1. I thank Suzanne Lacy for allowing me access to her archive. I am also grateful for her comments on my manuscript. Mydescription of Car Renovation is based on my reading of a photographic document in The Power of Feminist Art, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Abrams, 1994), 30–31, and a phone conversation with Suzanne Lacy (May 29, 1999). Lacy titled the event Car Renovation, but the piece was inadvertently renamed Pink Jalopy in The Power of Feminist Art. I have adopted Pink Jalopy as the name of the car and retained Car Renovation as Lacy's title for the piece. [BACK]

2. I adopt the term “body/self” from Amelia Jones's Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), which uses it to underline body artists' utilization of their bodies as vehicles of their embodied selfhood and artistic subjectivity. I use the terms “body/self” and “body/subject” more or less interchangeably. [BACK]

3. For a discussion of essentialism and anti-essentialism, see The Essential Difference, ed. Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), and Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking (New York: Routledge, 1990). [BACK]

4. Marvin Carlson, “Performance and Identity,” in Performance: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1996), 144–64. [BACK]

5. Suzanne Lacy, including a conversation with Judith Baca, “Affinities: Thoughts on an Incomplete History,” in The Power of Feminist Art, 270. [BACK]

6. Kristine Stiles cites Duchamp's comment in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 804. See also Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Duchamp had his first retrospective, organized by Walter Hopps, in 1963 at the now-defunct Pasadena Art Museum. [BACK]

7. Lacy, “Debated Territory: Toward a Critical Language for Public Art,” in Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, ed. Suzanne Lacy (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 176. [BACK]

8. Lacy, “Cultural Pilgrimages and Metaphoric Journeys,” in Mapping the Terrain, 19. [BACK]

9. The Great Wall of Los Angeles, located in a flood-control channel in the Los Angeles River, has employed over 350 inner-city youths over a nine-year period to depict different eras of California history and to make “reappear,” in Baca's words, “the disappeared stories of ethnic populations that make up the labor force which built our city, state, and nation” (Judith F. Baca, “Whose Monument Where? Public Art in a Many-Cultured Society,” in Mapping the Terrain, 133). [BACK]

10. See Allan Kaprow, “The Education of the Un-Artist, Part I” (1971), “The Education of the Un-Artist, PartII” (1972), and “The Education of the Un-Artist, PartIII” (1974), in The Blurring of Artand Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 97–109, 110–26, 130–47. [BACK]

11. Lacy, “Affinities,” 264. [BACK]

12. Ibid., 267. [BACK]

14. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1989), 267. [BACK]

15. Sonia Kruks, “Gender and Subjectivity: Simone de Beauvoir and Contemporary Feminism,” Signs 18, no. 1 (1992): 89–110. [BACK]

16. Stephen Horton, “Reading, Resistance and Disempowerment,” in Simone de Beau voir's The Second Sex New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Ruth Evans (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 164. [BACK]

17. Kruks, “Gender and Subjectivity,” 92. [BACK]

18. Beauvoir, Second Sex, xxii. [BACK]

19. Nicole Ward Jouve, White Woman Speaks with Forked Tongue: Criticism as Autobiog raphy (London: Routledge, 1911), 111. [BACK]

20. Beauvoir, Second Sex, 718. [BACK]

21. Cited by Horton, “Reading,” 172. [BACK]

22. Cited by Margaret Atack, “Writing from the Centre: Ironies of Otherness and Marginality,” in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, 31–32. [BACK]

23. Beauvoir, Second Sex, xx. [BACK]

24. See Atack's summation of critiques by Michèle Le Doeuff and Toril Moi, in “Writing from the Centre,” 34. [BACK]

25. See, for example, Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (New York: Vintage, 1995); Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); and Riki Anne Wilchins, Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender (New York: Firebrand, 1997). [BACK]

26. Beauvoir, Second Sex, xxiv, xxvii. [BACK]

27. From Amelia Jones's recounting of Judith Butler's analysis in Body Art, 43. For Butler's

28. For a sampling of the anti-essentialist critique of female body exposure in art, see Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (New York: Routledge, 1988), and Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), which includes Mulvey's highly influential 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which set the tone for anti-essentialist critique. [BACK]

29. Jeff Kelley emphatically notes Lacy's exploration of the body in “The Body Politics of Suzanne Lacy,” in But Is It Art?: The Spirit of Art as Activism, ed. Nina Felshin (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 221–49. [BACK]

30. Suzanne Lacy, “The Name of the Game,” in Theories and Documents of Contempo rary Art, 784–85. [BACK]

31. My description is based on archival research and an account by Moira Roth in “Suzanne Lacy: Social Reformer and Witch,” TDR 32, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 56–57. [BACK]

32. I had a conversation/debate with Lacy about this issue when I interviewed her on June 28, 1999, in Los Angeles. [BACK]

33. I am in debt to Drew Leder for the concept of the absent/present body in The Ab sent Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). [BACK]

34. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). [BACK]

35. Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 192. [BACK]

36. Lacy, “Name,” 785. [BACK]

37. Roth, “Suzanne Lacy,” 57. [BACK]

38. Roth, “Suzanne Lacy,” 57. [BACK]

39. Author's phone conversation with Suzanne Lacy, May 29, 1999. [BACK]

40. My descriptions are based on Roth, “Suzanne Lacy,” 51–52, and Kelley, “Body Politics,” 228–33. [BACK]

41. From Lacy's comments on my manuscript. [BACK]

42. This piece is also identified by a longer title, The Lady and the Lamb or the Goat and the Hag; see Roth, “Suzanne Lacy,” 51–52. [BACK]

43. Cited in Roth, “Suzanne Lacy,” 51. [BACK]

44. Naomi Schor, Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 46. [BACK]

45. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak with Ellen Rooney, “In a Word: Interview,” in The Es sential Difference, 152. [BACK]

46. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980). [BACK]

47. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 96, 95. [BACK]

48. Teresa de Lauretis, “The Essence of the Triangle or, Taking the Risk of Essentialism Seriously,” in The Essential Difference, 3. [BACK]

49. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), 205. [BACK]

50. Lacy, “Affinities,” 264. [BACK]

51. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 23. [BACK]

52. Suzanne Lacy, Rape, ed. Linda Macaluso (Los Angeles: Studio Watts Workshop, 1980), n.p. This publication contains documentation for Three Weeks in May: A Political Art Performance. My discussion of this work is primarily based on this archival source. See also Moira Roth'sdocumentation in The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America 1970–1980 (Los Angeles: Astro Artz, 1983), 114. [BACK]

53. Lacy, Rape, 36. [BACK]

54. From the poster for Three Weeks in May in Lacy's archive. The comment about L.A. as the “Rape Capital” was cited in Lacy's Three Weeks in May, from Nancy Ward, Ad Hoc Committee on Rape, Department of Human Relations, Los Angeles County, 1976. [BACK]

55. Lacy, Rape, 54. [BACK]

56. Lucy Lippard, “Lacy: Some of Her Own Medicine,” TDR 32, no.1 (Spring 1988): 73. Lippard's original context refers to the power of Lacy's positive thinking. [BACK]

57. In Mourning and in Rage was included in the MOCA's exhibition “Out of Actions.” It was the only piece selected from Lacy's prolific outputs in the 1970s, not to mention her continuous contribution to action art for the past three decades. My descriptions of In Mourning and in Rage are based on two sources: Roth, Amazing Decade, 112–13; William Peterson, “Mobilizing Communities for Change: Suzanne Lacy's Large-Scale Works,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 5, no. 1 (Fall 1990): 203–4. [BACK]

58. Roth, “Suzanne Lacy,” 46. My information is also based on archival research. [BACK]

59. Lippard, “Lacy,” 73. [BACK]

60. My description of the participants is based on Lacy's list of performers and her unpublished manuscript “Women in Transition: Art and Public Policy” in her archive. [BACK]

61. See Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “The Multicultural Paradigm” (1989), in Warrior for Gringostroika: Essays, Performance Texts, and Poetry (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1993), 45–54; Lucy R. Lippard, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (New York: Pantheon, 1990); Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield, eds., Map ping Multiculturalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). [BACK]

62. My discussion of The Dark Madonna is based on Lacy's archive, including Lacy's proposal for the project, some symposium records, a flyer and questionnaire for The Dark Madonna, responses from the participants, UCLA's original press release, and a press clipping packet. [BACK]

63. Teri Anne Carpenter, “Dark Madonna to Explore Women's Experience of Culture, Racism,” Daily Bruin (UCLA), May 30, 1986. [BACK]

64. Lacy's mission statement for The Black Madonna, n.d. [BACK]

65. Diana Rico, “The Dark Madonna,” Daily News, May 30, 1986. [BACK]

66. Kathleen Hendrix, “An Emotional Conference on Women, Myth,” Los Angeles Times, sec. 5, Nov. 13, 1985. [BACK]

67. Ibid. [BACK]

68. Karen Rowe, “Introduction to Second Day of Dark Madonna,” transcription of the opening speech for the symposium on November 9, 1985. Also see Hendrix, “Emotional Conference.” [BACK]

69. Hendrix, “Emotional Conference.” [BACK]

70. Rico, “Dark Madonna.” [BACK]

71. This incident is vaguely conveyed in most of the newspaper accounts I read. I have revised my own narrative according to Lacy's recollection of the incident. [BACK]

72. My version of this performance is based on various participants' accounts of the performance collected in Lacy's archive, especially Diana Rico's report for “Artbeat,” KCRW (89.9 FM), aired on June 2, 1986. Lacy also reflects on this performance in two articles: “In the Shadows: An Analysis of The Dark Madonna, ” Whitewalls 25 (Spring 1990): 61–70, and “Fractured Space,” in Art in the Public Interest, ed. Arlene Raven (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). [BACK]

73. Carpenter, “Dark Madonna.” [BACK]

74. Author's interview/conversation with Suzanne Lacy, June 28, 1999, Los Angeles. [BACK]

75. According to John Willett, Brecht's term “gestus” “means both gist and gesture; an attitude or a single aspect of an attitude, expressible in words or actions” (in Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett [New York: Hill and Wang, 1964], 42). [BACK]

76. Rico, “Dark Madonna.” [BACK]

77. In addition to these core collaborators, Lacy also acknowledges the artists she consulted for the project, including Diane Gamboa, Judy Baca, Yen Lu Wong, Senga Nengudi. [BACK]

78. Lippard, “Lacy,” 75. [BACK]

79. Lacy, “Women in Transition,” 6, 9. [BACK]

80. Lacy, “Debated Territory,” 178. [BACK]

81. Ibid. [BACK]

82. Ibid., 179–80. [BACK]

83. Ibid., 182. [BACK]

84. Ibid., 183–84. [BACK]