The Reflective Life

© 2012 Kristine Marx There are many artists today experimenting with collaboration and socially organized art, but very few who have practiced it for as long and seriously as Suzanne Lacy has. Performance artist, writer, community organizer, and political activist, Lacy now has published a comprehensive collection of her well-written essays entitled Leaving Art: Writings on Performance, Politics, and Public, 1974–2007. The book covers a little more than three decades of her work and is usefully framed by art historian Moira Roth’s introduction and cultural theorist Kerstin Mey’s afterword. The book may be approached in several ways: as a document of the artist’s work, as the artist’s perspective on performance and politics, and as a tracing of West Coast performance art and political engagement from the mid-seventies to 2007. This makes it more than a mere grouping of a single artist’s activities; it offers a broader view considering activist art, collaboration, and the conditions that have shaped this category of art-making in the second half of the twentieth century. The book is chronologically organized into four sections. The first, “Learning to Look: The Seventies,” consists of Lacy’s early writings. It addresses themes connected to understanding societal expectations of women, the body in relation to women’s lives, and women’s experiences within their communities. In the second section, “Political Performance Art: The Eighties,” Lacy broadens the feminist discourse to include basic individual needs and rights. By expanding her content, she concentrated at this time on transforming communities through the strategies of intervention, advocacy, and collaboration. Lacy moves away from traditional art institutions to focus on working directly within local communities in the book’s third part, “Debated Territory: The Nineties.” In this section, she also more closely examines the correlation between practice and textual argument. The last group of essays, “Leaving Art: After 2000,” conveys a more contemplative tone as the author draws from her own practice. Calling these writings “case studies,” Lacy reflects on differences between THE REFLECTIVE LIFE