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Teaching freedom: the power of autonomous temporary institutions and informal pedagogy in the work of Tania Bruguera and Suzanne Lacy

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Teaching freedom: the power of autonomous temporary institutions and informal pedagogy in the work of Tania Bruguera and Suzanne Lacy

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Content Teaching Freedom
The Power of Autonomous Temporary Institutions and Informal Pedagogy
in the work of Tania Bruguera and Suzanne Lacy
Allison Littrell
Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the USC Roski School of Fine Arts
in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of
Masters in Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere
University of Southern California
December 2018
© 2018 Allison Littrell

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES iii

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER 1: SUZANNE LACY 9

Formal Education 10

Mentorship with Allan Kaprow 14

Development of New Genre Public Art 20
School for Revolutionary Girls 22
CHAPTER 2: TANIA BRUGUERA 29

Formal Education 30

Arte de Conducta 35

Cátedra Arte de Conducta and Escuela de Arte Útil 38

CHAPTER 3: COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS 44

CHAPTER 4: CONCLUSION 49

BIBLIOGRAPHY 53

IMAGE PLATES 57

APPENDIX A: Escuela de Arte Útil syllabus 73

iii

LIST OF FIGURES

Introduction

Fig. 1.1 Tania Bruguera with members of Cátedra Arte de Conducta, 2004, Havana, Cuba

Fig. 1.2 Tania Bruguera, participants inside Escuela de Arte Útil, 2017, Yerba Buena
Center for the Arts, San Francisco

Fig. 1.3 Suzanne Lacy, students outside School for Revolutionary Girls, 2016, Dublin,
photograph by Nicola Goode

Suzanne Lacy

Fig. 2.1 Allan Kaprow, poster for Six Ordinary Happenings, 1969. Sponsored by Project
Other Ways, Berkeley Unified School District, Berkeley

Fig. 2.2 a-b Allan Kaprow directs students from Project Other Ways, 1969, photographs of
Shape from Oakland Tribune Article

Fig. 2.3 a-b Suzanne Lacy with students and Allan Kaprow in Maps, 1973, Cal Arts, Valencia

Fig. 2.4 Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz, In Mourning and in Rage, 1977, Los Angeles
City Hall, photograph by Maria Karras

Fig. 2.5 Suzanne Lacy, Whisper, the Waves, the Wind, 1984, La Jolla, California

Fig. 2.6 a-b Suzanne Lacy, School for Revolutionary Girls, 2016, Dublin, photographs by
Nicola Goode

Fig. 2.6 c-d Suzanne Lacy, School for Revolutionary Girls, 2016, Dublin, photographs by
Nicola Goode

Tania Bruguera

Fig. 3.1 a-b Ana Mendieta, Silueta en Fuego, 1976 and Untitled (Body Tracks), 1974, New
York

Fig. 3.2 a-b Tania Bruguera, Tribute to Ana Mendieta, 1992, Centro de Desarrollo de Artes
Visuales, Havana, Cuba, photographs by Gonzalo Vidal Alvarado

Fig. 3.3 a-b Tania Bruguera, students inside the Cátedra Arte de Conducta, 2008, Havana

iv

Fig. 3.3 c-d Artworks created by Cátedra Arte de Conducta participants, 2003, Havana

Fig. 3.4 a-b Tania Bruguera, Escuela de Arte Útil, 2017, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San
Francisco

Fig. 3.5 Tania Bruguera’s bruises suffered at the hands of Cuban police, 2015, Havana

1

INTRODUCTION

Education as the practice of freedom—as opposed to education as the practice of domination—
denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that
the world exists as a reality apart from people.
— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970
1

Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970)
2
is a seminal text
that was photocopied and secretly distributed among people living under dictatorships in Latin
America during the end of the 20
th
century. It outlines the basis for a revolutionary new form of
emancipatory education called “critical pedagogy.” Critical pedagogy is not merely a theory, but
rather a set of discursive strategies for intervention within systems of oppression. Pedagogy of
the Oppressed is a unique education theory text as it is the product of practical application. Freire
wrote the text as a reflection on his observations during six years of political exile, a punishment
he incurred after teaching 300 sugarcane workers literacy in just 45 days in one of the earliest
successful applications of critical pedagogy. Since the beginning of the 21st century, Pedagogy
of the Oppressed has been taught in some Western teacher training programs and is read by
scholars, artists, and activists, particularly those involved with social practice art.

1
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, (New York: Continuum, 1970, 2000), 25.
2
Long before he wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire lived as a middle-class child in 1920’s Recife, Brazil. After the US
stock market collapsed in 1929, the effects of the Great Depression were soon felt in Brazil. Freire suddenly experienced extreme
poverty and hunger for the first time in his life. He was forced to drop out of school and help his family make ends meet, which
often meant scrounging for food in dumpsters. The everyday abject reality of poverty and how it changes human beings made a
profound impact on Freire at this young age. When his family finally gathered enough money to move to a less expensive area of
Brazil and he started school again, he was four grades behind and spending his time playing ball with other impoverished
children. With the children, Freire found his first community, through which he confronted directly the plight of the dispossessed
and their “culture of silence,” which manifested in the extreme reticence these individuals exhibited when talking to outsiders. He
began to study the philosophy of education, all the while continuing to directly engage in the struggle to liberate men and women
from poverty.

2

A basic understanding of Freire’s main tenets provides a possibility for elucidating the
relationship between pedagogy, action, and liberation as it relates to social practice art. Freire
grounds his text as an ontological investigation, claiming that the issue of oppression is, at its
core, the issue of one group of people defining, controlling, and denying another group of people
the right to be human. A basic continuum of humanization undergirds the social structure of
civilization. On one end of the continuum there is complete humanization, full consciousness,
self-affirmation, and freedom, while on the other end there is utter dehumanization, total
oppression, and the negation of being. It is a historical reality that certain groups of people force
others to be less human, creating an ontological disparity and dividing the world (as Freire sees
it) into just two groups: oppressed individuals and oppressors.
Freire outlines strategies for transforming oppressive structures.(According to Freire, the
strategy of ) praxis, "reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it,"
3
is the only
way to achieve liberation and dialogue is the main component of praxis because it provokes
reflection and contemplation. Using dialogue as the main mode of knowledge-building goes
against what Freire calls “the banking model” of education which treats students as empty
vessels to be filled, like vaults in a bank, with knowledge by the teacher.
4
The banking model
originates from Western philosophy’s conception of the individual as a “tabula rasa,” or blank
slate, waiting to be written upon. Instead, the teacher should recognize how much she can learn
from her students and adopt the role of student as she allows herself to be taught by her student-

3
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 51.

4
Ibid, 72.

3

teachers. True dialogue that is equal parts action and reflection
5
puts the teachers and students on
level standing and therefore should be the basis of critical pedagogical praxis.
The connection Freire makes between liberation and pedagogy is indispensable to social
practice. Freire sets up a compelling tautological argument, grounded in personal experience, to
prove that true pedagogy (which he defines as “action with the oppressed,”)
6
is the only strategy
for lasting liberation. He even goes so far as to reference a model for “educational projects,
which should be carried out with the oppressed in the process of organizing them.”
7
This
sentence is an open invitation to informal educators––and artists–– to try their own hand at the
strategies in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire has also noted how pedagogy is inherently
reciprocal, directive, and transformative
8
and when it is central to an art practice requires a
sustained engagement between audience and artist, much like a performance.
In this thesis, I am investigating the artwork of Suzanne Lacy and Tania Bruguera—two
contemporary artists who work in social practice and performance that have applied Freire’s
reflections on critical pedagogy and dialogue to develop dialogic strategies in their work. I am
specifically concerned with their socially engaged projects that reclaim institutional structures to
promote knowledge and attain freedom. Bruguera and Lacy’s projects, which emphasize
engagement and communication, could qualify as a type of informal pedagogy because they
promote the transmission of values from artist to audience. In the case of Bruguera and Lacy this
is accomplished by the artist leading her viewer through the aesthetic expression of a value

5
Freire theorizes the structure of words as having two dimensions, reflection and action, which exist in a dialectical bond:
without action, a word is mere verbalism and without action, pure activism.
6
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 66.
7
Ibid, 54.
8
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, (New York: Continuum, 1970, 2000), 25.

4

system. These “value systems” emphasize a mode of behavior that is conscious of community
concerns and socio-political issues rather than any formal qualities of art.
In her book Mapping the Terrain (1995), Lacy identifies this transition to social concerns
for her concept of “new genre public art,”
9
in which:
…some artists emphasize Otherness, marginalization, and oppression; others analyze the
impact of technology. Some draw from the ecology movement or from theories of
popular culture. As might be expected, feminist and racial politics are evident. Art’s
potential role in maintaining, enhancing, creating, and challenging privilege is an
underlying theme.
10

Lacy notes that socially engaged artists are often idealistic about including diverse publics in
their artwork and endeavor to communicate more effectively with their audiences. This idea that
dialogue, the practice of self-realization, and relational work as the most direct way to effect
social change serves as a connection between art and pedagogy.
While public art itself is not a new genre, the idea that art can communicate with diverse
audiences about social and political issues specifically relevant to them was a relatively new
concept in the 1990s. Therefore, Lacy’s definition of “new genre public art” from almost twenty-
five years ago was a predecessor to what in the 2000s is often referred to as “social practice” art.
Public art curator and critic Nato Thompson has provided his own definition of these practices in
his book Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from the 1991-2011: “socially engaged art is not
an art movement. Rather these cultural practices indicate a new social order—ways of life that
emphasize participation, challenge power, and span disciplines ranging from urban planning and
community work to theater and the visual arts.”
11
One way of ensuring a free and responsible
public is to ensure that as many people as possible have a voice and know how to reply to and

9
New genre public art is a predecessor of social practice art that shares the same central tenets.
10
Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle: Bay Press, 1994), 31.
11
Nato Thompson, “Living as Form,” in Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art From 1991-2011, ed. Nato Thompson,
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 19.

5

criticize systems that are not working for them. As Christopher G. Robbins, a scholar of public
pedagogy put it, “This means constructing material public spaces in which people—especially
youth—can come together to do the difficult and ethical, often transformative, and always
pedagogical work of citizens: deciding, deliberating, debating, choosing, contesting, imagining
alternatives in which people can live more responsibly, more justly, more humanely.”
12
One
implication of the highly conceptual nature of this model is that a pedagogical activity can
happen anywhere, from a large public lecture given by a national grassroots organization to a
workshop with three people in an abandoned garage; formality does not denote legitimacy.
In this thesis, I examine one case study from the work of each artist mentioned above––
Lacy’s School for Revolutionary Girls (2016) and Tania Bruguera’s Cátedra Arte de
Conducta/Escuela de Arte Útil (Behavior Art Department/Useful Art School)
13
(2002-09/2017),
both of which are temporary, autonomous art schools at the intersection of performance,
publicness, and pedagogy. Each artist has her own explanation of where she locates pedagogy
within her art practice. Lacy has emphasized the importance of listening, stating, “The practice
of listening is so foundational to public practice that it’s almost a cliché. What we don’t talk
about is how listening is, in fact, learning. That’s why I got into this kind of artwork. When I
work on projects I listen carefully for both the learning as well as the images that form between
us. I test the images out in conversation and eventually the shape of the work emerges.”
14

Bruguera, who considers herself to be a political artist making socially engaged work, sees
education as a foundational part of her practice:

12
Christopher G. Robbins and Suzanne Lacy, “Reclaiming the Public in Public Pedagogy,” Problematizing Public Pedagogy,
(New York: Routledge, 2014), 153.
13
I will refer to these projects separately as the Cátedra Arte de Conducta was the original school run out of Bruguera’s home
from 2002-2009 and Escuela de Arte Útil was the reiteration in the gallery at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2017. She
chooses to define these projects as “Transitional Institutions,” which will be clarified later.
14
Thom Donovan, “5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Suzanne Lacy,” Art 21 Magazine (November 13, 2012),
http://magazine.art21.org/2012/11/13/5-questions-for-contemporary-practice-with-suzanne-lacy (Accessed March 1, 2018)

6

I’ve seen the short-term and long-term impact of education. I’ve seen how people change,
how knowledge changes how they carry themselves. As an artist interested in social
change, I vouch for education, 70,000%. I believe that education is the solution to all
problems. I know it sounds a bit grandiose, but I think it should be everybody’s priority.
Education helps you deal with your feelings and it gives you options to act.
15

I chose Bruguera and Lacy because both established themselves as radical figures in the
field of political performance art and transitioned into social practice later in their careers. There
is a natural point of comparison via their shared feminist sensibilities and their formal
pedagogical experience. Additionally, both provide a robust conceptual foundation for their
practices. While many of Lacy’s projects incorporate pedagogy, School for Revolutionary Girls
was her first attempt at creating a fully-functioning educational institution. She has an immense
amount of experience teaching in higher education and even founded two programs to promote
the study of social practice art — The Center for Art and Public Life at California College of the
Arts and the Public Practice Masters of Fine Art program at Otis College of Art and Design.
Lacy was also influenced by her own formal education, both as a student in Judy Chicago’s
Feminist Art Program at Fresno State University (1970-71) and at the California Institute of the
Arts (1971-73) where she studied under Allan Kaprow. Elements of these pedagogical
experiences were influential when planning her own feminist academy for teenage girls in
modern-day Ireland.
Bruguera was inspired to start the Cátedra Arte de Conducta
16
in 2002 after she worked
as a teacher at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), the main art college in Havana, and the
Escuela de Conducta Eduardo Marante, a behavior reform school for juvenile criminals.
Bruguera ran the Cátedra out of her home in Havana for seven years and considered it to be a

15
Jeanette Petrik, Interview with Tania Bruguera, “Education is Always for the Future,” Temporary Art Review (July 20, 2017),
http://temporaryartreview.com/education-is-always-about-the-future-an-interview-with-tania-bruguera/
16
This translates as “Art of Conduct Chair” or “Behavior Art Department.” ‘Chair’ is a reference to the positions of power
within graduate and post-graduate programs.

7

public artwork, specifically a long-term intervention into the city of Havana’s education system.
After the original Cátedra closed in 2009, Bruguera created an updated version of the project,
called the Escuela de Arte Útil, as part of her 2017 mid-career retrospective at the Yerba Buena
Center for the Arts in San Francisco (YBCA).
17
Given the underground, informal nature of the
Cátedra, much more information is available about its new iteration in which Bruguera
transformed part of YBCA’s main gallery into a classroom for eight weeks. For the retrospective,
Bruguera developed the term “Transitional Institution” to summarize her intention for both the
original Cátedra Arte de Conducta and the Escuela de Arte Útil. She defines a transitional
institution as:
An artistic intervention that intends to create a moment of institutional self-critique by
repurposing an institution and its assets. Its implementation involves the examination of
the nature of political power structures and their effect on the lives of society’s vulnerable
individuals and groups. Its full realization occurs when others evaluate, adopt, or evolve
the proposals given by the transitional institution.
18

I chose to examine these two projects that model alternative pedagogies in art because
they are part of the recent history of educational social practice art. Additionally, they have a do-
it-yourself ethos enhanced by the expertise of professional educators who are focused on
deconstructing the hierarchy of traditional learning. Each “temporary” institution focused on a
different topic––Lacy’s curriculum for the School for Revolutionary Girls included the history of
the Irish rebellion, reproductive rights, and feminism, while Bruguera’s Cátedra/Escuela taught
her own modality of political performance art called Behavior Art. That said, these socially
engaged projects were similar in that they combined elements of informal and formal pedagogy

17
Talking to Power / Hablándole al Poder, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, June 16 - October 29, 2017, San Francisco,
California.
18
Exhibition didactics, Talking to Power / Hablándole al Poder, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, June 16 - October 29, 2017,
San Francisco, California.

8

in unique ways to reclaim a small zone of autonomy in which to cultivate an expression or
understanding of freedom.
To investigate the larger questions about pedagogy as a performative aspect of social
practice in School for Revolutionary Girls and Cátedra de Arte Conducta/Escuela de Arte Útil, I
will begin each inquiry by providing background on the artists’ life and a selection of their work.
Next, I will focus on the specific project. My primary research tools include interviews, both
published and first-hand, artist-generated text, writings by critics, press clippings, and photos.
The evaluation of a social practice project is much debated
19
but in this thesis I will be
examining the case studies on the following criteria, which were developed by Suzanne Lacy and
taught as part of her 2017 Introduction to Social Practice course at the University of Southern
California (USC): a) Context, b) Research, c) Goals, d) Engagement Strategy, e) Positioning of
the Artist, and f) Outcomes. According to Lacy, every social practice work should address these
seven elements, so using this as a rubric will allow for a direct comparison between works.
After conducting an in-depth analysis, I will consider secondary theoretical texts of
education and pedagogy which I’ve identified based on the artists’ own education, background,
and writings as influential in the realization of each project. For example, at Cal Arts not only
did Lacy participate in the Feminist Art Program, but she also studied with Allan Kaprow whose
art and teaching were informed by the American Pragmatist educator and philosopher John
Dewey, particularly Dewey’s tenets of “experiential art.”
20
Additionally, both Lacy and Bruguera
have noted the influence of Paulo Freire in their work. I will explore how the provenance and

19
This question of evaluating social practice as different from other modalities of art is a recurring one that is mentioned by
critics such as Shannon Jackson’s Social Work, Grant Kester’s Conversation Pieces, Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells as well as
the debates between Kester and Bishop in Artforum: “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents” by Bishop and
“Another Turn” by Kester. The argument often coalesces around the perceived tension between aesthetics and efficacy (in
simpler terms “doing social good”) in these projects.
20
. Lacy cites the influence of Kaprow and Dewey in both her books, Mapping the Terrain (1995) and Leaving Art (2011).

9

methods of Freire’s critical pedagogy resonated strongly with Bruguera
21
in her own intention to
provide an anti-colonial lexicon for art making.
Given that Lacy and Bruguera are artists making work about and with education, I have
distilled a few crucial questions that will shape my investigation in the rest of this thesis: What
does it mean for a work of social practice art to be pedagogical? What is the relationship between
social practice, performance art, and pedagogy? What are pedagogical strategies for teaching
liberation? How can an artist-initiated institution retain autonomy within the museum context?
And, lastly: what are the challenges faced by artists and curators when documenting these
ephemeral projects?

CHAPTER 1
SUZANNE LACY

Born in 1945 in the small agricultural town of Wasco in California’s San Joaquin Valley,
Suzanne Lacy describes her hometown as part of the “Appalachia of California,”
22
referencing
its majority white, working-class population. Lacy’s father had been a pilot during World War II
and later an electrician and refrigeration mechanic. He epitomized the working-class ethos of
Wasco, though he appreciated the arts and had a painting practice that filled the Lacy house with
artwork. Out of the three Lacy children only Suzanne developed a professional interest in the
arts, yet her career path went through many twists and turns that almost led her very far from fine
art. From grade-school age Lacy demonstrated strong leadership and interpersonal organizational

21
While Bruguera is notoriously extremely reticent about her influences, she does mention Freire several times in interviews.
When asked in an interview with Kathy Noble work her relates to Joseph Beuys’ idea of social sculpture, Bruguera replied: “I’m
more interested… in the Latin-American tradition of political art: Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal and Antanas Mockus. Beuys is not
known at all in the world of international politics, but Boal is, and I wish political artists could be as influential in politics as they
are in art.”
22
Author interview with Suzanne Lacy in Los Angeles, December 15, 2017.

10

skills. For example, she would spend days organizing the neighborhood children to play
elaborate games or put on theatrical productions.
23
In high school, she developed interests in both
art and pre-medicine, but was persuaded to study medicine because of the apparently limited job
opportunities for a professional artist.

Formal Education
Understanding an artist’s educational background provides a deeper insight into their
pedagogy. Lacy left Wasco at eighteen, moving to the slightly larger city of Bakersfield to study
pre-med. There, she dedicated herself to her studies and gained acceptance to UC Santa Barbara
where she graduated with a degree in Zoology and Chemistry. She hoped to go on to get a PhD
in psychiatry as she had an interest in the “effect of the mind on the body,”
24
especially as it
could be applied to suicide prevention, but her confidence in a medical career path was
wavering.
25
Left with a sense of uncertainty about her future, Lacy took the year of 1969 to
volunteer at VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) in Washington DC. This was where she
had her first foray into community organizing. After completing a training program at the
Maryland School of Social Design, she chose to organize for healthcare in a rural majority-black
community outside of Washington DC. Apart from learning community organizing, Lacy also
“discovered feminism”
26
during her year at VISTA when, by chance, she attended a meeting of
The Women’s Psychology Associates at an American Psychological Association annual
conference. A few of the psychologists spoke about questioning Freud’s attitudes toward women,

23
Moira Roth, “Oral History Interview with Suzanne Lacy,” Smithsonian Archives of American Art, (March 16, 1999), 3.
24
Ibid., 15.
25
This was partially due to the disparity between number of male and female medical students— in 1965, only 8.3% of enrolled
first-year medical students were women. (American Medical Association)
26
Moira Roth, “Oral History Interview with Suzanne Lacy,” 17.

11

a criticism that resonated with Lacy when she eventually enrolled in a graduate program in
psychology at Fresno State University. At Fresno she met feminist artist Faith Wilding and
together they posted signs around campus that read “Feminist Meeting Tonight,” only to be
shocked when over forty women showed up. Lacy and Wilding began to hold regular feminist
meetings where they would discuss female sexuality and body politics. Thus began the legacy of
feminist organizing at Fresno State.
Lacy and Wilding’s effort was soon bolstered by the arrival of Judy Chicago, an
established feminist artist and educator in Los Angeles who had come to Fresno looking to
launch the nation’s first Feminist Art Program (1970). Given that Lacy had studied psychology
and the program was for professional artists, Chicago at first denied Lacy entrance into the
fifteen-student program. Eventually, however, Lacy was granted entry and began her first
experience with experimental pedagogy occurring within the bounds of a formal educational
institution. The experience was a formative one, as was the idea that artists and students could
initiate their own educational curriculum.
27

The inaugural all-female cohort at Fresno State’s Feminist Art Program was centered
around a female academic sensibility and freedom of expression that was unprecedented in a
university setting.
28
Chicago’s lessons were a mix of practical and theoretical knowledge. The
first assignment she gave the women was to purchase a pair of work boots. Later studio
assignments followed from prompts such as, “How do you feel when you’re walking down the
street with men leering at you?”
29
Lacy recalls the high register of anger and fear expressed
during those early classes: “Judy challenged us to look at our experiences as women, but we had

27
Ibid.
28
Ibid.
29
Ibid.

12

no idea what stories lay inside. They emerged as half-remembered nightmares, suffocating and
inexplicable images that came to us as we drifted off to sleep.”
30
Performance was the medium
of choice for most women in the program because it allowed the concreteness of experience to be
communicated in a direct and personal way. Lacy recalled that to promote the furthering of
feminist performance art as a genre,
31
Judy Chicago “intentionally steered us [her students] away
from anything that was conceptual, that was removed from a direct engagement with our
feelings. We made art of our experiences.”
32

Progress made in the burgeoning feminist art program at Fresno was soon mirrored by
feminist performance art circles in New York, Los Angeles and beyond. These practices
coalesced around the concept that “the personal is political.” This simple phrase became the
credo of much American feminist art of the 1970s. Lacy describes what the phrase means to her:
“Strong feminist art might or might not be obviously political. By virtue of its expression of a
repressed cultural experience, it will always in fact be political, as long as women’s experience is
not widely acknowledged in our society.”
33
Connecting the personal, subjective lives of women
with the objective reality of a patriarchal society led naturally to a curiosity about the public —
with whom should feminist artists communicate in order to build awareness?
Lacy and her peers found that introspection could also happen communally through
structured small group dialogues called consciousness raising groups. Consciousness raising
combined techniques from Gestalt therapy, which focuses on mindfulness of the present moment

30
Suzanne Lacy, “Time, Bones, and Art” in Leaving Art, ed. Suzanne Lacy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 10.
31
There was little vocabulary for feminist performance art at the time, as the genre was overrun by male-dominated performance
which came out of the legacy of the Situationists, Dadaists, Surrealists, even the Russian Constructivists, and later the Abstract
Expressionists. A very nascent feminist performance practice blossomed with works like Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964)
and Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1965), however the discourse around these works usually lumped them into the larger context of
Happenings and Fluxus.
32
Moira Roth, “Oral History Interview with Suzanne Lacy,” 47.
33
Suzanne Lacy and Lucy R. Lippard, “Political Performance Art: A Discussion by Suzanne Lacy and Lucy R. Lippard.” In
Leaving Art, ed. by Suzanne Lacy, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 155.

13

to reveal deep awareness of self, with psychoanalytic talk therapy. Already well-versed in
psychology and Gestalt therapy, Lacy found consciousness raising to be a compelling practice.
She summarized the impact it made on her in the following way:
Women’s lives were described and determined by culture. People were
always interpreting for women, what they wanted, what they should have
and what they should experience. Part of the sexual revolution was about
women beginning to have an experience of sexuality and beginning to talk
about it. Even then, it was still pretty circumscribed by male desire, the
hippie movement. It was free sex, but men were defining what the nature of
female experience was. Consciousness-raising was meant to create a way for
women to think through their own experience individually, and then to make
sense of it collectively.
34

As a tool for liberation, consciousness raising aimed to connect women’s seemingly disparate
personal experiences with each other to reveal common ground. The group’s aim was — to
borrow Freire’s terminology — to uncover an objective reality beneath a multitude of subjective
experiences. In other words, to make the personal political.
Much of Lacy’s later social practice work utilizes the technique of consciousness-raising
to teach self-awareness and freedom to communities. To this day, she still uses the original set of
rules that she learned under Chicago: equal time, equal space (meaning that each person sits in a
chair in a circle and gets the same amount of time to share their thoughts on a pre-selected topic),
and no interpretation, judgment, critique or questioning of others’ thought is allowed. At the end
of the session, there will be an evaluation stage during which the participants are permitted to
make connections between their experience and what others shared. The evaluation stage is
crucial because it is where observations lead to critical questions like, “75% of the women in the
room shared about an experience of rape. Why is this happening?” It is at this moment that the
personal has taken on political significance. Lacy honed the pedagogical potential of this

34
Allison Littrell, author’s personal interview with Suzanne Lacy, December 15, 2017 at University of Southern California, Los
Angeles.

14

practice—when individuals are sharing with each other their awareness is heightened and they
are more likely to retain information.

Mentorship with Allan Kaprow
In 1971, the Feminist Art Program relocated to the California Institute of the Arts in
Valencia and became even more robust with increased enrollment and funding under the
combined leadership of Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro. Lacy commented on the general
ethos of the cohort, recalling, “There were aesthetic judgments, but it was based on the ability of
the work to authentically reveal the self and one’s feelings… ”
35
To emphasize the primacy of
emotion to art, Chicago engaged her students in “therapeutic theatrical exercises” that combined
consciousness-raising techniques with storytelling, which made it easier for the women to share
emotional experiences with an audience.
36
Like the other feminists in her program Lacy strove to
infuse an emotive, embodied consciousness into her performance art. In this respect, her
scientific, analytic background was actually an advantage; she could think creatively and
logically at the same time, reconciling the conceptual and emotional elements of performance.
While at Cal Arts, Lacy found a natural mentor in the artist/professor Allan Kaprow.
Kaprow pushed the boundaries of performance with his structured art events called Happenings
which required active participation of the viewer. Strict boundaries - often written out into a
“score” – were set by Kaprow, who then stepped back to allow the art experience to proceed.
From studying Kaprow’s earliest Happenings from the late 1950s to the early 1960s -- 18
Happenings in 6 Parts (1957), Yard (1962), and Fluids (1967) -- one may understand how

35
Moira Roth, “Oral History Interview with Suzanne Lacy,” 56.
36
Vivien Green Fryd, “Suzanne Lacy’s Three Weeks in May: Feminist Activist Performance Art as ‘Expanded Public
Pedagogy,’” NWSA Journal 19, no. 1 (2007): 24.

15

Kaprow viewed art as a process with the everyday environment, reciprocally related to
humankind. His artwork was less a “work” and more of a process-oriented, experiential
interaction. Much of the conceptual underpinning behind Kaprow’s practice comes directly from
the writings of pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, whom Kaprow studied while a graduate
student at Columbia University.
One of Dewey’s central tenets, the concept of “instrumentalism,” clearly rejects the
philosophy of a priori reasoning and defines the boundaries of human knowledge as what can be
discovered via experience, particularly using objects and experimentation as means to prompt
knowledge production.
37
From an art historical perspective, Dewey’s most influential writing
was his 1934 book Art as Experience. It was this work that heavily influenced Kaprow during his
graduate studies in philosophy to begin a career-long investigation into the relationship between
experience, aesthetics, and participation. Perhaps Dewey’s most revolutionary contribution to the
philosophy of aesthetics was the privileging of experience and emotion as fundamental to the
nature of art.
38
This was especially significant to Kaprow because it connected aesthetics and
epistemology––two previously bifurcated branches of Western philosophy
39
–– by foregrounding
the link between experience and knowledge, leading to a pedagogical approach which became
central to Kaprow’s practice.
40
Dewey proposed a universe in which experience is shaped as the
reflection of the rhythms of everyday life.
41

37
Elizabeth Anderson, "Dewey's Moral Philosophy," in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (2005)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey-moral/
38
Stewart Buettner, "John Dewey and the Visual Arts in America," in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (1975): 383.
39
The dualities enforced in the Aristotelean and Cartesian traditions of Western Philosophy that separated subject from objects,
body from mind, and the knowledge-seeker from the known were all constructions that Dewey dismantled in his theory of
epistemology.
40
Lehnert, An American Happening, 194.
41
Buettner, “John Dewey and the Visual Arts in America,” 6.

16

In Art as Experience Dewey postulates that the existence of art objects is contradictory to
the true meaning of art, which for him is what the physical object activates within human
experience, not apart from it.
42
He goes further to denounce the classical status of art objects
placed in museums as cutting off art from life and relegating it to a separate realm where it loses
all significance. He sets upon the task to “restore continuity between the refined and intensified
forms of experience that are works of art and everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are
universally recognized to constitute experience.” He then continues with a metaphor: “Mountain
peaks do not float unsupported; they do not even just rest upon the earth. They are the earth in
one of its manifest operations.”
43
He makes no distinction between experiencing real life or a
work of art, as he claims that man is constantly “undergoing” or “doing” within his environment
— the environment acts upon humankind as much as we act upon it, in a constant dynamic
feedback loop.
44

By 1969, Kaprow had abandoned the term Happenings in favor of “Activities,” which
were more deeply concerned with studying the habits and patterns of social behavior and
communication.
45
For the Activities in the 1970s and 1980s he made small instructional books
with photographs and scores suggesting many open-ended actions, including “just doing.”
46

Kaprow was pursuing his raison d'être of his later career: to coalesce the precepts of Zen
Buddhism with Dewey’s pragmatism into a new art form that would denounce attachment to
spectacle and seize upon art’s essentially communicative and pedagogical nature. As a result, he
made almost no distinction between his job as a professor at University of California, San Diego

42
John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee, 1934), 1.
43
Dewey, Art as Experience, 2.
44
Ibid., 44.

45
Pamela Lehnert, An American Happening, 91.
46
Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 128.

17

and his art practice, inviting students to “just do” in his classes, even if that meant taking a nap
during the lesson.
Kaprow’s work modeled some valuable strategies for feminist performance artists,
specifically the idea that artmaking was reflective of life, not a separate skill. He constructed a
methodology for framing life and calling it art which included spaces previously thought to be
inappropriate or mundane, such as domestic life, relationships, and sexual life, thus echoing and
legitimizing the practice that the feminists had already intuited—of making art from the forms
and subjects of interior body politics.
47
His work also provided strategies for integrating politics
and artmaking by providing an example “that art could become politically meaningful by
engaging directly in life by addressing significant issues, creating performances that demanded
audience responses, and erasing the barrier between artwork and viewer.”
48
The feminists
already had the desire and the reasons to make political change, so from Lacy’s perspective,
Kaprow provided a rationale for her peers, if they chose, to make “the move into ‘life.’ ”
49

Lacy studied with Kaprow until she left Cal Arts and continued a mentor relationship
with him into his later life as Zen Buddhism began to increasingly influence his practice. Lacy
viewed Kaprow and Chicago with their expertise in conceptual art and feminism, respectively,
“as the passionate mother and the affectionate, distant father.”
50
Together, they assisted Lacy in
creating her own mode of art making, which would come to be known as new genre public art.
One of Kaprow’s lesser-known artworks had a formative influence on Lacy because it
resulted in the synthesis of Kaprow’s pedagogic approach to artmaking. The artwork, called
Project Other Ways (1969-71) was an “educational experiment” in collaboration with the

47
Suzanne Lacy, “Tracing Allan Kaprow,” in Leaving Art, ed. by Suzanne Lacy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 321.
48
Vivien Green Fryd, “Suzanne Lacy’s Three Weeks in May,” 25.
49
Moira Roth, “Oral History Interview with Suzanne Lacy,” 53.
50
Ibid.

18

Berkeley Public School System and educator Herbert Kohl. Noticing a dearth of arts curricula in
the public-school system and a cultural bias that marginalized the arts education for low-income
communities, Kaprow and Kohl applied for a Carnegie Corporation grant with the ultimate goal
of recruiting and training teachers for the public-school system. This never came to fruition, but
what did happen over the course of two years were classes, projects, and workshops taught by
creative producers and educators to children of varying ages in the economically impoverished
area of downtown Berkeley. Rather than teaching art, Kaprow and Kohl focused on the staples:
reading, writing, and math, but used artistic teaching methods that gave them freedom to “play
and change as [they] saw fit, where in the average classroom it would have been almost
impossible.”
51

Lacy asked Kaprow to reflect on Project Other Ways in an essay for her new genre public
art anthology, Mapping the Terrain (1995). In his essay, Kaprow recalls the day when a group of
sixth graders, who were supposedly hopelessly illiterate, came to Project Other Ways. Kaprow
gave the students polaroid cameras and took them on a walk through downtown Berkeley. He
found that the students consistently photographed the graffiti and signs they saw on the street.
This intrigued Kaprow and Kohl. If the students could not read, why were they interested images
with text? In the next workshop, the students were invited to draw their own graffiti and signs
with no restrictions. Surprisingly, the paper-covered table was soon filled with drawings, lines,
and words — names of local celebrities and gang members, the students’ own names, and curse
words. Apparently, the students were not illiterate beyond hope when it came to learning about
content that related to their daily lives.

51
Allan Kaprow, “Success and Failure as Art Changes,” In Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, edited by Suzanne
Lacy (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 152.

19

Wanting to investigate this hypothesis further, Kaprow and Kohl gave the sixth graders a
set of Dick and Jane early reader books that had been discarded by the school system for their
overly racially, sexually, and socially stereotyped narratives. It was the two instructors’ hope that
“the kids’ sensitivity to these biases (the majority were black or Hispanic) would provide the
openings for frank discussion, and would make attractive the prospect of wholesale revisions of
the texts.”
52
The students cut, ripped, collaged, shuffled and hacked the Dick and Jane stories
into narratives that reflected life in urban Berkeley during a time of social turmoil. They changed
the text: “Run, Spot, run!” became “Run, man, fuzz!”
53
The results of the experiment were
exhibited in an art show, and even shown to educational policy makers with the hopes of making
substantive changes to the curriculum.
Following the guidelines of Kaprow’s Activities, Lacy organized many performances
during the 1970s in which she dictated the circumstances for the performance to occur.
Additionally, in solo performances, she used her own body and references to the body as a
metaphor for violence against women, often incorporating recently deceased animal organs in
much of her work from this time.
54
In one Happening called Maps (1973), designed for
Kaprow’s class at CalArts, Lacy led students on a scavenger hunt of sorts using a hand-drawn
map that connected various locations such as a slaughterhouse, a school cafeteria, and a hospital
for the mentally ill. Students were instructed to carry a parcel of lamb’s organs with them from
location to location and attempt to reconstruct the interior anatomy of the animal by nailing the
organs on the wall. Maps was not only an investigation into institutions of violence (the
slaughterhouse and the mental hospital) which tested the participants' visceral reaction to humans

52
Kaprow, “Success and Failure as Art Changes,” 154.
53
Ibid.
54
Lacy also used meat in various solo performances during the 1970’s, which often incorporated her own body as a medium.

20

being treated and processed as meat, but also an experiment in the process of teaching and
learning within the bounds of an Activity.

Development of New Genre Public Art
Lacy began to transition away from using her own body as the site of performance and
made a signature turn to addressing the public outside of art institutions. Three Weeks in May
(1977) was Lacy’s first large-scale public performance. It consisted of over thirty art events held
in the span of three weeks, during which Lacy documented every rape that occurred in Los
Angeles County. Lacy went to City Hall and publicized the sealed rape records, marking the
location of each rape with a stamp on a map that was displayed on the steps of City Hall. Next to
that map was another showing the location of sites of resistance—support groups and self-
defense classes for women. In Three Weeks in May Lacy defined strategies and processes that
would become integral to her subsequent projects. One strategy was to directly address the media
to gain visibility, another was to create aesthetically compelling performances to symbolically
coalesce fragments of a larger theme. In Mourning and In Rage (1977) was a public performance
that piggybacked on Three Weeks in May by staging an event on the steps of City Hall in front of
TV news cameras. The performance featured female performers, clad head-to-toe in black,
wearing veils and headpieces so that they were made to resemble extremely tall 19th Century
mourning figures. The women exited out of a hearse to present a manifesto that was meant to
bring attention to the media’s portrayal of violence against women in the Hillside Strangler

21

case
55
, and to demonstrate the power of symbolism and aesthetic control in engaging public
attention.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Lacy furthered her work in community engagement by
embedding herself deeply within unique groups, such as women senior citizens in La Jolla,
California for Whisper, the Waves, the Wind (1983-84), black teenagers in Oakland for The
Oakland Projects (1991-2001), or the inhabitants of Barrio Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia for
The Skin of Memory (1999). During this time, her projects began to grow in duration, often
taking years and involving many collaborators in different fields. Each long-term community
engagement consisted of two distinct phases, which became part of Lacy’s signature practice.
First, the research and dialogic practice— which usually takes many months, even years— is
where sustained action with the community occurs. The final performance element, produced as
a culmination of the research generated, is where Lacy’s original aesthetic vision comes to
fruition. Often, the image is a tableau vivant that Lacy constructs with community members,
framing them while doing an action from everyday life. This was the case in Whisper, the Waves,
the Wind (1983-84) which featured 154 older women, dressed in white finery, sitting at white-
clothed tables along a pristine strip of California beach. The ladies discussed their lives,
relationships, hopes and fears while audience members walked around, listening to the
conversations. Each of her public projects from the late 80s to 90s were pedagogical in a two-
fold sense, involving both the learning that occurred between participants in a dialogic process
and the audience’s learning during the performance.

55
The ‘Hillside Strangler’ was the moniker for American serial killers (Kenneth Alessio Bianchi and Angelo Anthony Bianchi)
who terrorized Los Angeles from October 1977 to February 1978. They targeted young women, starting with sex workers and
escalating to suburban teenagers. They kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered ten women, leaving their naked bodies in public
locations for the police to find. Due to this, the press coverage of the case sensationalized the violent sexual nature of the crimes
and used a tone that emphasized that the victim were prostitutes, often conflating facts to make it sound as though all the women
were sex workers when in fact only three out of ten were. Feminists such as Suzanne Lacy found it indefensible that the media
insinuated that the women’s sex worker status somehow meant they were asking for it.

22

By 1995, Lacy had developed the term “New Genre Public Art” to describe her own
practice and the plethora of other experimental practices in the field. Much of her theoretical
writing grapples with the issue of assigning value in new genre public art. She begins by
acknowledging Kaprow’s premise that an art status can deaden the qualities of art that make it
worthwhile. However, Lacy reaches the conclusion that labeling a new genre public work as art
imbues it with a symbolic value which can be even more powerful than large-scale action. Lacy
calls for a retooling of the critical language around art that uses engagement as its medium; the
artist’s intention and the question of beauty must be considered when evaluating this art. Like
Kaprow, Lacy incorporated her ideas as a pedagogue and went on to found the Masters in Public
Practice program at Otis College of Art and Design (2007-2018), one of the first degree
programs focused on social practice in the US.

School for Revolutionary Girls
In 2016, the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) invited Suzanne Lacy to Dublin to
produce a project as part of A Fair Land,
56
a year-long centennial celebration of the Irish
Revolution. The exhibition at IMMA was presented with support from CREATE Ireland, in
collaboration with Grizedale Arts. Lacy’s project, the School for Revolutionary Girls, was a ten-
day pedagogical program with twenty young women aged fourteen to seventeen which explored
the legacy of feminism in Ireland. The school’s curriculum included a dialogical practice
influenced by feminist consciousness raising strategies, a historical component informed by
historian Liz Gelles’ research, and a culminating performance developed by the girls. Lacy also

56
A Fair Land, August 12-28, 2016, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland.

23

worked with Gina Roston, Raghubir Kintisch, and Margot Mullen, three of her graduate students
from the Otis Public Practice MFA Program.
57

Whenever Lacy begins a project in a new community, her priority is to conduct research,
even months before traveling to the site. In the case of School for Revolutionary Girls, she and
her chosen students began to research in California via both traditional methods and Skype calls
with Gelles and members of the museum and educational community on the ground in Ireland.
The overarching goal of the research was to elucidate the role of feminism in the Irish
Revolution. Lacy discovered that because of the haphazard, guerilla nature of the Revolution,
women were given combat roles in addition to supporting their male counterparts, but that this
vital female contribution had been left entirely out of mainstream Irish history. Moreover, in
1916, the same year the Revolution ended, the first global wave of female activists organized to
fight for suffrage, education rights, and better working conditions. The Irish Revolution was a
watershed moment in the international women’s movement as it demonstrated that women could
and were willing to fight alongside their male counterparts. Lacy endeavored to complete a
project that would invite a younger generation of women to engage with the feminist legacy of
this “invisible army” of women in Ireland and beyond.
Lacy used her first-hand research with women in Dublin to ascertain the most relevant
needs and concerns felt by the female community, which directly informed the curriculum of the
school.
58
While Lacy has stated that she has no problem with “parachuting,”––a disparaging
term in social practice discourse that describes artists who drop in to less privileged communities
to conduct a project, ostensibly to help the locals, that can in reality be superficial and tone-

57
Much of the description and analysis that follows was gleaned from interviews I conducted with Lacy and her three students
about their experience working on the School for Revolutionary Girls.
58
Author interview with Raghubir Kintisch via phone, January 23, 2018.

24

deaf—Lacy is rarely, if ever, criticized for parachuting. Her capacity for making meaningful
social practice art projects in various foreign countries including Colombia, Ecuador, and
England may have to do with her deep ethnographic research practice and her willingness to
collaborate with non-artist specialists. Freire has written about the necessity of identifying
“generative themes,” a complex set of ideas, concepts, hopes, doubts, values, and challenges that
represent striving towards fulfilment,
59
in a community’s consciousness before attempting
liberation education. In Dublin, some generative themes that Lacy’s team discovered concerned
class-based oppression, sexual violence towards women, the law against abortion (the 8th
amendment of the Irish constitution), and a government that did not prioritize women’s rights or
healthcare. Rather than promoting a particular agenda, Lacy identified these generative themes,
then finessed a collection of ideas, strategies and activities to provide a well-defined structure for
the girls’ engagement.
Once on-site in Ireland, Lacy gave each of her three graduate students a group of five to
seven girls to lead in consciousness-raising groups, writing workshops, and research sessions.
She encouraged each woman to lead in a way that felt comfortable and utilized their respective
expertise. For example, Raghubir Kintisch is an artist, a teacher, a mother, and a practicing yogi.
She is interested in the relationship between art and spirituality and felt that she was able to use
her skills while working with the girls in Ireland. Gina Roston has a theater arts and production
background. Both women echoed the sentiment that Lacy let them have autonomy and Kintisch
noted: “She is a master at cultivating people’s creative expressions and then keeping it inside of
her own framework.”
60
Roston described Lacy’s role as similar to that of a producer: setting up

59
“Concepts Used by Paulo Freire,” Freire Institute online
http://www.freire.org/component/easytagcloud/20generative20themes.
60
Author interview with Raghubir Kintisch, January 23, 2018.

25

the prototypes and letting her collaborators fill in the details.
61
Lacy was open to hearing all ideas
but was not afraid to say no if she felt it would not work with her vision for the school, which
was to cultivate “the girls' feminist spirit and creativity.”
62
She made it a priority that each and
every girl felt welcome in the space regardless of background or socioeconomic status by
ensuring the girls were comfortable, well-fed, and that there was tea available at all times. Lacy’s
position in School for Revolutionary Girls is one example of an artist using strategies of
generosity to promote feelings of openness, trust, and respect amongst participants.
The demographic makeup of the School for Revolutionary Girl was teenage girls of Irish
descent, ranging from middle-class to living below the poverty line. As is usually the case with
Lacy’s projects, the participants were curated carefully in the sense that they all had a
prerequisite desire to become “revolutionary.” Many local artists’ daughters enrolled and the
IMMA’s education department solicited the remainder of the group. Coming from relatively
low-income families, the girls had never been in therapy before. This, coupled with a religious
reticence regarding sex, made the consciousness raising groups foreign experiences for the
young women.
63

During the ten active days of the project, Lacy, her team of grad students, students from
the social practice department of the Irish National College of Art and Design, workers from the
IMMA, and some local artists spent almost all their time together. They ate together and spent
downtime together. The leadership met each morning before class and again after, first to bounce
around ideas for that day’s plan and after to evaluate and formulate next steps. Each day would

61
Author interview with Gina Roston, January 17, 2018
62
Author interview with Raghubir Kintisch, January 23, 2018.
63
. Three girls who came from a program to help low-income teens found the school’s activities too unnatural and
uncomfortable, and ended up dropping out of the program. This was the only case of dropouts and, according to Kintisch, their
departure did not have a disruptive impact.

26

begin with a consciousness raising session with 5-7 girls, led by one of the graduate students.
The sessions followed the strict rules of equal time, equal space, no interrupting, judging,
interpreting, and there was an evaluation period at the end of each session. The topics that
seemed to resonate most with the girls were that of their emerging sexuality and how it brought
unwanted attention from boys and men. Since this was such a common, relatable issue that all
the girls experienced, talking about it in the consciousness raising setting was an exercise in
trust-building. Kintisch remarked on the growing kinship between the girls who had started off
exhibiting cliquish behavior, but by the end had formed lasting friendships that continued even
after the school was over.
For the finale of the project, Lacy developed a performance that pushed the students to
synthesize their new awareness into an art piece. By Roston and Kintisch’s account, the visually
stunning and professionally executed performance was where Lacy’s directorial hand was most
visible, because the live event required a level of finesse and sensitivity that only a professional
artist could have provided.
64
The performance took place in the afternoon of August 28, 2016,
the last day of the School for Revolutionary Girls. An audience of parents, museum members,
and locals congregated in the courtyard in the center of IMMA. The large space was imposingly
empty, save for a bespoke garden of courgette (zucchini) plants
65
that had been planted by the
Grizedale Arts program in the center of the courtyard. To set the scene, the balconies on the
buildings were draped with bright green bunting and the garden patch was populated with bright
green wooden-staked signs with proclamations such as: “C’MERE,” “SUPPORT WOMEN,” and
“JOIN THE REV.” The girls, wearing bright blue “School for Revolutionary Girls” t-shirts and

64
Author interview with Raghubir Kintisch, January 23, 2018.
65
The zucchinis were not chosen by Lacy’s team but rather were a separate project organized by the museum. Lacy believes the
Grizedale Arts program picked zucchinis due to the durability of the plant and its practical, edible use. Lacy utilized the maturing
zucchinis as part of her art project, having the girls carve feminist slogans into the tough, young plants so that the messages
would grow permanently into the skin of the vegetables.

27

white messenger bags that doubled as sashes adorned with political pins, entered the courtyard
on bikes in four squads from four directions. Waiting behind the scenes in rooms off the
courtyard, the artist instructors conducted the girls’ next move, which was to disperse through
the audience and pass out slips of paper on which statistics about a particular women’s issue.
Each girl interviewed an audience member about the contents of her slip and filmed the
conversation on a cell phone. Afterwards, they went to the “Social Media Hub” (a table with
chairs, laptops, and typewriters in the zucchini patch) and posted the interviews to social media
in real time. This was a gesture to continue the school’s strong online presence, which
symbolized the connectivity and global community-building aspect of feminist organizing.
In the next act of the performance, the girls each held a sign and marched around the
courtyard in a silent protest, finishing in the zucchini patch, where they hammered their signs in
amongst the existing signage. As close inspection would reveal, the girls had also carved their
political messages into the flesh of the young zucchini plants so that the text would grow as the
vegetables matured. This detail showed Lacy’s ability to use existing resources toward her
aesthetic goal— although she did not choose the zucchinis to be a part of the performance
setting, she saw potential in them as a medium. Additionally, the protest signs were a perfect
example of Lacy’s blend of authorship and collaboration: bright green on one side and the exact
shade of bright blue of the girls’ shirts on the other, they were painted with the meticulous hand
of a professional in the same all-caps font that protesters in the 1960s made iconic. However, the
messages on the signs were collectively authored, gathered from the workshops in which the
girls had shared their fears and hopes and dreams. Messages such as, “Assault and rape is never
the victim’s fault,” "Equity and equality go hand in hand,” “It is important to express our voice,”
and “I demand consent is respected.”

28

Next, the instructors led the girls to three balconies on the second floor of IMMA, where
they collectively repeated into waiting microphones the phrase “In a Fair Land…” three times.
Then each girl spoke about what she envisioned for “A Fair Land,” her vision to rectify the
injustices toward women in Ireland. As the voices jumped from balcony to balcony, a rhythm
developed and continued until all the girls had spoken. In closing, the girls spoke once more in
unison and audience applauded. The girls then descended from the balconies and intermingled
with the audience members, answering questions and celebrating each other.
From the color-coded bunting on the balcony, which visually referenced the decorations
used during heads of state appearances, to the protest signs hand-painted to feel like 1960s
graphic design, it is evident that Lacy values aesthetics when creating a social practice work.
However, aesthetics is only one component of the picture. In an interview with the local
newspaper, Lacy said that she wanted to accomplish two things with School for Revolutionary
Girls: a meaningful and educative “personal solidarity building” experience and an art work.
66

She wanted it to be more than just a workshop, and given the way she masterfully transformed
the material generated by the girls in the educational phase into a cohesive visual whole, she
accomplished both goals.
Lacy noted that she felt the project might have had greater efficacy if it were longer.
More specifically, she expressed that the consciousness raising groups could not compare to
those done by feminists in the early 1970s as there was not enough time to go deep into the
issues. With only ten days and with an audience so unfamiliar with the process, she would’ve
needed at least a month of consistent meetings to achieve the level of self-reflection that she
would have hoped for. Lacy is humble when reflecting on her work, tending to note the failures

66
Una Mullaly, “Girls of the Revolution: a look at life for Irish teens over 100 years,” The Irish Times (August 26, 2016)
https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/girls-of-the-revolution-a-look-at-life-for-irish-teens-over-100-years.

29

or challenges of a project before its successes. Another possible missed opportunity in School for
Revolutionary Girls was the lack of sustained engagement; once the school ended after ten days,
there was no framework to keep the girls in communication. This is one of the pitfalls of a
temporary project—while the ephemeral nature lends a novelty and a precious quality to the
experience, it is difficult to enact lasting change in a young person’s life in just ten days without
any program for maintenance. Critics of parachuting might disparage this project’s short
timespan as an example of a superficial engagement, which more often than not neglects the
long-term effects of an artist’s intervention into a foreign environment. School for Revolutionary
Girls had a long-term research plan period to support it, and the consensus from the community
was generally positive. However, it may have succumbed to some of the negative aspects of
parachuting insofar as it did not provide a framework for sustainable, long-term change.

CHAPTER 2
TANIA BRUGUERA

Born in 1968 in Havana, Cuba Tania Bruguera experienced the first decade of Fidel
Castro’s communist dictatorship during her childhood. Life in Cuba at that time was unstable:
wealthy Cubans began to leave the country in droves during the early sixties, and those who
could not afford to uproot their entire family sent their children away for fear of the unknown
inequities they would suffer under Castro’s regime. In 1961, the United States imposed a trade
embargo in response to the Bay of Pigs crisis that led to depleted resources on the island nation
and left citizens scrambling for food and resources. Counter-revolutionary factions constantly
threatened to overthrow the government and, in January 1968, the year Bruguera was born,

30

Castro arrested and exiled thirty-seven members of the Cuban Communist Party for conspiring
with the Soviet Union to overthrow the regime.
Bruguera was born into a unique situation for a Cuban citizen of her age: as the daughter
of a diplomat, she traveled frequently to embassies outside of Cuba, but at the same time was
submerged in the Cuban propaganda that her father exported to countries including France,
Lebanon, and Panama in order to form political alliances.
67
For several years after the age of
seven, Bruguera lived in Beirut where she experienced the ravages of war—during the Lebanese
Civil War—more than she ever had in Cuba. She returned to Cuba at age eleven with a
“perspective that was broader than that of an islander”
68
and, as a result, she believes she became
more acutely aware of the isolation and repression imposed by the Cuban government. In an
interview, she described the discomfort she felt after reintegrating into her home country, “We
were saying what was expected and not what we thought; we would do things not out of belief
but out of duty. Reality could become very confusing. I was shocked by the presence of lying in
everyday life as a consequence of those representational mandates.”
69

Formal Education
Bruguera came of age in the 1980s in an increasingly isolated Cuba, living in constant
threat of a Cold War that never came. Even as Castro disparaged United States presidents in
public speeches, US Cold War policies never dictated an invasion of Cuba. In fact, for many
young Cubans of Bruguera’s generation, the threat of war was seen as a deception on the part of

67
Tom Eccles, Interview with Tania Bruguera, “Art Featured: Tania Bruguera,” Art Review Ltd. (December 2015).
68
Ibid.
69
Ibid.

31

the government, a justification for repression and disappointment.
70
Their beliefs were
synthesized into a Havanan art movement called los ‘80s, named for the decade in which they
were most active. These radicalized young Cuban artists wanted to use “their art as a weapon
and agent of freedom”
71
against what they perceived to be an oppressive government. Although
literature was heavily monitored by Castro’s government, some artists were able to obtain art
magazines in which they found inspiration in the conceptual artists of the 1960s and the image-
based, feminist social critiques of the 1980s by artists such as Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and
Cindy Sherman. Los ‘80s artists blended the aesthetics of 1960s conceptualism and the 1980s
“picture generation” with perestroika, an economic and political restructuring tactic used by
Mikhail Gorbachev. The tactic was ostensibly to bring the socialist Soviet Union up to the
economic standard of capitalist countries such as Germany and Japan by promoting a greater
awareness of market structures and loosening of government control, which in turn lead to an
ease in censorship.
Bruguera joined los ‘80s when she received her BFA in Fine Art from Escuela de Arte
San Alejandro in Havana in 1987 and an MFA in painting from the Instituto Superior de Arte,
Havana in 1992.
72
Like her peers, she made it a priority to use her art as a tool to uncover the
themes and subjects of Castro’s censorship. Among this excised history were the life stories of
many Cuban expatriates whose decision to leave the country at the beginning of Castro’s regime
was perceived as an act of treason. Migration policy during this time was completely silenced by
the media and never openly discussed.

70
Marilyn Machaco and Nicole Bass, “Biography of Tania Bruguera,”
http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/files/note_bio_machado_for_nicole_1.pdf.
71
Ibid.
72
Guggenheim Collection Online, “Tania Bruguera,” (2008) https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/tania-bruguera

32

Because of this, the media obliterated mention of Cuban expatriate artists such as Ana
Mendieta, even as her career reached significant heights in New York. Bruguera felt it was
important to uncover Mendieta’s story and relocate it within early 1990’s Cuba, where once
again, there was a massive exodus from the country occurring and little known about the lives of
those who had left Cuba previously.
73
Bruguera identified with Mendieta’s artistic expression as
a way of coping with displacement. Like Bruguera, Mendieta was born into a family prominent
in Cuban government and society in 1948. At age twelve, Mendieta and her sister were sent to
Iowa to flee Castro’s regime. They lived with other immigrant children in a series of refugee
camps, foster homes, and boarding schools. Her world shifted radically from that of a sheltered,
upper-class Catholic school girl to a refugee in a foreign country with no family or language
skills.
Mendieta’s work draws upon her experiences of discrimination as an immigrant, and the
rupture of her spiritual life when faced with exile from her homeland. She is most well-known
for her “earth-body” performances, in which she explored the possibility of reconciling her
displacement to a new land by facilitating an intimate, spiritual connection between her own
body and the natural landscape. When Bruguera discovered Mendieta’s oeuvre––most likely
through clandestine sources––the younger artist found deep resonances in the elder’s
performative work, and was inspired to embark on a decade-long initiative to unearth and re-
conceptualize Mendieta’s oeuvre. Bruguera’s performance series Tribute to Ana Mendieta
(1986-1996) was one of her earliest “long-term projects,” as compared to the “short-term

73
The culmination of the emigration surge occurred in 1994 when Castro called off all border guards and a massive number of
Cubans left the country, unobstructed, in rafts and small boats.

33

projects” (singular intervention performances) and “collaborations” she had done previously.
74

Bruguera performed her first reenactments of Mendieta’s work at Fototeca de Cuba in Havana in
1986, less than one year after Mendieta’s tragic death under suspicious circumstances.
75
In 1992,
Bruguera chose to reenact Mendieta’s Silueta (1976) and Body Track (1974) series in which the
artist used her body to make imprints in different organic media—dirt, fire, and sand, or tracks
made with her forearms as they slid down a pristine white wall. Both actions were performed in
front of live audiences. Mendieta commented about her Silueta Series: “I have been carrying out
a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette). I believe
this has been a direct result of my having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my
adolescence. I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature).”
76

By recreating the performances in their mutual homeland, Bruguera was able to relocate
Mendieta's work into the current political context, both honoring it and subtly changing its
meaning. Bruguera was deliberately reinstating Mendieta’s place in a censored history to expose
and defy the forces of colonization, misogyny, and political oppression that had silenced her. In
her meticulous reenactments Bruguera forced Cuba to once again see Mendieta, saying: “you
cannot silence me.”
In 1998, Bruguera moved part-time to Chicago to participate in a cultural exchange
program with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and pursue an MFA in
performance. When asked about her interest in the exchange program, Bruguera answered:
“First, because for me and for many Cubans, America is, in a sense a dream… I think that

74
The terms are taken from the glossary on Tania Bruguera’s website which lists the self-generated lexicon she uses to describe
her work.
75
The circumstances of her death implied foul play on the part of her husband, minimalist artist Carl Andre.
76
Elizabeth Manchester, "Untitled (Silueta Series, Mexico)," TATE (October 2009)
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/mendieta-untitled-silueta-series-mexico-t13357

34

America is a point of reference for everything in Cuba, for daily life, politics, and or art. And so
it was very important for me to come here and see what is real and unreal in relation to what I
thought.”
77

During her time in Chicago, Bruguera encountered for the first time a group of Cuban
emigres rebuilding their lives in America and immediately identified with them. She spent time
with them, eating dinner in their homes and talking to them about their experience of recreating
their lives in the US. She also observed a group of homeless people who lived in a tunnel in
downtown Chicago and was struck by how similarly the experience of the homeless matched the
experience of the new Cuban immigrants. Both groups were treated like objects by the rest of
society, and neither had any stable territory to call their own.
78
They were both in a constant
process of “constructing everything from the beginning”
79
under the scrutiny of governing
institutions such as the Immigration Control and the police. She even noted that the word in
Cuban for homeland is the same as the word for homeless: patria.
80
One word described the
shared experiences of these separate groups.
Bruguera has stated that the time spent doing research for her final performance at SAIC
was far more impactful to her than the actual event. Most importantly, she discovered the voices
and artwork created by Cuban Americans, a faction of people she was not cognizant of while
living in Cuba. For her final performance, she created an encounter between performers dressed
like policemen and border patrol agents, and the viewers. After walking through a long, dark
hallway, the participants were forced to surrender their IDs, and then walk through a series of
rooms in which Cuban emigres enacted, metaphorically, the destabilizing experience of moving

77
Betti-Sue Hertz, “Interview with Tania Bruguera,” 1990’s Art from Cuba, 1997.
78
Ibid.
79
Ibid.
80
Ibid.

35

to America. At the end of the performance, more “guards” asked the participants a series of
questions taken from the real questionnaire given by the Immigration and Nationalization
Service, which included tasks like singing the national anthem. In order to retrieve one’s
identification, one had to answer the questions flawlessly no matter how many attempts it took.
These themes of interrogating structures of power and assumed social relations between citizens
of different backgrounds would prove to be central to Bruguera’s work as she continued to
pursue performative situations that destabilized the viewer through their engagement with the
work of art.

Arte de Conducta
Once back in Havana, Bruguera taught for a short time at the Escuela de Conducta
Eduardo Marante, a correctional school seeking to reintegrate Cuban youths into society after
incarceration. From this teaching experience Bruguera formulated Arte de Conducta (“Behavior
Art” in English), which would become her conceptual contribution to performance and social
practice art. Arte de Conducta is listed as one of twelve terms in Bruguera’s “Glossary,” a self-
authored lexicon which describes different strategies or mediums employed in her work. The
artist’s intention behind creating a lexicon was as an "intervention into the language of art" that
“follows her interest in questioning structures of power. This conceptual appropriation of
knowledge—meant to update old meanings, to cross-pollinate disciplines, and to question the
role of art— forms the understructure of a "lifelong political performance.”
81

81
Tania Bruguera, “Glossary,” http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/608-0-GLOSSARY.htm
Bruguera has parsed out the relationship between art and politics in her work with the term from her glossary Political Timing
Specific: “Site-specific art responds to its physical, geographical, or social conditions. Political timing-specific art expands these
coordinates to include the political conditions that mark a particular moment. Political events define and shape the work—these
are understood as significant issues of public concern, particularly those related to governance and its implementation through
policy, propaganda, journalism, and public opinion. The work provides an answer to a specific situation that is born of a

36

Bruguera is reticent to divulge her theoretical and literary influences, but Freire’s non-
Western orientation and his commitment to dismantling systems of oppression attracted her to
Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Living in the Caribbean in late 1980s through the 1990s, she would
have been aware of contemporary politicians using Freire’s radical pedagogy for direct political
interventions, like Boal’s Center for the Theater of the Oppressed in Brazil and Mockus’
groundbreaking work as mayor of Bogota. These public experiments marked a radically new
attitude for Latin American governments toward the public, one that used artistic methods for
policy change.
Bruguera seems to take a cue from Freire’s belief that “naming and shaping” the world is
an existential right with the potential to increase the humanity of the namer when she develops
terminology to describe her artwork, instead of relying on critics or curators to codify her
practice. Freire stresses the importance of clarifying language as a strategy toward liberation
through the following argument: adopting the language of the oppressor (or Western academics)
can dangerously obscure reality, because the language of oppressors will never be reflective of
the objective reality of oppression. Instead, it will provide a softer alternative that promotes
comfort and complacency in the status-quo. When Bruguera appropriates and blends pre-existing
terms to introduce her emancipative, anti-neoliberal, anti-colonial agenda into the art vocabulary,
it is a response to Freire’s imperative for renaming. He writes, “To exist, humanly, is to name
the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem
and requires of them a new naming.
82
For Freire, the act of naming forces a change of behavior

necessity, not just the artist’s desires. The artwork evolves with the political moment, and its realization is in the consequences it
generates. Once the moment passes, the piece loses its potential impact and becomes a document.” (2017) An example of her
political timing specific work includes a candidacy for the presidency of Cuba in 2018.
82
Freire, Pedagogy, 88.

37

in the oppressors, a gesture that we see Bruguera begin to explore with more and more frequency
in her art when she addresses Western hegemonic art history.
Bruguera conceived Arte de Conducta as a reaction to the Anglo-European dominance of
the term “performance art.” When she began her career as a performance artist she was
immersed in the limited context of Havana in the 1980s when los 80’s artists were relatively
divorced, both geographically and historically, from the traditions of Anglo-European
performance art. In Anglo-European tradition, performance was taught via the history of early
20
th
century Dadaists and Futurists, post-war avant-garde events such as Happenings and Fluxus,
and the traditions of dance and theater. At SAIC, Bruguera began to see the academic history of
this art media as problematically Western-centric, stating:
I discovered everything that separated what I was looking for in my work from
most such performative traditions – mostly the vision of my work as a gesture.
After I left the school [SAIC] and after a heavy [Michel] Foucault induction, I
called what I was doing Arte de Conducta, to make sure that any analysis would
start with the social and political implications of the work.
83

In response to this perceived disconnect, Bruguera created a new artistic practice that privileges
the gestural within the performance. In practice, this challenges the audience to react to the
artwork, which in turn completes it and gives it meaning. Behavior Art as she defined it goes one
step further in shifting the focus from artist to audience by claiming that the goal is for the
participant’s behavior to change after the art encounter.
84
Ideally, new behaviors will be learned,
and problematic normative behavior will be called into question. Attempting to change the
participants’ behavior gets right at the heart of praxis and gave Bruguera a unique artistic
“medium” with which to make art that had a direct impact on politics. She thought of changed
behavior not as the end result, but rather the means by which her message was expressed. To

83
Tom Eccles, Interview with Tania Bruguera, “Art Featured: Tania Bruguera.” Art Review Ltd. (December 2015)
84
Tania Bruguera, “Glossary,” http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/608-0-GLOSSARY.html.

38

understand Behavior Art, one must recognize that it does not seek to resolve specific problems,
but rather to lay out a quandary in which new behaviors are rehearsed and potential future
scenarios are imagined.

Cátedra Arte de Conducta and Escuela de Arte Útil
Bruguera’s propensity for changing modes of behavior led her to interest in education,
which on some levels, is also focused on reinforcing and dismantling certain patterns of thought
and action. She had always hoped to teach her version of performance art in Cuba as avant-garde
practice was lacking from all the art curricula. Beginning in 2003, Bruguera founded the Cátedra
Arte de Conducta (Behavior Art School) out of her home in Havana. It continued until 2009. In
Bruguera’s words, “The idea was to create conversations. I believe that education lies in
conversation. I don’t believe in a vertical channel to transmit encyclopedic knowledge, although
it’s important to have some contextual knowledge. Through the project, we’ve managed to create
a generation of Cuban artists interested in the social and political aspect of art.”
85
Bruguera
formulated the curriculum of the Cátedra by inviting her friends and colleagues from around the
world to take up an informal residency at her house and lead sessions at the school that involved
their take on her two-fold concept of making behavior art and learning art as behavior. She called
these visitors “guests” and the participants “members” to avoid the hierarchal terminology of
“teachers” and “students.” Some visiting guests include artists Nao Bustamante, Artur
Zmijewski, Christoph Büchel, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and over one hundred more individuals. On
paper, Cátedra Arte de Conducta was a two-year program but some members stayed for a few
days, a few months, or five years. Though little ephemera besides a few photographs remains of

85
Jeanette Petrik, Interview with Tania Bruguera, “Education is Always for the Future.”

39

the original Cátedra, what has survived documents some of the experimental “behavior art”
made by its members. The Cátedra was also the first “Transitional Institution” in Bruguera’s
practice, a site which examines the nature of political power and how to repurpose that power to
serve revolutionary goals.
With the advent of Arte de Conducta in the early 2000s, Bruguera’s work underwent a
formal shift in which she no longer used her body in her performances, but instead assumed the
role of the instigator. Her new work had new priorities that closely resembled the rhetoric of
social practice, although she has always considered herself a political artist first and foremost. As
Bruguera has notably said: “I was tired of making art that pointed at the thing, I wanted to make
the thing itself.”
86
In this case, the thing refers to political change. She defines social practice as,
“not only a set of tools to engage in the social sphere, but also a way in which people can rethink
the future and ways in which people can redefine governability and also ways in which society
should work.”
87
To address the tool-like potential of art, she created a new glossary term: Arte
Útil which loosely translates to “useful art” but references its secondary meaning––“tool”–– to
suggest that art can provide solutions to real-life problems. In some of her later projects that
address Arte de Conducta and Arte Útil, using behavior as a medium required a detachment of
ethics from behavior. Any questioning and unlearning of normative behavior became the goal
and whether that was seen as right or wrong was irrelevant. This attitude led to some of
Bruguera’s more incendiary and controversial pieces such as Self Sabotage (2009), a
lecture/performance during which she played Russian roulette with live rounds while reading her
reflections on political art in front of an audience for the Venice Biennale, and Untitled (Bogotá)

86
Tania Bruguera, “When Behaviour Becomes Form,” Parachute Contemporary Art La Habana, No. 125, (Quebec: Parachute,
2007), 65.
87
Carol Zou, Interview with Tania Bruguera, “Social Practice,” Performing Public Space (March 2, 2013),
http://performingpublicspace.org/tania-bruguera.

40

(2009), which involved offering Colombian cocaine to all audience members of a panel
discussion. These experiments in Behavior Art break the boundary of art made from political
images and move into the territory of art that works from within politics and creates politics by
using the resources of aggression, control, and power to change behavior.
Because of her history of criticality towards institutions of power, Bruguera has faced
intense animus from the Cuban government, which has detained and psychologically tortured her
on two occasions. The first was in 2014 over a public restaging of her performance art piece,
Tatlin’s Whisper #6, which had been performed five times before in various places, including the
turbine hall of the Tate, London.
88
After her arrest, Bruguera’s passport was confiscated and she
was not allowed to leave Cuba for several months, although she had not lived on the island for
many years.
89
Bruguera was arrested again in Havana in June 2015 as she walked in a silent
protest with the Ladies in White, a group of female relatives of imprisoned dissidents. This time,
the police injured her in custody and she sustained several hematomas on her arms and torso. A
factor that has always provided some modicum of safety for Bruguera and has prevented her
from being a recognized enemy of the state is that she calls her political interventions “artwork.”
For example, after her latest arrest, a statement issued from her Facebook page stated:
Tania does not belong to any group of opposition, nor of dissidence, nor of
activism in Cuba. Tania is an artist who works in an independent manner with
EVERYONE … Tania is not an opposition, nor a dissident, but an artist who
works with political art and who believes that art can help transform the social
and political reality we live in.
90

88
Tatlin’s Whisper is a staged performance, the media for which is a podium and a hot microphone. Members of the audience
are invited to freely come up to the podium and speak “truth to power.”
89
Coco Fusco, “On the Detention of Cuban Artist Tania Bruguera,” e-flux journal (January 3, 2015), http://www.e-
flux.com/announcements/30175/on-the-detention-of-cuban-artist-tania-bruguera-by-coco-fusco/
90
Jillian Steinhauer, “Artist Tania Bruguera Arrested Again in Havana, Injured by Police,” Hyperallergic (June 9, 2015)
https://hyperallergic.com/213188/artist-tania-bruguera-arrested-again-in-havana-injured-by-police.

41

Such a declaration was necessary to protect Bruguera’s personal safety in her homeland. In the
US, her art operates slightly differently, as it is exhibited in arts institutions and framed as fine
art. In Cuba it remains in the open world, where the lack of a frame causes it to appear more like
direct political intervention.
Bruguera’s 2017 mid-career retrospective Talking to Power / Hablándole al Poder, held
at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco (2017), covered four decades of her art
practice using the artist’s own lexicon as the organizing logic of the show. It included sections on
Arte Útil, political-timing-specific art, and the transitional institution, among others. The
exhibition dealt with the representation of ephemeral performances by recreating the
environment in which they took place. For example, a large orange curtain and wooden podium
were used to present Tatlin’s Whisper #5 (2008), and white plastic chairs facing a table with a
9mm revolver and printed manifesto were used for Self Sabotage (2009). The viewers were
invited to enter these situations to experience an embodied recreation of the performances, rather
than a representational one.
To address the transitional institution category, Bruguera worked with curators to recreate
a version of the Cátedra de Arte Conducta inside of the main gallery at YBCA. The result, La
Escuela de Arte Útil, was a fully-functional classroom occupying the last room of the
retrospective—a very large, high-ceilinged gallery with approximately 50 chairs, carpeted in
wall-to-wall orange. Artifacts from the original Cátedra were held in vitrines around the
classroom space. While a core group of students enrolled in the Escuela and were required to
attend lectures and workshops three afternoons a week for eight weeks, the general public was
also welcome to participate on a drop-in basis. From June 20 to August 10, Bruguera organized
programming about systems of power and how to harness dissent through creativity with

42

collaborators such as Alistair Hudson, Debt Collective, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Wochen Klausur,
and Rick Lowe. As an homage to the original Behavior Art School in Havana, the workshops
directly addressed Bruguera’s desire that “the museum was not a destination where a work of art
could be seen, but rather a site for temporary pedagogical pause"
91
yet expanded upon the
curriculum of the Cátedra by exploring such topics as “Active Hyperrealism,” “Reforming
Capital,” and “Usership,” which responded to the challenges facing socially and politically
engaged artists today. During each lecture session (which were all recorded and available to
stream for free on YBCA’s YouTube page) empty 24 x 36 inch paper pads hung poised at the
front of the classroom. Video documentation of the Escuela sessions show a wholly interactive
discussion from start to finish, with the lecturer asking questions of the audience throughout the
discussion and a transcriber documenting these thoughts on the pads of paper. For example,
during the first Arte Útil session taught by Bruguera herself, she began by asking the audience to
give her their definition of “useful art.” Answers from audience members included broad ideas
like “immigration services” to specific projects like “the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project” to
“Bread and Puppet Theater.” Next, Bruguera asked the same audience members to defend why
the example they chose was art. Those ideas were also documented on the pad. After the lecture,
the sheets of paper remained as a skeletal outline of the discussion, tacked one by one on the
high walls of the classroom/gallery as a record of the conversation that had occurred. Subsequent
workshop sessions and smaller discussion groups were not video documented, but the notes
generated became an actively changing part of the retrospective exhibition.
One obstacle in representing an ephemeral, durational interaction such as the Escuela
sessions is that aesthetic documentation will necessarily reduce a multifaceted experience to a

91
Ashton Cooper, "Artist Tania Bruguera Gathers Postcards for the Pope,” Blouin Artinfo, October 21, 2014.

43

one-dimensional, partial view. As such, the words on the pieces of paper remained as artifacts
representing the Escuela de Arte Útil and, in the exhibition, did not provide a substantive insight
into the nature of the project. Only by watching the ten-plus hours of video documentation does
one get a sense of the conversational pedagogical dimensions of the project; by looking at the
paper one would see only out-of-context words written in a single person’s handwriting. Perhaps
here is a missed opportunity for sustained engagement similar to the School for Revolutionary
Girls. One idea to remedy this issue would be to develop a curriculum or handbook based upon
the ideas generated in the Escuela to expand the scope of the project beyond those who were
first-hand witnesses.
The public response to the Escuela de Arte Útil installed as a part of Talking to Power
was varied, with somewhat negative responses from the art-journalists who called the display
“authoritarian” and like “a padded college essay typed in oversize font [which] relies on scale to
fill the blank spaces where the visual content would otherwise be.”
92
There was some excitement
generated from the less-specialized media, which voiced interest at the idea of school within an
museum, citing: “The first day of school can be boring. Usually it's the teacher going over the
syllabus, setting ground rules and taking attendance. But Escuela de Arte Útil isn’t your typical
school.”
93
It follows that art journalists’ reactions would tend to be more critical of the aesthetics
of the Escuela and more positive when considering the conceptual potential of Bruguera’s work.

92
Charles Desmarais, “Tania Bruguera’s Formidable Art Overwhelmed at YBCA,” SF Gate (July 14, 2017)
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Tania-Bruguera-s-formidable-art-overwhelmed-at-11289360.php.
93
Ryan Levi, “Blacklisted Cuban Artist Brings Extreme Political Art to Bay,” KQED Arts (July 26, 2017)
https://www.kqed.org/arts/13732071.

44

CHAPTER 3
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Despite the obvious differences in form, content, and location between the School for
Revolutionary Girls, the Cátedra Arte de Conducta, and the Escuela de Arte Útil, these projects
each demonstrate the artists’ basic vision for humanity as reflecting upon and transforming
reality. Suzanne Lacy and Tania Bruguera, on a most basic philosophical level, share the
ontological position that human consciousness and the world are dialectically linked, with
humankind and the environment constantly transforming the other. As Jean Paul Sartre wrote
and Paulo Freire quoted in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “Consciousness and the world are given
at one stroke: essentially external to consciousness, the world is nevertheless essentially relative
to consciousness.”
94
This tenet is an alternative to traditional Western aesthetic analysis in which
the viewer (like a student) passively absorbs the information presented in a work of art by the
artist who has assumed the role of teacher. Both Bruguera and Lacy are committed to using the
structure of an aesthetic experience to promote reflection and later transformation of a subject’s
consciousness to have greater critical awareness of the world around them. This use of
experience to promote knowledge is a praxis, and that makes it a form of pedagogy in the
Freirean sense—the leading of student with a teacher. Additionally, both Bruguera and Lacy
chose to recreate institutions with School for Revolutionary Girls, Cátedra Arte de Conducta,
and La Escuela de Arte Útil. This decision is an aesthetic one, allowing for a direct comparison
and critique of traditional schools.

94
Jean Paul Sartre, “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl's Phenomenology.”

45

There are several different approaches that are often used in both critical pedagogy and
social practice, including co-teaching, experiential learning, consciousness raising, and dialogical
processes within workshops or other formats. One major distinction between Lacy and Bruguera
is how they use these methodologies. This section is a comparative analysis of Bruguera’s two
transitional educational institutions, and Lacy’s School for Revolutionary Girls in which I
evaluate similarities and differences in the main elements of the projects and consider where they
fit into the shifting curatorial discourse around social practice.
The overarching goal of both projects was to promote revolutionary self-education in a
non-didactic way by focusing on different mechanisms for pedagogical transformation. Lacy’s
project utilized a historic and contemporary knowledge of feminism in Ireland and the rhetoric of
1960s feminist protests to create a staged performance, using teenage girls’ bodies as a medium,
in the public gaze. The process that led to this culminating performance is as significant as the
final artwork—it involved daily consciousness-raising groups that prompted the girls to be
present and deepened awareness of their feelings, as well as writing activities to put them in
touch with their self-expression. The School for Revolutionary Girls acted as a sanctuary in
which self-transformation could safely occur. The performance was a celebration of this
transformation, a physical and visual representation of the girls’ newfound strength. Lacy,
Kintisch, and the other instructors saw the change they hoped the students would undergo.
However, the nature of having a short-term project is that not as much attention can be devoted
to maintaining the lessons learned after the student leaves the institution.
Conversely, Bruguera’s transitional institutions forefront a conceptual or political
understanding that can then be “repurposed” through the pedagogic process to use the resources
of power to fight power. Unlike Lacy’s project, a certain level of artistic and political literacy

46

was necessary to engage with Bruguera’s institutions, as she is invested in using challenging
conversations to cause unconscious changes in behavior that can happen long after the art project
has concluded. She believes that education should make the student reflect critically on their
situation, recognize the problem, demand a solution, and be able to imagine that solution.
Bruguera outlined her pedagogical position as follows: “We don't teach art because we want
people to know famous artists' names and know how to recognize their work when they see it.
What we're doing is using art as a language tool.”
95
Even as she teaches language in her schools,
she understands that the usual duration of viewing artwork is very short and true learning
happens outside the boundaries of art when her students go home or out into the world. The
delayed effect of Bruguera’s pedagogy makes it markedly different from Lacy’s strategy, which
prompts an instant, embodied self-transformation.
The School for Revolutionary Girls served what Lacy has called a “curated” audience—
she selected the participants who enrolled based on the prerequisite that they desired to become
revolutionary and the audience who saw the final performance consisted mostly of people
familiar with the project via IMMA and the students’ families. The model for Bruguera’s
projects was more self-generating and less curated. Originally, in Cuba, the participants of
Cátedra de Arte Conducta were Bruguera’s contemporaries and fellow artists who were familiar
with her work; there was not an outside audience. The audience for the Escuela de Arte Útil
consisted of people who visited Talking to Power and a separate group of participants who
attended the workshops. Bruguera had no personal control over either of these groups, although
they most likely chose to participate due to a pre-existing affinity for her work. In this way, the
audience and participants of Bruguera’s project were attracted by her artistic persona and

95
Carol Zou, interview with Tania Bruguera, “Social Practice,” Performing Public Space (March 2, 2013),
http://performingpublicspace.org/tania-bruguera.

47

personal ideas, while in Lacy’s project they were selected based upon a conceptual goal. In fact,
by working with teenagers in a foreign country, Lacy all but ensured that her participants were
not familiar with her work.
In terms of an engagement strategy, both Bruguera and Lacy were driven by their larger
ethos to teach freedom and agency of body, speech, gender, and expression in revolutionary
educational environments. While they both used dialogue to initiate a pedagogical experience,
one major difference lies in the strategies they used to begin the conversation. Drawing from her
feminist consciousness-raising background, Lacy had the girls begin with their personal
experiences of sexuality or sexism and then related those subjective stories to the larger feminist
movement, proving to the girls that they did not have to feel isolated or ashamed. Bruguera’s
engagement strategy can be understood as functioning in the opposite way: she structured a more
traditional classroom environment to teach students that individuals can infiltrate systems of
power and gave them a tool for making change through behavior art. While their methods
differed, ultimately through their pedagogy Lacy and Bruguera demonstrated the dialectic
between the personal and the political. With Lacy the personal leads and with Bruguera it is the
political situation that must be evaluated first, then used to shape personal behavior that can
disrupt power structures.
In respect to proximity to established arts institutions, Escuela de Arte Útil and School
for Revolutionary Girls had far greater reliance on the museum structure than did Cátedra de
Arte Conducta. The Cátedra is the outlier in this case, as it was necessarily kept a clandestine
operation out of the artist’s home due to fear of political backlash. In its updated version, the
Escuela more directly addressed Bruguera’s desire for “repurposing an institution and its

48

assets”
96
by turning a usually standard white-cube gallery into an active dialogical space. By
updating a model that was originally an underground school, Bruguera carried over the informal
and convivial nature of the Cátedra into the YBCA’s large gallery. Because she is from a
country where exposure to fine arts was limited for most of the population, Bruguera was
cognizant of a level of discomfort or alienation intimately related to race and class that
individuals might feel upon entering a museum. Even in America, museums have the
connotation of elitist spaces open to a privileged few, so by organizing participatory activities in
the gallery Bruguera reinstated the public utility of the museum. As cited earlier, her ultimate
pedagogic goal was to generate a conversation with various voices, which lead to
experimentation and eventually to lasting changes in behavior. In that sense, the Escuela de Arte
Útil succeeded in repurposing institutional assets for its own ends, even avoiding any
aestheticized documentation which could be retained by the institution. Aesthetic representation
via objects, photographs, or even writing is not a priority for Bruguera. This may be in line with
her wish to keep her practice ephemeral, like a rumor, and not object-based.
School for Revolutionary Girls also operated from within a museum, but used the
connotations of that space to build the gaze and enhance framing around the project, especially
the final performance. Lacy taught young women with no artistic literacy or revolutionary
feminist strategies in a country which has a conservative—albeit democratic—government that
often oppresses women's rights. As such, the School for Revolutionary Girls functioned to lead
young women toward finding their own bodies and voices and celebrate that transformation in a
staged, public performance. Loading the performance with references to feminist art protests and
other theatrical elements and staging it in the middle of an art museum served to insert the girls

96
Exhibition didactics, Talking to Power / Hablándole al Poder, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, June 16 - October 29, 2017,
San Francisco, California.

49

into the history of feminism and legitimize them as being worthy of an audience. Lacy very
deliberately chose to have the performance happen in a space central to the experience of IMMA,
a giant, cavernous courtyard that felt both intimidating and regal. She also utilized every
aesthetic register—sound, texture, vision (and even taste, in a sense, with the zucchinis)—to
engage the audience in what the girls had to say. Interestingly, unlike the Escuela, video
documentation of the School for Revolutionary Girls performance is not readily available. What
does exist are many professional photos which document moments from the ten-day project. The
difference between watching an unedited video of an entire Escuela session and viewing selected
photos from the School for Revolutionary Girls points to the difference in how Lacy and
Bruguera chose to represent their projects, for future display in galleries and beyond. Lacy
endeavored to create lasting visual documents of the School for Revolutionary Girls performance
that could be exhibited in future art shows, while Bruguera focused on unedited videos that,
while not strong aesthetically, were best suited to spread information on the Internet.

CHAPTER 4
CONCLUSION

As educators and founders of temporary, autonomous institutions, Suzanne Lacy and
Tania Bruguera brought unique subject positions and skill sets that affected the outcome of their
projects. One element that shapes the characteristics of socially engaged art is the historical
milieu that an artist is positioned in. Bruguera and Lacy represent different perspectives as artists
making work about and at the intersection of race, class, and gender-based oppression. Lacy
spent her formative years in the hub of first-wave feminist art in the US, working through the

50

then still-nascent issues of self-representation without exploitation and transforming personal
experience into artistic expression. Lacy adopted the first-generation feminist artists’ credo “the
personal is political” as the ethos of her own practice. The application of this principle manifests
in many ways, from Lacy’s concern with the spatial organization of her consciousness-raising
group to maximize equality to the “radical hospitality” she extends to the communities she works
in. Lacy always seeks to create a physical space, whether it is a classroom, a miniature museum
inside a bus, or a parking lot roof, where dialogue can foster openness and an exchange that
involves both teaching and learning.
Twenty years after Lacy studied in Fresno, California in the seat of the US feminist
movement, Tania Bruguera came of age in Havana, Cuba with a group of politically radical
artists who protested Castro’s regime. By the 1980s, feminist theory had expanded to consider
race and class as important indications of difference alongside gender. Bruguera attended SAIC
in the 1990s just after the Culture Wars, during which the US instigated new conversations about
identity politics, and the emergence of the “Third Wave” of feminist art. This phrase was coined
by author Rebecca Walker, and refers to a more “intersectional” feminism which was the
reaction against the so-called “white feminism” of 1970s America.
97
The developments of
intersectional feminism resonated with Bruguera, as the problematics of race, censorship, class,
and oppression were inextricable from the context in which her life and practice had been
formed. It follows that her relationship with feminism is foregrounded in her understanding of
the body as the site of behavior, a vehicle to either receive or resist political directives, as she is
first and foremost a political artist. Repeatedly, when Bruguera writes about about her practice
she situates the political as a primary concern that must be considered inasmuch as it shapes

97
Rebecca Walker, “Becoming the Third Wave,” Ms. Magazine, 1992.

51

personal behavior. Only then can behavior be used to act back upon the system, using the
resources of power to create power after the art experience is over to “generate and install
models of social interaction that may provide new ways to relate with Utopia.”
98
Bruguera has
faced intense government censorship of her art practice since she was a college student. Officials
would often make studio visits to the Havanan artists known to be radicals, then preemptively
pass a law which made the art they saw illegal. Being constantly surveilled and thwarted in her
freedom of expression made Bruguera very vigilant and self-protective and led to her investment
in education as a way of teaching others to lift the veil of oppression.
For Bruguera education (like art) is an ideological activity that teaches individuals how to
behave and what to value. Meanwhile, Lacy has a less politically-centric ethos which views
society as being made up of discrete individuals, each with a unique set of experiences. Thus, all
social practice art is inherently pedagogical for Lacy, and all of her projects have self-education
as a major goal.
99
Bruguera has called the original Cátedra Arte de Conducta an “artwork in the
shape of an art school” and a “rumor,” which emphasizes the ephemerality of the project and its
defense mechanism “against the amnesia existing in between the numerous and frequent re-
editings of Cuba's history.”
100
The Cátedra survived in a hostile environment precisely because it
was never formalized; it was a mere rumor. In its second iteration, the Escuela de Arte Útil in the
Yerba Buena Arts Center acted as a temporary takeover of the museum space and re-
appropriated it as a classroom. Both Escuela de Arte Útil and School for Revolutionary Girls
utilized the resources of institutions for their own ends— to create spaces for new and diverse
publics to have an unmediated and emancipatory pedagogical experience.

98
Tania Bruguera, “Artist’s Statement,” TaniaBruguera.com, 2009.
99
Suzanne Lacy, interview with the author, December 15, 2017.
100
Stephanie Schwartz, Interview with Tania Bruguera, “When Behavior Becomes Form,” Oxford Art Journal (June 12, 2011),
218.

52

Ultimately, in their respective projects both Lacy and Bruguera produced temporary
artist-initiated spaces for education which, at their core, existed to teach and test ideas about
freedom and strategies for attaining it. These projects modeled intense, transitory sites of
freedom that emerge outside the hegemony of established institutions (although they may borrow
assets from institutions) and serve to liberate the body and mind through unmediated, direct
experience. Like performance art which aims to bring an interaction between the viewer and the
artist into focus, their projects were spaces for direct communication between individuals which
cannot be represented or abstracted. John Dewey explains how communication informs
experience, which in turn informs art, “in being communicated, the conveyance of meaning gives
body and definiteness to the experience of the one who utters as well as to that of those who
listen. Men associate in many ways. But the . . . expressions that constitute art are
communication in its pure and undefiled form. Art breaks through barriers that divide human
beings, which are impermeable in ordinary association.”
101
Each time that an artist is able to
carve out a space for communicating the tenets of freedom on her own terms, without any
sanctions or regulations imposed by an outside body, as Suzanne Lacy and Tania Bruguera
demonstrated, it furthers the legacy of artist pedagogues who teach agency over oppression.

101
John Dewey, Art as Experience, 89.

53

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57

Fig 1.1 Tania Bruguera with members of Cátedra Arte de Conducta, 2004, Havana, Cuba
IMAGE PLATES

58

Fig 1.2 Tania Bruguera, participants inside Escuela de Arte Útil, 2017, Yerba
Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco

59

Fig 1.3 Suzanne Lacy, students outside School for Revolutionary Girls, 2016,
Dublin, Ireland, photograph by Nicola Goode

60

Fig. 2.1 Allan Kaprow, poster for Six Ordinary Happenings, 1969. Sponsored by
Project Other Ways, Berkeley Unified School District, Berkeley

61

Fig. 2.2 a-b Allan Kaprow directs students from Project Other Ways,
1969, photographs of Shape from Oakland Tribune Article

62

Fig. 2.3 a-b Suzanne Lacy with students and Allan Kaprow in Maps,
1973, Cal Arts, Valencia, California

63

Fig. 2.4 Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz, In Mourning and in Rage, 1977, Los
Angeles City Hall, photograph by Maria Karras

64

Fig. 2.5 Suzanne Lacy, Whisper, the Waves, the Wind, 1984, La Jolla, California

65

Fig. 2.6 a-b Suzanne Lacy, School for Revolutionary Girls, 2016,
Dublin, Ireland, photographs by Nicola Goode

66

Fig. 2.7 a-b Suzanne Lacy, School for Revolutionary Girls, 2016,
Dublin, Ireland, photographs by Nicola Goode

67

Fig. 3.1 a-b Ana Mendieta, Silueta en Fuego, 1976 and Untitled (Body
Tracks), 1974, New York

68

Fig. 3.2 a-b Tania Bruguera, Tribute to Ana Mendieta, 1992, Centro de
Desarrollo de Artes Visuales, Havana, Cuba, photographs by Gonzalo
Vidal Alvarado

69

Fig. 3.3 a-b Tania Bruguera, students inside the Cátedra Arte de Conducta,
2008, Havana

70

Fig. 3.3 c-d Artworks created by Cátedra Arte de Conducta participants,
2003, Havana

71

Fig. 3.4 a-b Tania Bruguera, Escuela de Arte Útil, 2017, Yerba Buena
Center for the Arts, San Francisco

72

Fig. 3.5 Tania Bruguera’s bruises suffered at the hands of Cuban police,
2015, Havana

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Asset Metadata

Creator Littrell, Allison (author)

Core Title Teaching freedom: the power of autonomous temporary institutions and informal pedagogy in the work of Tania Bruguera and Suzanne Lacy

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere

Publication Date 08/20/2018

Defense Date 08/17/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag art,OAI-PMH Harvest,pedagogy,public,social practice,Suzanne Lacy,tania bruguera

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