A People's Art History of the United States: 250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice

by Nicolas Lampert

  Judy Chicago, Suzanne Lacy, Sandra Orgel, Jan Lester, and Aviva Rahmani, Ablutions, June 1972 (Suzanne Lacy)

  The performance space operated as a safe space to address painful subject matter. Lacy writes, “The strategy of Ablutions was to convince the audience of the reality of the problem, to create a cathartic experience for rape victims, and to stimulate a cultural context for women to begin the painful process of speaking out.”2 The next phase was to move this dialogue into the public sphere. Lacy moved performance art out of the gallery and into the city, where the potential stage became the city itself. She asked, “Why talk about rape exclusively in an art gallery when you could still be attacked on the way home?”3

  Citywide Interventions

  Lacy’s first citywide public performance, Three Weeks in May, was launched on May 8, 1977. The project involved a three-week series of actions that confronted the rape crisis in Los Angeles. More than thirty events were staged, including performances, actions, speak-outs, radio programs, self-defense clinics, exhibitions, and demonstrations. Central to Three Weeks were community organizing, creating a media strategy, working with politicians, with artists taking on the role “as communicators, public spokeswomen for the cause of female safety.”4 Lacy explains that the goal of Three Weeks in May “was not only to raise public awareness, but to empower women to fight back and to transcend the sense of secrecy and shame associated with rape.”

  Lacy acted as a co-organizer, curator, and participant in the project.5 She installed two twenty-five-foot-tall maps of Los Angeles at the City Hall Shopping Mall, an underground shopping arcade in downtown L.A., next to City Hall. As daily rapes were reported to the Los Angeles Police Department, Lacy would stamp the approximate area of the map with a red stamp that read RAPE.

  Suzanne Lacy stamping “rape” on map of Los Angeles in Three Weeks in May, May 1977, City Mall in City Hall, Los Angeles (Suzanne Lacy)

  By the end of three weeks, the map had more than ninety stamp marks—a low estimate, considering that many rapes are never reported to the police. The other map detailed the locations of clinics, shelters, organizations, and other services to help assist women who were victims of rape and violence. Both maps were printed on bright yellow paper with a caution-tape border design as an outline.

  Lacy and her co-collaborators chalked sidewalks in the city that noted the approximate location and the date when a rape had taken place. Sharon Irish writes that these simple but poignant words served as a “marker of violence and activated new meanings in locations that may never before have been associated with violence in most people’s minds.”6

  Lacy also activated the City Hall Shopping Mall location by focusing attention away from consumerism and toward civic engagement and activism. The City Hall Shopping Mall, although underground and seemingly removed from the public, reached a critical audience. City officials and government workers who frequented the mall began to pay attention and began to offer more support. Members of the city government started to join the demonstration and began speaking publicly about violence against women. And when Three Weeks in May concluded, the city government and the police department took concrete action by publicizing rape hotlines.7

  Chalking sidewalks near sites of rape, Three Weeks in May, May 1977, Los Angeles (Suzanne Lacy)

  From the start of the project Lacy advocated that the government and the police play an important role in helping to reduce domestic violence, rape, and violence against women. On the other hand, she also communicated the role of artists in movements. During the planning stages for a subsequent performance, In Mourning and in Rage, Lacy had to explain to activist groups that artists were more than unpaid volunteers in a movement:

  We had a meeting with all the women’s organizations in town that deal with violence, and we said we wanted to do this piece, and we wanted to support them. Immediately, one of the women from one of the centers jumped up and said we think the way you can support us is that you can help us do a self defense lecture-demonstration and then you can serve on the hot line and we need help doing that. And we said NO, we’re artists, and we have skills in this area and we’re going to talk with you about it. There was a struggle because they didn’t understand what we were trying to do as artists; they don’t trust art . . . so there was a struggle to educate them to what we can do, and about the power of this imagery and what it can do.8

  In short, she helped bridge the gap between artists and activists.

  Made for Television

  On December 13, 1977, Lacy collaborated with Leslie Labowitz on In Mourning and in Rage, a one-day action on the steps of City Hall that encouraged women to fight back against sexual violence. In Mourning and in Rage was concieved in response to the media coverage of the Hillside Strangler case. The murders of ten women by two male serial killers (assumed to be one at the time) had placed Los Angeles on edge. Mainstream media only heightened the sense of fear and helplessness by running sensationalized stories of the murders that dug into the victims’ pasts and projected the storyline that women in Los Angeles were powerless to stop the violence. There was little public discussion or criticism of the culture of male violence against women, or information about women organizing and fighting back.

  Lacy and Labowitz’s response to the media coverage was to create a public performance that would place a feminist counternarrative into the media’s coverage of the murder case. On the morning of December 13, Lacy and Labowitz (along with Bia Lowe) orchestrated a public action that was a “tableau enacted for the cameras” and “witnessed by the media audience.”9 Seventy women met at the Woman’s Building, including ten women dressed in specially constructed black mourning garb that made each wearer stand seven feet tall. Next, the ten women climbed into a hearse and drove toward City Hall under a motorcycle escort. Twenty-two cars filled with women from the Woman’s Building followed behind in the funeral procession. Each car had its lights on and had stickers that read FUNERAL and STOP VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN. When the motorcade approached City Hall, it circled twice and then pulled up to a sidewalk location, where the media had been instructed to wait. The ten women dressed in black and one in red emerged from the hearse, formed a line on the sidewalk, and then walked to the City Hall steps.

  Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz-Starus, In Mourning and in Rage, performance at Los Angeles City Hall, 1977 (image ID# wb3044, photograph by Maria Karras, Woman’s Building Image Archive, Otis College of Art and Design)

  On the steps of City Hall, a microphone was set up, and a banner was held behind the ten women that read IN MEMORY OF OUR SISTERS, WOMEN FIGHT BACK! The banner, much like the performance, was designed with the camera in mind. Lacy and Labowitz predetermined what the best spot would be for the media to set up so that the banner could be easily filmed and read through the medium of television.

  The ten women each spoke. The first mourner walked up to the microphone and read, “I am here for the ten women who have been raped and strangled between October eighteenth and November twenty-ninth.” The nine women behind her echoed in unison, “In Memory of Our Sisters, We Fight Back!” Each of the nine women read a short statement, followed by the repeated chorus. Next, the woman dressed in all red spoke: “I am here for the rage of all women. I am here for women fighting back!” Lacy read a short statement, followed by a statement by the director of the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women, who demanded, among other things, that free self-defense classes be offered to women in recreation centers in the city. The performance then ended with a song by Holly Near, written specifically for the occasion.

  In Mourning and in Rage was specifically choreographed to fit within the three-to-five-minute duration of a television news story and was designed to leave the viewer with a concise and didactic message to remember: women organizing, mourning the loss of other women, and, most significantly, fighting back.

  In Mourning and in Rage, performance by Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz-Starus, Los Angeles City Hall, 1977, photogra
ph by Maria Karras (Suzanne Lacy)

  Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz-Starus, A Woman’s Image of Mass Media. 1977, photomural of In Mourning and in Rage, performance by Leslie Labowitz-Starus and Suzanne Lacy, photomural by Labowitz-Starus (Suzanne Lacy)

  The performance also doubled as a press conference. Nearly every major television network in Los Angeles covered the event, and the action netted tangible results. The $100,000 reward for information about the Hillside Strangler was converted into a fund for free self-defense classes for Los Angeles residents, and two self-defense workshops were provided for city employees. Additionally, a reporter followed up on the event by asking the local telephone-book company why they had refused to list rape crisis hotlines in their books. This inquiry and the fear of negative press resulted in the phone-book company switching its policy and listing crisis numbers in the front of the book; unfortunately, the numbers were removed the following year.

  Lacy and Labowitz’s action entered the bloodstream of the media not by chance but by careful planning. Both artists understood how the media worked, and how artists and activists could use it to their advantage. Lacy and Labowitz designed the action so that it would speak to the short attention span of the media and the public. “News demands clarity and simplicity, a straightforward narrative composed of two to four images, a message that can be explained in thirty seconds by a reporter who may only invest a few minutes of her or his time at the event,”10 Lacy said. Every detail was planned in advance. “We considered, for example, camera angles, reporters’ use of voice-over, and the role of politicians in traditional reporting strategies.”11 The result was a succinct message that made it difficult for media outlets to distort the message. For artists, the message was also clear: consider your audience and consider the messenger.

  23

  No Apologies: Asco, Performance Art, and the Chicano Civil Rights Movement

  “It’s not in your best interests to apologize publicly.”

  —Harry Gamboa Jr.1

  WHOEVER SAID THAT POLITICALLY ACTIVE artists have to play by the rules and conform to the norms of a movement or a community? Not Asco, an East Los Angeles art collective that was founded by Harry Gamboa Jr., Willie Herrón, Gronk, and Patssi Valdez, and was active from 1971 to 1987. Asco (Spanish for “nausea”) was infamous for agitating nearly everyone from residents of East L.A., Chicano artists, the guardians of the art world, and participants of the Chicano civil rights movement.

  An early action by Asco, Stations of the Cross, epitomized their desire to rupture public space and public norms. On Christmas Eve, 1971, Gamboa, Gronk, and Herrón led a procession down Whittier Boulevard in East L.A. amid holiday shoppers and curious onlookers. Herrón carried a fifteen-foot-tall cross, was dressed up as a skeleton (a Christ/Death figure), and wore a white robe and face makeup. Gronk was dressed as Pontius Pilate (or Popcorn) with a green bowler hat, carrying an oversized fur purse and a bag of unbuttered popcorn. And Gamboa dressed up as zombie altar boy, accented with an animal-skull headpiece. The one-mile silent procession ended at a U.S. Marines recruitment station, where a five-minute silent vigil was held. Gronk blessed the site and spread popcorn over the ground, while Herrón leaned the cross against the door, symbolically blocking the recruitment center that had sent so many community members to their death. After the vigil, Asco split the scene and left behind the cardboard cross and popcorn for the Marines to ponder their meaning.

  Remarkably, the police never spotted them, but community members on the busy street did. At times, onlookers verbally assaulted them but did not attack them. Regardless, Asco had placed themselves in a dangerous situation where there was the potential for violent community reaction. Gamboa reflected:

  Either the police were going to take care of you or someone in the neighborhood was going to take care of you. So you met a lot of resistance because it was so conservative. And to even to stray into the sensitive area of religious icons or even hinting that you might not believe in certain things or might even question what America is all about, again, you were setting yourself up to be someone that’s punished.2

  Gamboa adds:

  There were definite enforced roles bound up with growing up to be male or female . . . people would take it upon themselves to punish you for who you are. If you failed to comply with the rules or fulfill the requisite obligations, you could become the object of physical brutality at the will of the community by merely walking from one corner to another. There are countless experiences that I, personally, or other people I knew endured that involve such scenarios of admonishment and abuse as punishment for transgressions.3

  To Asco, the risks were worth it. Stations of the Cross served as a litmus test for how far they could push their audience. They dressed up in makeup, subverted gender roles, and altered religious symbols. Ironically, Stations of the Cross focused on an issue that the community overwhelmingly endorsed: opposition to the Vietnam War. Yet Asco’s mode of communication defied conventions, asking the audience to dig deeper in search of the meaning of its artistic expression. Moreover, the performance critiqued both the war and the community. Both were violent, both were repressive, and Asco was not willing to give either one a pass.

  Outside/Inside the Movement

  Asco’s abrasive methods placed them on the margins of their community, but their engagement with community-based activist movements, especially Gamboa’s, made them anything but outsiders. Gamboa was one of a number of student leaders during the Chicano Blowouts, a watershed moment in East L.A. when thousands of students walked out of five high schools on March 5, 1968, demanding an overhaul of the education system.4

  Students had good reason to walk out. East L.A. high schools had the highest dropout rate in the nation, and violence was at an epidemic level. Students would attack other students, teachers would attack students, and the police who patrolled the schools would respond with even more violence. Learning was all but nonexistent in this setting. “The schools were designed to create a product,” reflects Gamboa, “and the product was either soldiers for the war, cheap labor or prisoners. That was it.”5

  In the early 1970s, Chicanos represented less than 1 percent of students in the University of California system, yet they filled the front lines of the military, representing the highest death rates in Vietnam.6 The Blowouts demanded changes in the schools: hiring more Chicano teachers and administrators, bilingual education, the end of rigid dress codes, and schools that were on par with those in the white districts of Los Angeles.

  Gamboa’s leadership role in the Blowouts at Garfield High School made him a target for police and FBI surveillance. He was listed as one of the top 100 most dangerous and violent subversives in the country. His crime: helping to organize students to demand better public schools in East L.A.

  Regardless of police intimidation, Gamboa’s activism continued after high school. He was one of 30,000 people who attended the National Chicano Moratorium March—a massive antiwar demonstration on August 29, 1970, at Laguna Park in East L.A. that turned into a riot when police stormed into the crowd and fired tear gas.7 Chaos ensued throughout the night, and by dawn, three protesters were dead, sixty-one injured, and more than two hundred people were arrested.8 One of those killed was Rubén Salazar, a Chicano journalist for the Los Angeles Times and news director for the Spanish-language television station KMEX. Salazar was killed when police fired a twelve-inch tear-gas canister at close range into his head as he sat inside the Silver Dollar Cafe. His death, and the acquittal of the officers responsible, sent shock waves through the Chicano community. Salazar was one of the prominent voices of the Chicano civil rights movement, and his murder at the hands of the police sent a clear message: Chicano people were deemed expandable, whether it was in the cities, rural America, or in Vietnam.

  In the aftermath of the riot, Gamboa decided to turn to a new medium to voice his outrage: photography:

  I saw cops [at the Moratorium] acting like dogs, but the next day in the newspapers
the cops were represented as the victims: all the photographs were images of the cops getting hit. That’s when the idea hit me: they’re manipulating these images. All of a sudden, the pieces of the puzzle fit together: If I don’t capture these images and document the things I see, they’re going to get lost, and ultimately other people will define them for me. It seemed to hit all at once, perhaps because it was so traumatic and life threatening, not only for my family, and me but also for the whole community. So I got a camera, bought some film, and started taking pictures.9

  Gamboa also turned to writing. Community activist Francisca Flores invited him on the day of the Chicano Moratorium to become an editor of Regeneración, a Chicano political and literary journal that had been relaunched from its early 1900s origins, highlighted by Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón’s involvement. Gamboa agreed and chose to expand the dialogue about Chicano culture and the Chicano movement itself. One of his first decisions was to invite Herrón, Gronk, and Valdez to contribute pen-and-ink drawings. The four soon began to collaborate, leading to the formation of Asco.

  These four artists embraced dark humor and rejected the trends of Chicano art and mural art that looked to the past for inspiration. They had no desire to depict Mexican revolutionaries, Che Guevara, farmworkers, or images of Aztlán—the mythical homeland of the Aztecs.10 “A lot of Latino artists went back in history for imagery because they needed an identity, a starting place,” explains Gronk. “We didn’t want to go back, we wanted to stay in the present and find our imagery as urban artists and produce a body of work out of our sense of displacement.”11 Gronk added: “As an urban dweller . . . I couldn’t paint farmworkers because I would be deceiving people. I’m not familiar with those things . . . I want to communicate an idea, not just a slogan.”12