Primary Source/A Conversation
RedCat, Los Angeles, 2023
Suzanne Lacy presented Primary Source/A Conversation, a performative action designed to interrogate feminist art pedagogy and the process of encountering, interpreting and preserving women’s contributions to art.
On each of the three evenings, two different artists involved in the early days of the Los Angeles performance and feminist art movements brought a box of archival material to the gallery where they participated in a staged conversation, led by students from CalArts, USC, and UCSB, that explored how young researchers encounter and interpret artists’ archives and how the artists respond to these interpretations.
As Lacy explains, “The three conversations explore differences in how learning takes place in the presence of the artist, through writings about the artist, and through the artist’s archives.
The archives of the presenting artists are being collected now, bringing up issues like whose work is worth preserving. How is information about art practices communicated? How accurate is “received” knowledge – what we learn from the writings of others – and do archives offer different insights, materially representing what the artist prioritizes?”
Each event was informal and intimate, revealing an improvisational construction of in-situ learning environments. Underlying these sessions are questions about erasure and misinterpretations in the work of women, the working class, and people of color and the value of independently-led study versus received knowledge.
Primary Source/A Conversation is an extension of the artwork The Performing Archive, made collaboratively by Lacy and Leslie Labowitz Starus and included in the exhibition The Feminist Art Program (1970-1975): Cycles of Collectivity.
Barbara T. Smith & Ulysses Jenkins in conversation with students of Professor Amelia Jones from USC.
Nancy Buchanan & Patssi Valdez in conversation with students of Amanda Beech, Daniela Lieja Quintanar, and Michael Ned Holte from CalArts.
Susan Mogul & Linda Vallejo in conversation with students of Professor Jenni Sorkin at UCSB.