he started to open the door and leave, when the provost yelled after him, “Just a minute, just a minute.” Paul turned around, and he said, “Yes?” And he said, “All decisions can be reversed.” And Paul said, “Will this decision be reversed?” And he said, “I think so.” And so after all of this we achieved my lectureship.
RB: And you had a studio. They were separate buildings, weren’t they, from the department?
MS: Yes. Well, the curious thing was, we weren’t there very long, maybe a couple of years, when Paul got this letter from Herb Blau telling him they were starting a very interesting academic institution in Los Angeles and would he come up and talk to them because they wanted him to be the first dean of the art school at CalArts. And he did that, and he moved. I didn’t move with him because Peter had one more year before high school.
RB: So you stayed on as a lecturer?
MS: I stayed… No. The minute Paul left, they made me a professor.
RB: And you stayed another year—
MS: Yes.
RB: —and had this commuting back and forth. About 400 miles, I guess.
MS: Yes.
RB: And CalArts was then in Valencia?
MS: CalArts was in the old convent the first year.
RB: Oh, downtown.
MS: Near MacArthur Park, yeah. And then, the next year, the year I moved up to Santa Monica, CalArts moved to its new home in Valencia.
RB: And the commute was quite long. It was, what, about an hour? Up to hot old Valencia?
MS: Yes.
RB: And you, what were you doing? You didn’t teach at CalArts, did you?
MS: Oh, yes. You can’t imagine how many husbands and wives there were there. The deanship of dance was shared by husband and wife. A man would be in maintenance and his wife would be secretary to a dean, for example.
RB: So it was a family kind of experience.
MS: It was a family orientation, and Paul and I had no problem with that. He was the dean, and I worked for him. We didn’t have titles. We were called “member of faculty.”
RB: And what kind of subjects were you teaching? You were teaching drawing?
MS: It really was at UCSD that I began to form my philosophy of teaching. I began to see how restrictive a life it was to be a teacher. I felt that it was incumbent on me to know everything in order to inform students.
Well, you know what it’s like when you go to university, and your students don’t really know anything about art. I was teaching beginning classes for Paul. I would be teaching perhaps one-seventh of a class after the large lecture in the lecture hall, which contained all seven of these groups. These were enormous numbers of students that were being taught. And, remember, it ended up at Berkeley with the students’ revolution, where students cried, “We’ve become anonymous. We’re nobodies in this.” Sometimes the professor didn’t even appear, and his voice was recorded on tape, as a televised appearance.
RB: So the whole University of California system needed a shake-up. And you were there right in the crisis?
MS: We came right at that time. My sense of teaching was that I had a group of receptors who sat there, I was at the head of the class, and I felt—except for my insights and what I knew about art—I felt no more equipped to really be there in that position than the man in the moon. I mean, I felt that it wasn’t a logical or proper way for me to be teaching. It was at that time that I began to formulate different ways of teaching. RB: Now, there were other people that Paul brought or that you knew there like the Antins—Eleanor and David Antin?
MS: And Paul brought—
RB: Harold Cohen with him.
MS: He brought Harold Cohen and the Antins; he brought Newton and Helen Harrison—
RB: You. This was a community that you had there.
MS: Yes.
RB: And in the community, did you talk together about the problems of teaching in this way?
MS: No, because I’m not sure everybody felt as I did. The way I felt led to a revolutionary experiment that then took place at CalArts.
RB: Where you had the freedom to do that?
MS: Yes. Well, in the interim between my staying the extra year at UCSD and then leaving and going to CalArts, I met Judy Chicago. Judy came to San Diego to give a lecture, and subsequently she had me visit Fresno, where she was teaching, and give a lecture. The difference between the atmosphere that I was living in and the atmosphere that she had created was astonishing to me. I felt she was involved in an appropriate historical change. And I think that what I reacted to was really part of what was necessary for the future and was actually what the Berkeley students were up in arms about.
RB: And this was about 1970?
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Womanhouse catalogue, 1972. Courtesy of Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and the California Institute of the Arts Archive.
MS: It was just about ’69, ’70. The Berkeley students were decrying the loss of personal contact, any possibility of intimacy in teaching. And what was happening with Judy and her group is that she was reinstating all of that. Subsequently, we got together. And the way that happened was that I presented to the male group who were working for Paul at CalArts the possibility that Judy and I would team-teach a women’s class. They didn’t really know Judy, and she carried a very volatile mythology around her, so they were cautious. But I persuaded them that, since I was fifteen years older than she, I would be the leavening influence, and I told them I believed that this program could develop into something very important. And so by virtue of their faith in me and my past performances in terms of my career, and what they had seen of me as a teacher and so forth, they agreed to let us do that. That was a big move. However, as far as CalArts was concerned, it wasn’t so radical because at CalArts at that time they were doing the most amazing things. Victor Papanek, who was teaching design, had his students making radios for a penny each that could be shipped to Third World people. This was a radical notion. In the music department, they had imported dancers from West Africa, and they were constantly doing a chicken dance in the halls. They flapped their arms and spoke very little English. And then, again in the halls, starting at six o’clock in the morning, students and teachers practiced their t’ai chi. Ravi Shankar was another one of these people. Gene Youngblood was a brilliant analyst of film and movies, and he was there at that time. So it was just a grand melee of radical procedures. And our Feminist Art Program simply took its place.
RB: When you announced the course, what happened with the students?
MS: We announced the course and the students were shy and curious, and so we sat at a table and talked about what it would be like. We also talked to the faculty. I remember the whole faculty attending a retreat at that time. And the woman who ultimately taught the design program for women only—Sheila de Bretteville—explaining what her class would be like. Judy and I talked about what we had planned. I didn’t know at that time, nor did Judy, that we would do Womanhouse. Once we met the students in our class—there were 21—we talked about doing a community project and it turned out to be Womanhouse.
RB: And Womanhouse had a catalog?
MS: Oh, yes. Not only a catalog. Womanhouse was a phenomenon, a cultural phenomenon, not only in California but everywhere.
RB: It was nationally known.
MS: But it was also internationally known. When Womanhouse was finished, we were interviewed by Encyclopedia Britannica. An hour program was done on KPFK. We were written up in Time-Life. We received incredible publicity. And when you think that the young people, students in an art class, made and experienced this event, it was really quite extraordinary.
RB: Womanhouse was a building in which environments were made by each student?
MS: Well, it was an artistic project. And it wasn’t linear in the sense that when you enter my home you enter a vestibule and then you go into the living room. I mean, the sequence was unpredictable. We took over a house, and the house had many rooms. Each student was interested in a particular room, and so they created a sort of happening environment in each of their rooms. One woman painted enormous leaves on the wall. This was her expression of love of beauty and regard for nature. We called it the Leaf Room. It was very beautiful. And near that was a more traditional bedroom, where several students working together created a room patterned on Gigi, a story by Colette, the French writer. The room was the bedroom of a courtesan. It was a very elegant room. The women went to an antiques dealer and talked him into loaning them incredible Victorian furniture. They made a very dense, perfumed room with lace and satin and a vanity, I remember, with all sorts of encrusted silver hairbrushes, and so forth. But the point is that they created an atmosphere, an environment, which was specific to itself and that had nothing to do with the other rooms in the house.
RB: And each room was really separate—the kitchen, the bathroom?
MS: Every room was separate.
RB: And did they sort of draw straws for who got what room, or did it just fall into place?
MS: Well, the radical part of our teaching was based on consciousness-raising. So every day we would sit in a circle in a particular room, and the session I remember best took place in the kitchen. In this old abandoned mansion, we sat on the floor, had our talk time, and then we got our mops and cleaned it up. But the kitchen talk was one hell of a drama; that’s what I remember. Everyone told her story of growing up with her mother and her experiences in the kitchen. And I remember someone saying at some point, “These stories seem to add up to our relationships with our mothers like a metaphor for a bottle of milk. Is it half empty or half full?”
Robin Weltsch, Susan Frazier and Vicky Hodgett, Nurturant Kitchen at Womanhouse, 1972. Courtesy of the California Institute of the Arts Archive.
RB: Marvelous.
MS: That would ultimately be a description of their relationships with their mothers. It’s really very true, isn’t it? Was she giving or taking away in her nurturance?
RB: And to objectify all of that into an environment must have been quite a challenge.
MS: Well, here is the part where I asked myself, “A teacher? What kind of a teacher can I be?” But ultimately I accepted myself as a facilitator. My growing philosophy of education was based on the idea that they had as much to tell me, as I had to tell them. The only difference was in our ages—that indeed if I had lived longer than they did, which I had, I had more experiences perhaps. But they might have had denser experiences. Remember, those were the days of heavy drugs. And in our separate performances at Womanhouse, one of the groups made a marvelous theatrical piece about drug users, and that certainly wasn’t my experience.
RB: How did the academic deans, how did the management of the school react to all of this? What was their relationship to you? I mean, you were doing something, I’m sure, beyond what had been done before, ever.
MS: Ruth, remember we worked for the Disneys, who were considered not conservative but reactionary people.
RB: Right.
MS: So your question is well put. However, the one Disney (by marriage) who was head of the school had been converted in some way. He became enormously tolerant of this whole weird environment that was CalArts. And no one in management ever said anything. When you came into Womanhouse, to see the performances or went through the rooms, you knew immediately you were in the face of something you’d never seen before in the art world. There was Judy’s “menstruation bathroom.” My room had a dollhouse in it. Everybody made something quite different, and these rooms were all inspired by a woman’s point of view. We made a film of Womanhouse. Danny Selznick, who was on our board, brought the idea of Womanhouse, to the American Film Council, and they gave Joanna Demetrakis a grant to film Womanhouse. We have that as a record.
When we did Womanhouse, we were scared to death because it had never been done before—such a mammoth project, you know, on an idea that had never been set forth before. And the thing I think that impressed me so much, Ruth, and which gave a real backup to my democratic sensibilities was when I saw women walk into that house and just gasp! Some of them crying. Some of them—there was never a word said; it was always the expression on the face, “I know this. This is art, but I know what this is about. I know what this is about. I know what this is about.”
RB: So it was a parallel activity to the establishment, or what is art. It wasn’t really a challenge to what is art; it was another art form?
MS: It was a reinforcement for women also.
RB: Of those 21 students, how many stayed in touch with you? How many moved into the art world?
MS: About half of them. Robin Mitchell, Faith Wilding, Suzanne Lacy, Mira Schor—oh, a number of them stay in touch.
RB: Right, and are they still in California and still working?
MS: Faith and Mira are in New York and doing very well. Faith and Mira would always do well, in my opinion, but their journey was so different from that of David Salle and Eric Fischl, who were their colleagues at CalArts, because theirs was a woman’s point of view in the art-making process and that was not something that was really acceptable then. When you walked into my house earlier, did you see that piece on the wall that was like a dress? That’s Mira’s piece. It looks like a dress, reads like a book, and has secrets.
RB: In California, you were teaching at CalArts for five or six years?
MS: No, four.
RB: Four years. And you—Judy Chicago came down from Northern California. She came from Fresno for about two years and left.
MS: Two years and left. And I continued the Feminist Art Program in my own manner for two years after she left. I concentrated more on publishing. We published Anonymous Was a Woman, and we published another wonderful publication called Art: A Woman’s Sensibility. The cover of that publication was reproduced in The Village Voice, because we showed Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup, and up to that point, Ruth, almost everybody—
RB: Nobody knew she was a woman, right?
MS: Right. Which in a way was the point also of Anonymous Was a Woman, which was a poster, a book, and a celebration of women’s creativity at CalArts. As a book, it was a gathering of letters. The women in our Feminist Art Program sent letters to a variety of established women in the art world—critics, poets, curators, artists—and they asked, “How’d you do it? We’re young. We’re students here. We want to know.” And then this beautiful collection of replies came back, and we published them.
RB: Under the quotation from Virginia Woolf.
MS: Exactly.
RB: And was it Virginia Woolf’s life or just the quote that made you choose the title?
MS: Virginia really is a heroine to creative feminists, in the sense that her life is so instructive to us. Her devotion to her art. The fact that she was so original. Also the tragedy of her life. You know, these things belong to us. Like Sylvia Plath’s life or like Frida Kahlo’s life. It’s always somehow inspiring to think of someone who had great suffering and yet great achievement at the same time. We are inspired by their redemption. These women are all heroines. Certainly it was Virginia Woolf’s life as well as her work. And also her attitudes toward society and her particular way of being a feminist. For example, she had a lot of trouble joining groups. A lot of women have trouble joining groups. But that doesn’t stop you from expressing your point of view in whatever manner you choose to do it. That’s what she did. She made her little pamphlets, and she was a journalist. She published books, and she wrote her own books. She and her husband were a partnership; they published together. And ultimately she took her life. And all of that made for a genuine kind of myth for women who were at that time being so conscious of the fact that they were women and that they had a history. We needed to have role models. Everything came together at the same time: art and consciousness, myth and reality. You asked me before, and I don’t think we went into it, why did I think that California was a particularly fertile ground for all this to happen? I don’t think it could have ever happened in New York. New York is hell-bent on separating one person from another because of the competition. And in California there was some chance for us to get together. And it was as simple as that.
My life would never have been what it is today if I hadn’t had that eight years in California. My life changed there. The difference between the California women and the New York women was that the New York women were “head” women, and in California they were “body” women, which is not to say that the New York women weren’t involved with their bodies, but not in the same way. Because in California people are sun worshipers who live in a climate which emphasizes involvement with their bodies.
In New York that doesn’t happen. In the intellectual community or in the artistic community, the concentration is on what is mental. To give you an example, Judy Chicago would be a wonderful example of a “head-body” person and Lucy Lippard would be a wonderful example of a “head” person. And they were both important figures in the woman-artist movement.
RB: And when in this decade did the idea of making a special publication, Heresies, come up?
MS: Well, I brought that idea back from California, a continuation of the publishing ideas we had tried at CalArts.
When I left New York in 1967 and had a new development in my life—in my thinking, in my art—when all this happened, some people who had been my New York friends before California couldn’t quite handle it, and I lost a lot of friends. But one friend was faithful, Joyce Kozloff. So when I came back to New York with Paul—Peter, our son, remained at San Francisco State—I said I had a few ideas that I would like to present to the women artists of New York, and Joyce called a meeting and we presented the idea of a school or the idea of a magazine, and the idea of a magazine was the one that really caught on. Although there was a school, the Feminist Art Institute, which subsequently opened. I organized it with a group of women, including Betsy Damon. I worked there only six months.
Miriam Schapiro, Personal Appearance #3, 1973. Fabric, paper, collage, and acrylic on canvas, 60 x 50 in. Courtesy of the Flomenhaft Gallery.
But it was the magazine, Heresies, which caught on like wildfire and became one of the most interesting small publications in the seventies and eighties. It’s about to have its tenth anniversary. It is one of the best philosophical statements of feminist thinking. You know, the popular image of a feminist is as a bra burner, but there’s a hell of a lot more to it than that.
I think what we women did was to democratize art. I think today a lot of what goes on in galleries—I’m not saying it’s successful—is a democratization of art. For example, there’s an important movement toward recognizing ethnicity. Recently, I was amused because one of my paintings wasn’t permitted to go to Russia. The man who was organizing the show said, “Well, your work is not political so therefore you don’t qualify for this show, because we’re just showing political work.” In 1972, it was the reverse. I was excluded from shows because I was political. But now there’s a new politics, and the new politics calls for new laws and new rules. So what’s political today is that you have to be a nonmainstream ethnic, an outsider, and then whatever you do is considered political. I’m not putting this trend down. I’m just trying to point out how the shifts and changes go, and how complex it is, and how it’s all in the area of gray.
Right after Womanhouse, I glued fabric on the painted surface of the canvas. And that was really a no-no as far as New York was concerned. I had a show in 1973 at the André Emmerich Gallery, an enormous show of my work, and all the canvases had fabric on them. My colleagues were just astonished. In fact, Al Held said of me—I had a lot of New York admirers before I came to California—“Well, she left the true faith.” The fabric—which is really, in a larger sense, the fabric of my life—was so important to me. And then from that came my research into women’s traditional art and—
RB: The aprons.
MS: The aprons and the needlework and ultimately our producing that fabulous issue of Heresies called Women’s Traditional Art. I’m so gung-ho about Heresies because it really is an encyclopedia of everything I’m talking about. Every issue was different, and each issue was published by a new collective. So the process of publishing was different and the content was different.
Excerpted from East of Borneo. This is an edited version of a much longer oral history interview in the public domain. To read the entire transcript click here.
Suzanne Lacy on the Feminist Program at Fresno State and CalArts
CalArts students at Klubnikin Packing Co., downtown Los Angeles, in Maps, 1973. Happening in Los Angeles, CA. Photo: Susan Mogul. Courtesy of Suzanne Lacy.
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 30 or 40 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.
MR: [Laughs]
SL: We had a totally enthralled group of women, and the next thing you knew we had begun feminist organizing at Fresno State. In the meantime, Judy Chicago, looking for a way to start a feminist art program, came to Fresno from Los Angeles, approached Faith, and began to talk about organizing young women art students. I applied that spring, after a year of graduate school. I remember the interview with Judy sitting there with her straw hat and two or three of her little groupie girls around her. You know, I’d always done art, so I felt like this is a natural for me. She said, “No, I don’t want you.” I said, “What do you mean? I know all about creativity”—I’d just written a 50-page research of the literature on creativity, from psychology’s point of view—“and I’ve always done art.” She said, “That doesn’t matter. You are on the career track for psychology, and I’m only interested in working with women who will become professional artists.” I didn’t know what on earth she was talking about, but I did know I really wanted in that program. So for the next several months Faith and I strategized how to get me into the program, which we eventually succeeded in doing. I love to tease Judy now, because I’m probably one of the most successful of the artists from that time, along with Faith. We’ve always teased her about what bad judgment of character she has.
MR: Could you describe the program at Fresno that Judy Chicago ran? Who was in it, how she conducted it, how you felt about it.
SL: Well, once I got in, I was very excited. I was a second-year grad student in psychology at the time, and I was moving so far out of academic psychology by then that I was working in sociology and race relations and things like that. I think one of the major things I got out of it was my first real encounter with female sensibility. I had always had women friends, but I had been trained academically with men, had identified with them, and had found some things about women quite provoking. Mostly, their lack of freedom and inability to experiment, go places, and do things (which I thought was what men did). But when I got involved with that program, for the first time I began to appreciate not just particular women but all women.
In terms of the structure, Judy brought about fifteen students together. We had to make a major commitment of time and money. That is, we could take anywhere between three and twelve units of school credit. For many of us, over 50 percent of our schooling was this program. The first thing she did was ask us to buy work boots. Then she taught us how to deal with realtors, as we canvassed Fresno to look for an abandoned space to make into our studio. We found this huge old theater outside of town and, with our work boots, began to transform it. Judy taught us carpentry. I was certainly familiar with tools and stuff, but I’d never learned how to Sheetrock. We made flawless walls. We completely renovated this whole place. And in order to do that, we had to pay money; I think at that time it was $25 a month, which was a rather major commitment. I was freaked out, as I’ve always been since I’ve been an artist, about money. But nevertheless, we all did it to support the rent and utilities in our studio. We had a series of courses. We had reading studies, feminist art history, and studio art. That’s when we first started discovering people like Frida Kahlo, Mary Cassatt, and other women artists who were uncovered subsequently or simultaneously—I’m not sure which—by art historians. Several women we discovered by rooting through used bookstores. I remember when Nancy Youdelman came to class one time with the book of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the first Women’s Building. This was revolutionary to us. We poured over this and other books and found photographs in esoteric places.
Students of the Feminist art program at California State University, Fresno (1970-71).
Ti-Grace Atkinson came to Fresno, and we prepared a cheerleading reception for her. We went down to the Fresno airport prepared to do our “c-u-n-t” cheers—with the pink cheerleaders—and off came 40 or so Shriners as we were screaming, “Give us a c, give us a u.” [laughs] Right behind them came this giant leggy woman wearing sunglasses at six o’clock at night and carrying a cigarette holder. She had buckskin pants and a giant fur coat. That was Ti-Grace Atkinson, who sat there sort of bemused while we were performing madly for her. It was quite an evening. Judy and she had a real run-in. The gist of it was Ti-Grace felt that everybody, male or female, who had anything to do with patriarchy was completely screwed, and Judy’s position was to work with the men in your life.
MR: And you named your dog Ti-Grace.
SL: Yes. I had a dog named Ti-Grace, a dog named Simone—after Simone de Beauvoir—and a cat named Red Emma [after Emma Goldman]. They were fixtures of the early feminist movement. You’ll find their photographs in a variety of places, documenting the building of the Woman’s Building. The dogs, I mean, not de Beauvoir and Atkinson. So we built ourselves an art studio, and we spent a lot of time working on our art. Judy would give us assignments having to do with topics, for example, like rage. You know, like, “How do you feel when you’re walking down the street with men leering at you?” There was indeed a lot of anger that got expressed in those early performances. People turned to performance almost intuitively. It wasn’t as “sophisticated” as some of the Conceptual performance works at the time. For the most part, we didn’t know anything about that work, and I don’t think Judy knew a lot about it either. We were doing what I’d call skits. She intentionally steered us away from anything that was Conceptual, that was removed from a direct engagement with our feelings. We made art of our experience. I remember I put up huge pieces of paper on the wall, 8 feet by 6 feet, and I’d throw balloons full of paint at it, and slosh paint around. We were very physically engaged. As well, we had crits and we had consciousness-raising sessions.
MR: In crits, were the standards whether one was emotionally engaged? Were there aesthetic judgments made?
SL: There were aesthetic judgments, but it was based on the ability of the work to authentically reveal the self and one’s feeling states. It was probably not divorced, in some respects, from Abstract Expressionism, although the work was not abstract. Judy gave assignments having to do with emotional states or feelings about mothers or about other women. Of course, one could also just do art art. There was no prescription against that. But we were very caught up in a burgeoning awareness of what it meant to be a woman.
Those first consciousness-raising groups were incredibly intense. It was like uncovering, in a funny way, an entire new world within your self. I remember seeing the movie The Bell Jar, from the book by Sylvia Plath, and watching the scene where she’s almost raped by her date, and thinking, My God. While I have never been raped, I had certainly had rather forceful experiences with dates. The kind of pressure that you wouldn’t ever describe as attempted rape in the fifties and sixties. So our work together was like a continuing revelation. I did paintings, not much performance at that point. I did a lot of conceptual work, wrote, and I made sculptures. I guess one sculpture that stands out in mind is a life-size bride, which ended up looking like a cadaver, that was made with resin.
It looked like a macabre Kienholz, with birth control pills for her bridal bouquet and a gag over her mouth, and she was lying in a position like she was about to be raped. It was a papier-mâché figure with about an inch of resin meticulously layered, and then this cloth wedding gown that was also layered in resin. The whole thing had this rigid fifties look. And her eyes were popping out of their sockets. For a cunt she had a plunger with a pink lightbulb in it. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was an aggressive and frightening image of marriage as a trap. Lord knows where that came from. Needless to say, however, I’ve never gotten married. [laughs]
The consciousness-raising was interesting because it was borrowed from—this was the late sixties, early seventies—from the intensity of the Gestalt therapy movement. People all over the country were sequestering themselves away in little rooms and screaming at each other in the service of changing their psyches. [laughs] That was not much different than what we did, and at times that aspect of the program made me nervous. I would back out of it. Part of it was my psychological training. Some of it was quite good. People went through a lot of changes. Some of it I thought was a little destructive, though not any more so than any of the other encounter groups that I had participated in during that era. You know, in the sixties in California we were always mucking around in each other’s psyches—experimenting in psychology. Mostly it didn’t hurt anybody.
MR: How did you and Judy relate to one another?
Suzanne Lacy, Maps, 1973. Happening at CalArts, Valencia, CA. Pictured, Left: Bia Lowe, Stanley Fried, Susan Mogul, Vanalyne Green and an unidentified student; Right, Detail of Maps. Photos: Suzanne Lacy. Courtesy of the artist.
SL: In the beginning, Judy did not know how to take me. There was a way in which I was separated from the group and critical of it. I would interject psychological analyses of their psychological analyses—in the middle of an encounter group. [laughs] And I also wasn’t able to fully engage with my work as an artist. I was still inclined toward the methods of social science. Nothing overt was ever said, but in time I became very close with Judy. She began to trust me. I don’t know if it was a subliminal thing that happened.
Later, when the group was getting ready to leave for CalArts, a similar rapid transformation happened. Judy and Miriam Schapiro were going to do a feminist art program at CalArts, and everybody was preparing to go there and trying to get in, and I wasn’t because I was a second-year grad student in psychology, on my way to getting a master’s. One day, Faith Wilding said to me, “Have you thought about coming to CalArts?” and I said, “Well, no. Not really.” That night I just stayed awake for hours in a fever, tossing and turning, and the next morning I got up and immediately went to the phone. I called CalArts to apply for a scholarship—because I didn’t have any money at all. At that precise moment, Judy broke into the line. This was before call-waiting. Judy’s method of getting through to you was through emergency interrupt. At that moment, just when I was talking to CalArts, I get this emergency interrupt from Judy, who says, “Suzanne-y, I’ve been thinking. Maybe you should apply to go to CalArts. Have you thought about that?” And so I went to CalArts.
I think that the women did some very good work. I think that they uncovered some important historical information in that program. Many of those women went on to be artists. Some dropped out later in the years, but by and large I think it was a tremendously affirming experience to be with all women, to have such a charismatic woman role model in Judy. We talked a lot about role models. I think it organized people’s psyches in a different way and allowed them to move forward with a lot more courage. We got to a point where we were doing exhibitions for the Fresno State art department, and all the faculty and students came. They were blown away by what they were seeing. We took the show on the road a few times, and I remember one time (it was pretty funny) when somebody in the audience got up and slugged Faith. The presentations almost always ended in confrontation. There was a lot of antagonism men had to what we were saying.
MR: Hmm!
SL: We were really gutsy. I mean, we were really presenting a very tough female image—to the world through our art and our panels. Because of Judy’s connections, we were able to make presentations in Los Angeles, the art world, and at schools. There was one weekend when Larry Bell came, and Miriam Schapiro and Sheila de Bretteville—Vickie Hall did a performance there. She was a terrific performance artist who moved to Fresno to study with Judy. A lot of people from CalArts came down, and we would have these big powwows, art showings, slumber parties. They were very exciting and intense times. That’s when I met Sheila, who decided, prompted by Miriam and Judy, to do a feminist design program at CalArts.
MR: Did you also witness the beginning of Miriam and Judy talking with one another?
SL: Yes, that was during that time. Witness is a good way to put it, because particularly Faith and I, who were older, were privy to conversations with Judy, who is very open about her process. Judy’s a very, very fine teacher. She’s incredibly demanding, and she knows how to push through to the tenderest parts of your psyche, and she goes right for the jugular in her criticism, which I think is good. Not in a humiliating manner, as it is in some art schools, but in a very direct and compassionate way. Why talk about the form and shape of something to the exclusion of what somebody is trying to express about themselves? She’s also brilliant about historical context. The woman reads incessantly. Whenever she wants to know about something, she sits down and plows through scores of books. She’s also tremendously supportive of her students. Judy also had certain biases that were very problematic for me. For example, I remember once at CalArts, Arlene Raven came back from New York having just seen a big Conceptual arts show and said, “You know, Judy, I think Suzanne’s a budding Conceptual artist.” My ears perked up at that.
MR: [Laughs]
SL: I said, “What is that, Arlene?” Judy went into a fit about it, because in her mind Conceptual artists were people like John Baldessari—distanced, aloof, abstract. In fact, that is part of conceptualism, but nobody had at that time managed to integrate a feminist emotive consciousness into that form of art, which they subsequently did.
MR: And then, when you did finally decide to go to CalArts, how were you integrated within the programs?
SL: Personally, or how were the feminist programs integrated into CalArts?
MR: Well, both, I guess, because you were also working for Sheila de Bretteville.
SL: The feminist programs at CalArts were several. Miriam and Judy did the Feminist Art Program. Sheila did the Feminist Design Program. Deena Metzger did Women in Literature and Women’s Writing. In the social sciences program—I think it’s called humanities at CalArts—there was also a group of women working on women in sociology. At this point in time (1970, I think), there was a massive amount of feminist consciousness and activity there.
MR: And CalArts had begun of couple of what? A year or so before? It was a hot spot.
SL: CalArts had begun a year before at a temporary campus in Glendale, where such things as nudity in the swimming pool took place, and Alison Knowles’s flying helicopters distributed paper for an event and Ravi Shankar played in the halls.
MR: Yeah.
SL: Gene Youngblood was there, and Allan Kaprow—there was an amazing amassing of talent that happened in the early days at CalArts. And while that was Disney’s vision, it was Paul Brach’s doing, at least in the visual arts. He was head of the art department. But the Disney family was not Walt Disney, and it took them a while to figure out what they had done. Much more conservative, they tried to whip the school into shape. They moved to the new campus at Valencia. I had already made a liaison with Sheila, who liked my rationality—
MR: [Laughs]
SL: —felt more comfortable with it, I think. [laughs] She thought I could teach the theoretical aspects, the reading, and lead the group discussions, since I’d been through this process. She would do the design piece, and I’d be her teaching assistant. So it had nothing to do with being interested in design that I went into that program. As I looked around the school, it became clear I could go into the art undergraduate program, but by that time I had been through seven years of college. And I wasn’t real interested in being an undergraduate student again. But it turned out that the design program was run by Richard Farson, who was founder of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, a psychologist. And working on staff was Jivan Tabibian, who was a futurologist and urban planner. I knew Dick casually from when he had led a Gestalt workshop at Esalen. I worked out a deal where they would admit me—as a graduate—in something like urban design. And of course, once you got into CalArts, there were no grades, there were no required courses. It was a very unique, chaotic place, and it was very loosely structured. You just did whatever you did. That worked out fine for everybody I knew. I don’t know if that would work out fine now for people, but we all—Charlemagne Palestine was there, David Salle, Jim Welling—seemed to do fine. You know, Baldessari was one pole of the Conceptual world, and Kaprow was the other, and then there was Chicago and Schapiro, which was a very strong feminist influence. It turned out that the feminists who were conceptually oriented gravitated toward Kaprow.
Allan Kaprow (right), Bia Lowe and an unidentified student, in Maps, 1973. Photo: Susan Mogul. Courtesy of Suzanne Lacy.
The second year at CalArts is when I began to establish my interest in performance, and I worked with Allan Kaprow. I think Allan and Sheila and Judy formed three kinds of very important influences, with Arlene Raven and Deena Metzger being other influences. But the three of them, theoretically, the way they thought, was so different, and yet I managed to merge some of their forms of thinking and take what I needed from each of them. They gave me a very strong base for exiting from CalArts.
MR: What did you draw from Allan Kaprow?
SL: Well, first an incredible legacy of events, happenings, Conceptual work. He had collected an array of books at the CalArts library. Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner and fluxus history. Allan’s formalism was supportive to my own inclinations in that direction. I know it’s hard to see the formalism, because people aren’t used to assessing the formal aspects of time-based work. I’m concerned with the structures and shapes of things. I like very controlled works. Because he was working so closely with many of us feminists, Allan’s work gave us a foundation for the move into “life” that we were looking for in a political sense. He gave us a rationale for it. I thought of them, humorously, as Judy the passionate mother and Allan the affectionate, distant father.
Because Judy was all content. Obviously Judy is herself a strong visual formalist, but her teaching was for expression, expression, expression, whereas Allan’s teaching methodology was cool, discursive, anything was possible, everything was interesting to discuss. And Allan also was at a very interesting point in his career. I learned from that—quite a bit. We knew him as the founder of Happenings, the Abstract Expressionist of the time-based media, a very major figure who had suddenly dropped into obscurity. I think he was struggling with how to handle not only the move to the West Coast but the move from the grand, expressive gesture to a different kind of concern. He was just beginning to have a shape for those concerns then. So I watched him work with his body, work with his pulse. He’d spit on his hand and note how fast it dried. He’d put us through all these paces, too—just like we put him through paces in our pieces. I remember having a revelation one day. We were sitting in a group when Allan casually mentioned how when he was a child, he was so intensely allergic that even to this day, if he eats a nut, his whole body literally blows up. And I sat there thinking, My God, that’s what’s going on. This man has this relationship to his body that’s at once kind of quizzical and distanced and yet threatening, tragic. I could empathize with these incessant experimentations trying to uncover the range of unconsciousness that happens within the seemingly simple gesture—the sociology of the unspoken. It took him a while to find a form for that.
What I learned from him was not only that there is always an intimate psychological connection but also a level of self-investigation that goes on in most art. I also learned what it was like for somebody to deliberately walk away from a major career and rebuild it. I think the man has incredible integrity. It was, interestingly enough, in his vulnerability that I understood what kind of strength an artist can have. He also was the first person to introduce me to nontheatrical performance. Judy’s performance work was theatrical.
MR: Did you also have contact with people outside CalArts, such as Barbara Smith, Rachel Rosenthal, Nancy Buchanan—
SL: No, none of those people.
MR: —Eleanor Antin—
SL: Well, Ellie did a lecture for Baldessari. CalArts had a very active visiting-artists program, so I got to know who was who in the Conceptual world. But, no, Barbara Smith was probably just getting out of Irvine about that time, and Nancy as well, and so their activity was neither considered feminist—by them—nor reaching other than a regional audience south of Los Angeles. But we did in fact have contact with national feminist artists, because we had the East-West Bag conference at CalArts. A woman was raped on campus, and so that became a focus point; we had a panel discussion with the feminist Z Budapest. Judy kept us connected with the Los Angeles, even national, feminist art scene. Womanhouse was the production of the art program. I was in design program, so I did not participate directly in Womanhouse. Judy did a performance workshop, and I took that, along with other classes she taught.
MR: What kind of assignments did she give?
Suzanne Lacy, Cinderella in a Dragster, 1976, on the cover of High Performance, Vol. 1, Issue 1, (1978). Courtesy of Linda Frye Burnham, Suzanne Lacy and Susan Mogul.
SL: One that I remember with fondness was “Route 126.” We had to drive along this two-hour stretch of road between CalArts and the coast and at some point stop the caravan of cars and get out and do a performance that had to somehow be identifiable as done by a woman. That was the only guideline. So we stopped at a telephone pole, and Judy and Shawnee Wollenman tacked Kotex on the pole. We have pictures of them being chased away by the highway patrol, who made us take them down. Nancy Youdelman did this lovely piece at the beach where she draped herself in flowing scarves like Isadora Duncan and walked into the water until she disappeared. This old, abandoned jalopy in a wash had fascinated me, and I stopped the caravan there for my piece. I gave everybody pink paint, red velvet, and a big stuffed heart, and we transformed this old jalopy into a woman-renovated car, and then we left it. After years there, it was subsequently hauled away within a week.
We were involved with things like menstruation, breasts, ovaries, all the female anatomy parts. [laughs] I did one with Laurel Klick and Susan Mogul on mastectomy. We developed an image that we used later in a piece on mothers. We had a woman ace-bandaged around the chest, and somebody came in and cut her nipple off and blood came out. We were into blood and guts.
I had been nailing beef kidneys into the wall every chance I got. Almost got thrown out of CalArts for doing it one time, actually. I conned Paul Brach into giving me a space in the graduate studios and— Did I ever tell you this?
MR: Hm-mm.
SL: It was about half as big as this room, somebody’s studio. I layered plastic and beef kidneys and then strung cord through the whole thing. So if you went in, there was an experience of being inside a body cavity. I was to leave it up for three days, and I came back the second day, and there was Stephan von Huene, the big, tall sculptor, who taught there. He and this host of graduate students lined up behind him, had an aerosol spray that they were spraying in the air. [laughs] They were out to get Paul to throw me out of school. I wasn’t even a painting student. I think it had to come down early. All my beef kidneys were constantly getting cut down. I did one show at Womanspace. I thought it was quite elegant. It was four beef kidneys hanging with a string net, fence, in front of them. It looked Gestapo-esque. I would change the kidneys every couple days so they would stay fresh. I came in one night, and there had been a feminist meeting, and somebody had cut them down. Their four little strings were limply hanging there. [laughs]
MR: Could you talk about Ablutions? Because that was where you appeared fully formed as a performance artist.
SL: That was in ’72, so I believe it was in the same semester I was graduating. Judy never let us rest in terms of reaching audiences. In fact, we didn’t show at CalArts itself. We showed in classes to prepare the work, and then we were out there some place in LA, some school or a gallery. She wanted us to put it out. For some reason, I was always very conscious of violence—I believe it has to do with my relationship to being in a body and with understanding sexual violence as an invasion of the body as a sacred space. At Fresno I said to Judy, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if we tape-recorded stories of women talking about having been raped?” I imagined the audience would sit in a dark room, and we would play the stories for them. That’s not particularly interesting now, but you have to remember that in 1970 you could not find stories of women who were raped. They wouldn’t tell you. So Judy said, “That’s a very interesting idea. Why don’t we start collecting stories.” So Judy and I spent the next year tape-recording. We’d hear rumors about a woman who was raped, and we’d find her friend, and we’d— You know, it was literally having to go down dark streets and end up in strange places in the middle of the night, tape-recording these stories. Some women had never told anyone. We used seven women’s stories. Out of the performance workshop came many beautiful images. Sandra Orgel came in one day and showed us pictures of taking a bath in eggs. The slides showed the parts of her body—her breasts and her vagina—covered with these eggs with menstrual blood kind of running through them. It was a very beautiful image.
So we took these images and the tape recordings, and we put them together in a piece that was a linear narrative. The soundtrack was exclusively the women talking; really straightforward like, “I was walking down the street. I was pushing my child in a stroller.…” Just telling in great detail the whole story of the rape. We had three galvanized metal tubs and piles of kidneys and piles of rope, and Jan Lester and I in white T-shirts and Levi’s and white gloves came out and methodically pounded these beef kidneys in a row, starting from one side of the room to the other. In the meantime, a nude woman came out and took a bath, first in eggs, then in blood, then in clay. She got out, was wrapped in white, laid down on the ground, and then another woman did it. I think two women went through the ablutions. Two other women did some imagery where they were twinning. They were adorning each other’s hair with chains. This was very methodical and throughout women were talking about being raped on a sound system. At the end, Jan and I, like giant spiders, tied everything to everything: the beef kidneys to the people, to the trays, to the—and then we left the scene.
MR: This is when the two women who’d been nude were bound.
SL: Yeah. They were wrapped in white and bound. They weren’t bound really; they were wrapped in white and laid down, and then they were tied to everything. We went over the set, tying it together. And the last words on the soundtrack were, “I felt so helpless. All I could do was just lie there. All I could do was just lie there,” and the tape stuck on that ending. The audience was stunned. They were really stunned. It was in Laddie Dill’s studio, and so there was a fairly heavy-duty Venice art audience there. Apparently, several people just sort of gagged and ran for the door at the end of it. They had never been exposed—not only with that information at that level of detail, but to women’s perspective on it. And the rage and the intensity of victimization that was in the piece. In fact, a couple of the women who were in the piece, one of them had an emotional reaction to allowing herself to participate from the vantage point of the victim. She was one who took the baths. We did it just before we graduated from CalArts.
Ablutions was a kind of exit performance for us. It was moving from CalArts to Los Angeles. It was moving from graduate school into the professional community, so that our relationships then would be closer to Womanspace, as opposed to the school. The year before I graduated I had an important encounter with Judy. She had done Womanhouse, we had the performance program, and it was the last day of school, just before summer vacation. I had shown some sculptures in the crit class. I had taken some mannequins and put wax all over their faces, and then melted it, so that they looked like women whose faces were falling off. During the class, Judy said, “Suzanne, this has got real potential, this body of work. If you don’t stop splitting yourself between design and literature and this and that and the other and make a commitment to art, I’m not going to work with you anymore.” When I left class I ran around shaking and grabbed my friend Jill Soderholm and mumbled incoherently and ran off and grabbed somebody else. And then I just made this switch inside. I went out and caught Judy in the parking lot, and said, “Okay. I’ll be an artist.” I didn’t actually feel pressured; I didn’t feel like she was going to abandon me or anything. It had nothing to do with that. I knew that she was challenging me, which she had tried to do earlier, to acknowledge that I was an artist, not six million other things. And Judy knows about commitment, and I think that’s what the issue is, and she knows how to push you up against the wall, those of us who are more nervous about making commitments.
Judy Chicago, Suzanne Lacy, Sandra Orgel and Aviva Rahmani, Ablutions, 1972. Performance at Guy Dill's studio, Venice, CA, Valencia, CA. Photo: Lloyd Hamrol. Courtesy of the artists and the Getty Research Institute.
MR: Is this the point at which you exited CalArts?
SL: Right. I exited and became a carpenter, while Judy, Arlene, and Sheila started the Woman’s Building. Miriam and Judy had had a falling-out, and there was not enough money to hire me or Faith or anybody else at that point, so it was Judy, Sheila, and Arlene that started the first Feminist Studio Workshop. I became a carpenter and worked many hours, many days a week, and didn’t have a lot of time or energy to do much else. I stayed in close touch with them but was very despairing of ever making a living as an artist—or ever being an artist at that point—because I worked so hard as a carpenter. But I began framing things, so to speak. I “framed” a bathroom I was doing as a work of art, so that you could come visit it on certain days while I was doing the carpentry. At one point, I got a lawyer to draw up an actual thirteen-page legal contract on the transplantable parts of my body, which allowed me to sell my eyes, my heart, my kidneys, and so on. I continued to explore issues of the body. I was also working on bridging that gap between what I always felt to be the strangely esoteric and elitist environment of CalArts with the real world. I felt, as a working-class kid, like I was from the real world. I would sit at CalArts and listen to kids talking about going to the Bahamas for Easter vacation. Their frames of reference were very different. So when I got out of school, I was very concerned with those kinds of issues.
MR: And then the Woman’s Building was created in 1973?
SL: Well, no, it was created that first year. The following year, 1973, they expanded the staff and took on Helen Alm Roth to do printmaking, myself to do performance, and Ruth Iskin to teach art history. They took us on as faculty. And Deena Metzger. So it was Judy, Sheila, and Arlene and the rest of us. We became, for eight years or so, the staff of the Feminist Studio Workshop.
MR: How much did you get paid?
SL: The first year it was something like $90 a month, and then it slowly went up. The max we ever got, I believe, was maybe six thousand one year, working full-time. So, needless to say, none of us ever supported ourselves completely on that, although we were trying. I either did carpentry, or at one point, around ’75 or so, I began working in a medical clinic as an emergency medical tech. They were able to train me because of my background. So I would work long shifts and basically do 48 hours of work from Friday night to Sunday night. It sure cut down on my social life.
MR: [Laughs]
SL: But it allowed me to function as an artist-teacher the rest of the week, which I did.
MR: What was the structure of the Woman’s Building?
SL: The Woman’s Building was a grand experiment. It was located in the old Chouinard art school, which we took over. The Feminist Studio Workshop was the core, the heart of the place, and it had 30 or 40 students a year. There were also various galleries, plus Womanspace Gallery. Marge Goldwater was one of the early curators of Womanspace. We had, for a while, a printing press and sisterhood bookstore. Once again, we did a whole lot of carpentry, renovating the place. My skills increased.
MR: There’s a great photograph in Faith Wilding’s book By Our Own Hands that shows you as a carpenter.
SL: With Ti-Grace the dog. I led carpentry workshops for the students. I belonged to a cooperative gallery called Grandview Galleries, named after the street we were on. It would provide us with a one-woman show once every year or two. When mine came up, I did One Woman Shows, which was an expression of the women’s community. The Woman’s Building was becoming a community, a mixture of feminists, feminist artists, and artists who were not feminists. In its early days, the openings were crammed. Everybody in town would come to them, including all the male artists. Everybody would come and get roaringly drunk and dance; it was quite an event for a period of time. That slowly dissipated, and it became known as a woman’s place. Then the openings were largely women and I remember a lot of complaints that some of the lesbians did not want men around. There was a constant struggle about what role men would play. Something happened in the West Coast feminist art movement that I don’t think was the case in the East Coast movement. We had such a strong community sensibility and focused so intensely on our relationships with each other that, except for some slightly aggressive attitudes toward men by women who had been fairly seriously damaged by them, for the most part men were not central to our theorizing. Men were not central to our emotional lives with other women, even though most of us were living with and loving men.
MR: Were you?
SL: Yes. I lived for eight years with Robert Blalack, a filmmaker from CalArts. So rage, at least for me, dropped away fairly quickly. And the defensive posturing dropped away very quickly. What happened is we began to explore what indeed was a feminist—and woman’s—sensibility. Feminist meaning a politicized version of a woman’s sensibility, and politics being the evaluation of power and the attempt to distribute power equally, to reassess the nature of power. This caused some men, like John Duncan, to become exceedingly hostile—I think because of a feeling of being left out when what was really happening was he strongly identified with women. He subsequently went off and did some very weird performances. It was difficult, I think, for the men in our lives to make adjustments to what had been happening with us those few years. They certainly had to go through a lot of changes in ways of relating.
Excerpted from East of Borneo. This is an edited version of a much longer oral history interview in the public domain. To read the entire transcript click here.
