Restaging Feminism in Los Angeles: Three Weeks in January (2012): Three Weeks in May (1977)

Restaging Feminism in Los Angeles: Three Weeks in January (2012): Three Weeks in May (1977)内容摘要：

Harriet Curtis Page 1 of 16 Restaging Feminism in Los Angeles: Three Weeks in May (1977) and Three Weeks in January (2012) In 1977, US artists Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz initiated an expanded performance project called Three Weeks in May, in which the numbers of reported rapes in Los Angeles were recorded over a three-week period, with the aim to expose the extent of sexual violence in the city. In 2012, this piece was re-staged as Three Weeks in January for the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival, a celebration of the breadth and diversity of Los Angeles art between 1945 and 1980.1 Accompanied by a range of public talks, performances, press conferences, and workshops, the centrepiece of both projects, the Rape Map, recorded the locations of reported rapes, physically mapping and making visible incidences of sexual violence. [Image 1 - File name: Map02_TWIM_1977.jpg Credit: Three Weeks In May, Suzanne Lacy, 1977. Photo: Suzanne Lacy. Courtesy: LACE.] In each case there was also a second map listing addresses and telephone numbers of rape crisis centres and shelters, since Lacy felt, ‘that a model of positive action should accompany such a graphic revelation of the problem.’2 The restaging of performances from the 1970s, a decade significant in the development of feminist performance, was one of the key strands of Pacific Standard Time (PST). The recent interest in re-performing feminist works has also been explored in Re.Act.Feminism: A Performing Archive, a travelling archive and exhibition project looking at the reception, documentation and reenactment of feminist performance.3 The restaging of Three Weeks in May at the PST festival maintained the geographic location of the project, however the repetition of activist projects such as Three Weeks in May outside the historical context in Harriet Curtis Page 2 of 16 which it was conceived raises questions about how the piece diminishes aesthetically and politically over time. For me, Three Weeks in January elides such criticism; the 2012 project embraced the local and international artistic platform afforded by PST, and reached an extended public through the use of social media. But what does it mean for this piece, a landmark feminist project of the 1970s which fuses art and activism, and mobilises individuals to awareness and public action, to be repeated in 2012? If, in the 1970s, performance was thought to be an ideal form or vehicle for expressing feminist issues, as Moira Roth argues in The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America 19701980,4 then what does the recent trend of re-performance mean for the history of performance art and feminism, today? What does it mean for this piece to be ‘successfully’ repeated and transposed to a new context, given the subject matter on which it focuses? How can attitudes and discourses around rape be changed and measured, if at all? And is the focus on the recent trend of re-performing historical works – particularly in the art world – an effective way of evaluating the outcomes of this piece? This article uses re-performance of feminist works as a platform for thinking more specifically about how such projects can affect and evaluate a change in attitudes towards violence against women. The focus will move away from the suggestion that in re-enactment, feminist performance is somehow diminished, de-politicised, or canonised and therefore bereft of its essential context-specific properties, towards the productive possibilities of restaging as a way of measuring the changing attitudes towards violence against women. Jacqui True, who has written Harriet Curtis Page 3 of 16 about violence against women as being part of a ‘political economy’, in which we can almost predict when violence will rise in different political and economic conditions, suggests that ‘[w]e must be able to measure or count the violence to mobilize the action and resources to end it.’5 In each case the Three Weeks projects respond to the immediate geographic and temporal contexts in which they are positioned, but here I look at how the projects stand in relation to each other and how they might indicate a change in attitudes to violence against women. With the additional consideration of an interim project entitled The Performing Archive (200708) in which Lacy and Labowitz look specifically at the relationship between past and present, between their historical collaborative projects and the perspectives of y