MA Performance Making 2014
Contextual Course: Radical Performance (DR71048A)
Professor Cami Rowe
REFERRING TO SUSAN SONTAG’S REGARDING THE PAIN OF OTHERS WHAT COULD
BE THE EFFICACY OF REPRESENTING RAPE IN THE PERFORMANCES UNTITLED
(RAPE SCENE) BY ANA MENDIETA AND ABLUTIONS BY SUZANNE LACY, JUDY
CHICAGO, SANDRA ORGEL AND AVIVA RAHMANI?
Candidate Number: 33304613
Word Count: 6599
29 April 2014
Goldsmiths, University of London
Student ID: 33304613
Goldsmiths, University of London
Radical Performance, 2014
2
Introduction
Ana Mendieta’s Untitled (Rape Scene) was exhibited as a photograph in the
Hayward Gallery last year, accompanied by a text that described the context of
Mendieta’s live re-enactment of a rape/murder that had happen the month before
at her University’s campus. It wasn’t only the picture that attracted me to the
work, but the context created through narrative, which made the re-enactment
almost tangible.
In this essay I will first set a theoretical frame referring to Susan Sontag’s
Regarding the Pain of Others. 1 While Sontag’s theory is based mainly on
photographs of war, in this essay war is interpreted more broadly as the private
war of rape, in order to apply Sontag’s thoughts to the examination of two
performances in where rape was represented.
These performances were both made in the 1970s, a time in which talking about
rape openly was more of a taboo than it is today. I agree here with Emily
Newman’s point that ‘there are few artists today who tackle the subject of
violence against women or rape. Those that do face dismissal, as many critics
and curators hesitate to take on such a challenging subject. Yet, these works are
important, necessary even.’2
Theoretical Framework
As the main theoretical framework the essay will examine the theory of Susan
Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others by dividing it into three sub-sections, to
create an analysis on which the performance examples could be examined. The
1 Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin Books, 2004)
2 Newman, Emily, ‘Confronting Art about Rape’, http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/wpcontent/
uploads/2012/12/newmantsbpaper.pdf
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work of other theorists will also be drawn on to either question or add force to
Sontag’s thoughts.
For the purposes of this essay I will offer definitions of three of the key terms used
in the title of this essay: efficacy, representation and rape.
Efficacy, according to the Oxford Dictionary Online, is the ‘ability to produce a
desired or intended result.’ 3 Representation, referring to an artwork is ‘The
depiction of someone or something in a work of art.’4 Lastly, a gender distinction
for this term seems hard to avoid as the definition of rape is set as ‘The crime,
typically committed by a man, of forcing another person to have sexual
intercourse with the offender against their will.’5
Besides given these definitions I think that the term image should be
contextualised before moving on. Where in her book Susan Sontag refers to
image as a photograph, in the essay I will use image not solely to describe a
photograph. Throughout the essay the term image can also refer to an image or a
series of images created on stage. 6
The argument to continue with will be that by combining the two main points of
Sontag the efficacy of adding a narrative to a dreadful image can transform the
isolated ‘shock’ position of the image to a more contextualised position of the
image. The image put into the context of a narrative can therefore create a
greater understanding of the situation for its spectator.
3 Oxford Dictionary online, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/efficacy?q=efficacy
4 Ibid, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/representation?q=representation
5 Ibid, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/rape?q=rape
6 For example: The image of the first scene was very powerful.
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Having explained these definitions the following section will outline the first two
principles of image and narrative and research their possible efficacy.
Image - Narrative
According to Sontag, there can still be found a solid foundation in both image and
narrative and its affect on its spectator when seen in the context of the mediasaturated
culture that we live in. Although it may seem that people have become
immune to the imagery thrown at ‘us’, Sontag sets out that the power of an image
is still valuable in the modern era we live in because ‘What the mind feels is still,
as the ancients imagined it, an inner space - like a theatre - in which we picture,
and it is these pictures that allow us to remember.’7
For Sontag, It cannot be true that cruelty will leave us as fully unconcerned and
ignorant people and vicious images can, even though we switch on and off our
screens whenever we want, still effect us because they can shock. Images can
show the dreadful things people do to each other and they can show ‘us’ what
‘they’ have been experiencing; these images they can ‘haunt us’.8 That is merely
why the philosopher Jean Baudrillard finds the role of images ‘highly ambiguous’.9
This ambiguity is in fact the duality of the sole image taken as a static and set
representation of an event, because in that way it shows ‘us’ only one side of this
event and that its function is quite fixed.
7 Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin Books, 2004) p.79
8 Sontag, p.80
9 Baudrillard, Jean, The Spirit of Terrorism (New York, London: Verso: 2002), p. 27
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Only one side of a more complex story will be represented in that way. One side
can indeed make us aware, let us shock and haunt us but will this shock effect
last forever or has this cruelty already become familiar to its spectator? For
Sontag ‘shock can become familiar’,10 but nonetheless she argues for the value of
an image because ‘habituation is not automatic’.11 Especially for people who
believe in a certain event, the representation of this event does not lose its value,
and as she argues, ‘this is even more true for staged representations’.12
Acknowledging the shock effect the representation of pain can cause, cultural
theorist Mieke Bal asks us: ‘Why would it be helpful […] to “image” pain?’’13 There
is a problem with an audience becoming unconcerned about the images they see
and the image as only a method to create aversion and ignorance but Sontag
states that we should not close our eyes to the cruelty that is happening around
us and therefore the essay will now continue to examine the efficacy of the
narrative added to an image in a staged representation.
To make the cruelty understandable, should an image be contextualised? Can a
narrative create this needed context? A narrative can compel its audience to deal
with the work for a longer period of time. While the function of an image might be
only to shock, an added narrative can create a more effective experience through
understanding the pain that has been shown. Sontag states that ‘the real thing
10 Ibid, p. 73
11 Ibid, p. 73
12 Ibid, p.73
13 Bal, Mieke, ‘Imagining Pain’ in Ethics and Images of Pain Edited by Gronstad, A. & Gustafsson, H. (New
York: Routledge, 2012) p. 115
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may not be fearsome enough, and therefore needs to be enhanced; or re-enacted
more convincingly.’14 The possible power of a performance comes here into play.
With bringing in performance as an effective way to represent the pain of others
the complexity of this art form cannot be denied.
Peggy Phelan points out that performance is in the strict sense of its art form nonreproducible,
it carries out that something will be lost after its moment of
presenting as she states that ‘performance’s only life is in the present.’15 Media
scholar Sophie Anne Oliver makes an interesting connection between the loss of
a specific performance after its done and the loss of a specific traumatic event
after it happened. As in her opinion it is impossible to exactly copy a traumatic
event it is also impossible to perfectly reproduce a performance.16
To come back to the importance of a narrative alongside an image I will argue at
this point that a staged representation could in the form of performance therefore
be a bridge between the image, the narrative and its audience, since a
performance can deal with both visual stimuli and a narrative.
Distance and Proximity
The following section explores the distance and proximity between the
represented image and its spectator and will question the effect of dissolving a
certain distance to the subject to let the spectator recognize that the pain of the
other could also possibly be the pain of themselves.
14 Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others (London, Penguin Books, 2004) p. 57
15 Phelan, Peggy, Unmarked the politics of performance (London: Routledge, 1996) p. 14
16 Oliver, Sophie Anne, ‘Trauma, bodies, and performance art: Towards an embodied ethics of seeing’ in
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 24:1 (2010) p. 125
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For Sontag, Distance and Proximity are essential topics when discussing the
images of horror and pain. It seems as if there is a quite strict distinction between
the ‘us’, the spectator, and ‘them’, the suffering. ‘They’ who have had experienced
a certain traumatic event could be explained in this case the ones who have
witnessed this event with proximity, as opposed to the distant one, who can in
addition be stated as ‘us’, who are gazing at or beholding the depiction of this
same traumatic event.17
What gives us the right to be the voyeuristic viewer? If we cannot do anything
against this suffering what could be the need of ‘us’ looking at ‘them’? Watching
someone else’s suffering from a distance can be equal to watching the suffering
from close by, and maybe ‘there’s nothing wrong with standing back and
thinking’.18 But even ‘watching up close – without the mediation of an image – is
still just watching.’19 Watching in this sense is seen as something passive and
needs something to become active. I will discuss activity and passivity in the
function of the watching at a later stage.
To come back to proximity and distance, the women, in the case of rape
representation can been taken as the near ones and the men as the distant ones.
In some cases this is legitimate, but the danger here created is that, as Judith
Butler also argues, the distinction between the individuals connected to this ‘we’
will get lost and before we can even come to a ‘we’ we should first recognize who
17 Sontag, Pain of Others, p. 113
18 Sontag, p. 106
19 Sontag, p. 105
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the ‘I’ is.20 The creation of this ‘we’ is in a way similar to the notion of ‘them’ as a
group and that can create, as Sontag points out, that ‘this’ is something, they, as
spectators, only observe. This can give the spectator satisfaction, because they
are not the ones who are suffering and they will not be the ones being
raped/tortured or murdered. As I argued earlier, there might be a powerful force in
performance as art form to dissolve a certain distance between ‘them’ as
spectator and ‘us’ as performers. In her essay Oliver argues that ‘Performance art
encourages us to consider more self-consciously the role of spectator as one
which is also always complicit in and with the representation, forcing us to
acknowledge the unavoidable ethical ambivalence of seeing the suffering of
others.’21 That the role of the spectator here becomes not simply the ‘outsider’ of
the representation but actually in a way the ‘insider’ as well is something we could
bear in mind.
To make a bridge between ‘us’ and ‘them’ Butler argues that although there is not
one human condition that we share universally, we could see the vulnerability of
our body as a shared common place to start of with. 22We all start life in the
vulnerable body of a baby dependent on others. The acknowledgment of this
human vulnerability can help to define how the recognition of ‘the other’ is in a
way the recognition of the ‘I’ and that this ‘I’ as a human is somehow tied to you.
Sontag points out that we often are unable to see the suffering of someone else
when it is too close23, while recognizing the pain next to ‘you’ might be more
20 Butler, Judith, Precarious Life, The Power of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006) p. 45
21 Oliver, Sophie Anne, ‘Trauma, bodies, and performance art: Towards an embodied ethics of seeing’ in
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 24:1 (2010), p. 123. Original emphasis.
22 Butler, Judith, Precarious Life, The Power of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006) p. 44
23 Sontag, p. 55
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effective in the sense that it could have been ‘I’. I will conclude this section by
arguing that a more proximate approach towards the suffering of the other could
possibly dissolve the created distance.
Active and Passive
In this part of the essay I will discuss the terms active and passive. The role of
activity and passivity focuses mainly on the role of the spectator. What is the
difference between an active and a passive spectator, and should we want to
transform a passive spectator into a more active one?
First of all, we should understand the role of a spectator. In order to understand
the role of a spectator Jacques Rancière points out that ‘being a spectator is not
some passive condition that we should transform into activity. It is our normal
situation. We also learn and teach, act and know, as spectators who all the time
link what we see to what we have seen and said, done and dreamed.’24 However,
to return to Sontag and the question of efficacy: There is something with the word
efficacy that needs an action, an action that will change something. Therefore it is
important that only becoming sentimental and filled with compassion as a
spectator needs to be undone. Sontag states that ‘compassion is an unstable
emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.’25 Exactly this might be
a crucial point when watching the pain of others, where compassion can be
perceived as something effective and necessary. It seems more important ‘what
to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been
24 Rancière, Jacques, The Emancipated Spectator (New York, London: Verso, 2009) p. 17
25 Sontag, p. 90
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communicated.’26 To add force to Sontag’s argument, Mieke Bal explains how
efficacy depends on the difference between affect and pathos. ‘Affect is the realm
of the non-representable. In this it is the opposite of pathos, sentimentality, and all
forms of vicarious suffering artworks can solicit. Pathos dictates emotions; affect
avoids that dictation without allowing indifference.’27 Therefore we might be able
to conclude that if a piece of art only represents and commands certain emotions,
only these more sentimental emotions might stay with its spectator, and these
emotions are not able to create any effect if they are only thrown at the spectators
without the possibility to first recognize or experience pain.
For Sontag, blocking someone’s feelings causes passivity. 28 However, creating
only sympathy is too simple: ‘So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not
accomplices to what caused the suffering.’29 Sympathy according to Sontag might
be even ‘an impertinent – or not inappropriate – response’;30 sympathy should
make place for a more reflective response, in which we can conclude that ‘our
privileges are located on the same map as their suffering.’31 We return again to:
‘us’ versus ‘them’. ‘We’ who reflect on the brutality and don’t feel any connection
to ‘them’ because we don’t feel responsible for ‘their’ suffering: As Sontag states
‘we might prefer not to imagine – be linked to their suffering.’32 To create an
active response we should start with creating the possible link from ‘their’
suffering to ‘our’ suffering and between ‘their’ misery and ‘our’ freedoms of being
26 Sontag, p. 90
27 Bal, p. 134
28 Sontag, p. 91
29 Sontag, p. 91
30 Ibid, p. 91
31 Ibid, 92
32 Sontag, p. 92
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only the spectator of this misery. Sympathy is not the panacea for a major shift
towards emancipation and understanding, but when sympathy transforms into
reflection it can be the first initial spark that starts to glow within the spectator to
acknowledge these issues and become more reflective as Sontag argues. 33
To underline the section on activity and passivity, spectatorship related to
performance, Sophie Anne Oliver states that:
Performance art rejects the distinction between active artist and passive
spectator and forces us a viewers to acknowledge our own role in the
performance of representation; by becoming conscious of the presence of
our own bodies in the act of spectatorship we may by be better equipped
to resist the temptation to turn away from the traumatized body of the
victim; instead, we are called upon to accept this body along with our own,
as part of what it is to be human.34
Through the recognition of his own role as spectator an active position can be
created, as long as the spectator himself is aware that his role is as important as
the role of the artwork. The spectator should thereby acknowledge that not only
the work of art has the function to change something but that the spectator
him/herself can intervene in the work of art as well.
Having set this theoretical foundation, I will now examine two performances and
their potential efficacy in the representation of rape. The essay will first briefly
introduce the time frame in which the performances of Mendieta and Lacy were
made and secondly it will examine and discuss them. Firstly, Untitled (Rape
Scene) (1973) by Ana Mendieta and secondly, Ablutions (1972) by Suzanne
Lacy, Judy Chicago, Sandra Orgel and Aviva Rahmani.35
33 Ibid, p. 92
34 Oliver, p. 128
35 Note: I am fully aware of the fact that I did not see the live performed performances I will examine in this
essay, so when I refer to the analysed performances I refer to the images and the written material about the
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Feminist art and the anti-rape movement in the 1970s.
Art curator Mirjam Westen36 points out in her introduction that in 1968 the
frustration of women towards their minor positions became visible by the many
forms of protests happening around the US and Europe. In the art world women
were ‘being excluded from exhibitions, public collections, subsidies and art
publications.’37 Feminism and feminist artists had from its beginnings not only the
function to create space for women to showcase their work. It also had the
function of establishing ‘ties between women’.38 One of the issues these feminist
protests and art movements wanted to discuss was rape, since this was still an
issue not discussed openly. The result was the anti-rape movement based in Los
Angeles. 39
Having described briefly this time frame, I will now continue by examining the
elements set out in the theoretical framework in Ana Mendieta’s Untitled (Rape
Scene) performed in 1973 at her apartment in Iowa City.
performance and not to the live experienced performance. But as Peggy Phelan writes: ‘Performance’s only
life is the present.’ However, ‘It does no good […] to simply refuse to write about performance because of this
inescapable transformation.’ Phelan, Peggy, Unmarked the politics of performance (London: Routledge,
1996)
36
Westen, Mirjam (ed.) ‘REBELLE. Art and feminism 1969-2009’ is published after the exhibition REBELLE.
Kunst en feminism 1969-2009 (2009), organized by Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem, NL, p. 9
37 Westen, Mirjam (ed.) ‘REBELLE. Art and feminism 1969-2009’ is published after the exhibition REBELLE.
Kunst en feminism 1969-2009 (2009), organized by Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem, NL, p. 9
38 Ibid, p.9
39 This information is based on the documentary made by Lynn Hersman: Hershman, Lynn, !Women Art
Revolution (Zeitgeist Films, 2010)
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Untitled (Rape Scene) 197340
The turning point in art was in 1972, when I realized that my paintings were not real
enough for what I want to image to convey and by real I mean I wanted my images to
have power, to be magic. Ana Mendieta41
In March 1973, University student Sarah Ann Otten was brutally raped and
murdered on the campus of Iowa University by a fellow student of that University.
Ana Mendieta was doing her Masters in Intermedia at that university that year. As
the first performance of a series that linked to this crime, Mendieta re-enacted the
crime scene the following month in her own apartment.42 As curator Charles
Merewether notes: ‘Mendieta had invited friends and fellow students43 to visit her,
and leaving the apartment door slightly open, they entered to find themselves in a
darkened room except for one light over a table where Mendieta lay stretched out
and bound, and stripped from the waist down smeared in blood. On the floor
around her lay broken plates and blood.’44
40 This work by Ana Mendieta was not solely a live performance, as she staged it first for an audience, she
later restaged it to take photographs of it. The images are well chosen in the fact that they are almost photo
documents the police would have make as a crime report. I saw one of the photographs in 2013 in the
Hayward Gallery in London and especially what attracted me was the text besides it where the murder event
and the performance were described. For more information on the performativity of the documented
performance I would recommend reading: Philip Auslander, ‘The performativity of Performance
Documentation’. (PAJ, 2006)
41 Mendieta, Ana, ‘Artist statement. Undated. In “a selection of statements and notes.” (Michigan, Eastern
University Press, 1988, p.70) used in Merewether, Charles, ‘From Inscription to Dissolution: An essay on
Expenditure in the Work of Ana Mendieta.' In the Catalogue of The exhibition Ana Mendieta by Centro
Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, In collaboration with the Fundacio Antoni Tapies,
Barcelona 1997, p. 90
42 Information mainly based on personal notes after my Hayward Gallery visit, 2013
43 Merewether writes that she invited friends and fellow classmates, while some other sources state that she
only invited her classmates. This is uncertain, but the fact was in any case that only people Ana knew were
invited.
44 Merewether, p. 90
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Imagine being Mendieta’s classmate (or friend) and knowing the story of the rape
and murder that happened last month on campus. Imagine you are invited by her
to come over to her place to see a performance.
But, what you did not expect to see was this:
[Figure 1] 45
By entering her room, you find her, bent over at a table, half naked and with
traces of blood everywhere. The image Mendieta here precisely created was
made with an ‘as if it was a real’ event that had happened there; a fictionalised
image, with a real narrative closely attached to it. As Jane Blocker writes, ‘Ana
Mendieta had a great capacity for narrative, a great interest in appropriating,
telling, and redirecting stories.’46 In this case, she used a narrative that was close
to her witnessing audience. As Sontag pointed out that an image could shock,
45 Figure 1: Ana Mendieta Untitled (Rape Scene) 1973:
http://thestereoscopiceye.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/anamedietarape.jpg
46 Blocker, Jane, Where is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 1999) p. 113
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this is what it did, as Mendieta said in an interview, ‘it really jolted them.’47
However, to emphasize the narrative power used by Mendieta, it not only ‘jolted
them’ but ‘they all sat down, and started talking about it.’48 The narrative in this
case and the image created can almost not been tear apart from each other. For
Sontag, a narrative can create more understanding and the essay argued that the
adding of a narrative to an image could do the same. What does the narrative do
in this case with the image? As Emily Newman49 explains, Mendieta re-enacted a
story based on facts, the work itself is a fictionalised version, what creates a
certain distance. Exactly this distance, created by recreating the event,
paradoxically creates a position in which the viewer can feel more comfortable to
reflect on it. However, we must not misunderstand the term distance: Mendieta
dissolves the distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’, through restaging the event of the
rape, as discussed above.
Where Mendieta takes, on the one hand, the distance away by inviting her
audience to her own apartment and let them witness from close-up this
representation of rape, on the other hand, this distance appears by the fact that
this image is not ‘real’. Precisely this distance creates the proximity that I will
argue Sontag is looking for, when she argues that sympathy should transform into
reflection. The use of something ‘real’ that had happened, as Merewether50 points
out, was central for Mendieta and her art at this time; what she made was a
47 Merewether, Charles, ‘From Inscription to Dissolution: An essay on Expenditure in the Work of Ana
Mendieta.' In the Catalogue of The exhibition Ana Mendieta by Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea,
Santiago de Compostela, In collaboration with the Fundacio Antoni Tapies, Barcelona 1997 p. 127 note 11
48 Ibid, p. 127 note 11
49 Newman, Emily, ‘Confronting Art about Rape’, http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/wpcontent/
uploads/2012/12/newmantsbpaper.pdf
50 Merewether, p. 92
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personal response on the things that happened, and the demand of participation
of her audience was an important thing for her.
To create a form of participation for her audience, Mendieta did not explain
herself; in fact, as she said: ‘I didn’t move. I stayed in the position about an hour.’
Therefore, the audience, as Maggie Nelson suggests, were not asked, ‘Why are
you still looking?’ but ‘How will you participate in this?’51
To make a bridge from the spectator’s point of view to the naked bloodied body of
the artist: it is interesting that although it is staged as a violent crime the actual
body of the artist is not harmed. The use of blood can be seen in a more ritualistic
way to create, as Judith Butler suggested, a common place to face the human
vulnerability.52 Mendieta, as Donald Kuspit explains: ‘experiences the body as a
sacred place: a kind of cathedral in which consciousness can soar’,53 and by
revealing, without any obstructions, the female body in its most vulnerable
position of just being raped and murdered the sense of the presence of the body
of the performer is highly sensitive. The symbolic, almost ritualistic, use of blood
in this piece could be seen as a metaphor for life and death. Blood, for Mendieta
is ‘a very powerful magic thing. I don’t see it as a negative force.’54 We can see
blood as the liquid that keeps us alive, that every single second of our life is
51 Nelson, Maggie, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (New York, London: W. W. Norton Ltd. 2011) p. 79
52
Butler, Judith, Precarious Life, The Power of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006) p. 45
53 Kuspit, Donald, ‘Ana Mendieta, Autonomous Body’ in Catalogue of The exhibition Ana Mendieta by Centro
Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, In collaboration with the Fundacio Antoni Tapies,
Barcelona 1997 p. 39
54 Wilson, Judith, ‘Ana Mendieta Plants Her Garden in The Village Voice (1980) quoted in, Merewether,
Charles, ‘From Inscription to Dissolution: An essay on Expenditure in the Work of Ana Mendieta.' In the
Catalogue of The exhibition Ana Mendieta by Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de
Compostela, In collaboration with the Fundacio Antoni Tapies, Barcelona 1997, p. 90
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running inside our body, but blood is also a link to crime and to violence and to
death.
Having discussed the various elements of the performance, it is now possible to
conclude that the desired result of the representation of rape in Untitled (Rape
Scene) can be best described as an attempt to let the audience communicate
about what had happened in their society. Mendieta created a frightening
representation of the rape/murder case that happened within their close university
community. However, the representation was not the ‘reality’, but a depiction of
the artist, and therefore it possibly created an open space where the spectators
could communicate about what they saw. The efficacy of the added narrative to
the image worked in this case, since the narrative existed before the image was
even created. Mendieta succeeded in creating another form of spectatorship, one
that demanded its audience to react. However as an artist the question remains:
Would an audience who did not know Ana Mendieta and did not know about this
crime event react in the same way?
The second performance I will examine is the collaborative performance
Ablutions made by Judy Chicago, Suzanne Lacy, Sandra Orgel and Aviva
Rahmani, performed in a studio space in Venice, California in 1972.
Ablutions 197255
55 Descriptions of this performance and other relevant information is loosely is based on the existing pictures
of the performance [See figure 2-4 in the appendix], the following interview: Lacy, Suzanne, ‘Oral history
interview with Suzanne Lacy’, interviewed by Moira Roth, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution,
Mar.16-Sept.27, 1990 http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-suzanne-lacy-
12940and, Chicago, Judy, Trough The Flower, my struggle as a woman artist (New York: Doubleday &
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As part of the well-known artist Judy Chicago’s Feminist Art Program at Fresno
State College (Fresno, US) Suzanne Lacy was interested in creating art mainly
referring to violence against women. Therefore she started recording stories of
women who had been raped. These stories were the basis for their collaborative
piece Ablutions.
The approximate one-and-a-half-hour performance started when the audience
entered the studio space where they could sit on the floor. The pre-recorded
stories of seven women telling in extreme detail their rape experience were as a
soundscape the core part of the work. The audio was the only ‘text’ used in the
performance and marked both beginning and end of the performance. In the
performance were three metal bath tubes, next to each other set on the floor, all
filled with a different liquid material; one tub was filled with eggs, the other one
with blood and the third one with mud. The floor of the space was covered with
broken eggshells, piles of rope, piles of chain and kidneys. After a period of
adjustment to the audio and the space, a nude woman was led into the space by
another woman dressed in a white t-shirt and jeans and placed on a chair where
the dressed woman started to fully bind her body. She was followed by another
nude woman who started a ritual of cleaning herself, first in the tub filled with
eggs, and when she moved into the second one, filled with blood another nude
woman went in to the mud tub. From the blood tub, the first woman went into the
mud tub and was taken out by two other women, wrapped in a sheet, tied up as a
corpse and left behind. Alongside the audio, the binding and the cleaning some
Company, Inc., 1975) p. 217-219 and Suzanne Lacy’s personal website: http://www.suzannelacy.com/earlyworks/#/
ablutions/
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19
women nailed down kidneys on the white wall, two others were mirroring each
other while decoration themselves with chains. At the point where the woman on
the chair was fully bonded with white rope the two women dressed in jeans and tshirts
started to tie up the whole space, resulting in a sort of spider web, and
when they finished they left the space while the tape recording ending with the
following sentence looped: ‘I felt so helpless, so powerless, there was nothing I
could do but lay there and cry softly.’56
The narratives used in this performance are presented as real stories and are told
the audience trough the medium of sound, no direct image is related to these
stories, these women and the event of rape they are referring to. Thus, the
imagery being presented in the performance space appears in this sense as more
metaphorical. The washing of the body in various symbolic liquids is in this case
more the symbolic representation of the stories heard, and while the narrative of
these recordings seems to be raw and genuine the image presented on stage
shows something else. Referring to the theory of adding a narrative to an image,
there is a potential power in this performance since the narrative and image are in
a way two separate things, and by interweaving them the images start to connect
with the narrative. However, this can be seen also as more negative in the sense
that the narrative here creates the ‘haunting’ effect of an image referring to
Sontag’s theory, since the narrative is only ‘there’ on tape and the context of
these stories is not given by the created images.
56
Chicago, Judy, Through The Flower, my struggle as a woman artist (New York: Doubleday & Company,
Inc., 1975) p. 219
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In contrast to what is stated before, the power of the recorded ‘real’ voice is
argued by theatre lecturer Deirde Heddon as she states ‘that there is a difference
between an enacted voice and a real voice put on stage, where ‘bringing the ‘real’
onto the stage serves as a powerful reminder that outside the theatre the real
world, in all its inequality and violence continues unabated.’57 Regarding this, it
might be that the function of the recorded voices in the performance actually did
function as the added narrative to a more complex series of images full of
metaphors, where the voices functioned as the ‘making understandable’ of the
narrative.
However, the use of the narrative in this performance is a quite complex one,
since the narrative actually includes seven different narratives and these different
stories are in this way compiled into one narrative. Art critic Meiling Cheng
pointed out that ‘Ablutions downplayed differences among women, generalizing
the experience of rape. That is not to discount the testimonies of the seven
women whose reactions were audiotaped, but rather to stress that the
performance spoke for the women who participated, in an effort to communicate
with a specific art audience.’58 This raises the question; if the wish of these artists
was to communicate with its specific audience, did they succeed? Suzanne Lacy
said in an interview59 that it was an ‘evocative’ piece of work and that the
audience were ‘really stunned’ after seeing this. They had never been confronted
with such detailed information, and some people even immediately ran to the
57 Heddon, Deirde, Autobiography and Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2008) p. 133
58 Meiling Cheng quoted in Irish, Sharon, Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between (Minneapolis: The University of
Minnesota Press, 2010) p. 36
59 Lacy, Suzanne, ‘Oral history interview with Suzanne Lacy’, interviewed by Moira Roth, Archives of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Mar.16-Sept.27, 1990
http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-suzanne-lacy-12940
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Radical Performance, 2014
21
door when the performance was done. This shock-reaction can, of course, be a
good first reaction if it later transformed into something else. However if the
audience wanted to leave immediately the efficacy is doubtful.
Ablutions can, in another way, be seen as the healing process, the aftermath of
the rape event for the rape victim. Sontag asks us: ‘what would they have to say
to us? ‘We’ – this ‘we’ is everyone who has never experienced anything like what
they went through – don’t understand.’60 Agreeing with Sontag that ‘we’ might not
be able to fully understand Arlene Raven points out the following: ‘I had been
raped only a week before my visit (to Venice, California). I told my story as it was
recorded for Ablutions. I not only had a friend silently listening to my pain, but I
participated in a process of feminist art which is based on uncovering, speaking,
expressing, making public the experience of women.’61 In the sharing of these
private and intimate narratives the metaphorical use of washing the body as form
of ritualization can be seen as ‘a sense of distance that is crucial to the survivor’s
healing.’62 Therefore, this so-called distance should be seen from the perspective
of the victim, who distanced herself from the event through telling and recording
the story that created a possibility for its audience to be confronted with these
stories.
60 Sontag, p. 113
61 Raven, Arlene, ‘We did not move from theory we moved to the sorest wounds*’ in the Catalogue of: RAPE,
exhibition held Nov13-Dec13, 1985 at the Hoyt L. Sherman Gallery of The Ohio State University Gallery of
Fine Art, Columbus, Ohio. Copyright 1985 by The Ohio State University p. 11
* (Paraphrases from a 1979 essay, ‘Rape: The Power of Consciousness,’ by Susan Griffin)
62 Irish, Sharon, Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2010) p.
34
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Sharon Irish mentions that in Ablutions the spectators are included within the
performance by making them listeners to these genuine testimonies while
witnessing the embodiment of the symbolic aftermath of rape’s healing process
the role of the spectator is hence the role of the witness, not the witness of the
rape itself, but the witness of the staged meaning of the aftermath of the rape
event. However, where the embodied images may represent the ritual of the
cleaning and the healing, the narratives are in that sense not linked to the
aftermath, but to the event of the rape itself. As Irish points out: ‘we must feel the
anxiety and pain of rape, but to heal afterwards, we must not be overwhelmed by
the trauma.’63 If we take Irish words into account and taken that this is what the
artists meant to say with their performance, then why does the performance end
with the powerful last sentence ‘I felt so helpless, so powerless there was nothing
I could do but lay here and cry softly’?64 It seems that, coming back to what I
pointed out earlier, the narrative creates here the ‘haunting image’ effect, and to
come back to Sontag, who claims that if the function of an image of cruelty is only
to haunt us, they should do it in order to stop us forgetting what people can do to
each other.65 On the contrary, she also stated that the narrative can make us
understand, and that does not seem entirely the case of this performance.
Having discussed the various elements of the performance, we now have the
possibility to conclude by pointing out that the effect of the representation of rape
in Ablutions had a big ‘shock’ effect on its audience, who had never maybe been
confronted with something like this before. Ablutions recognized that after the
63 Irish, In Between, p. 34
64 Chicago, Trough the Flower, p. 219
65 Sontag, Pain of Others, p. 102
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pain of rape we must heal afterwards. 66 Although, acknowledging this, the
performance seemed to be more effective regarding the victims and the healing
of their pain then the affect on the audience to reflect on the pain of the other.
Conclusion
In this essay my attempt was to address the question of the efficacy of
representing rape in the performances Untitled (Rape Scene) and Ablutions by
taking some of the main arguments Susan Sontag made in her book Regarding
the Pain of Others. Coming back to the main question of this essay, I argue that
the effect on its spectators is different in both performances.
With Ablutions the artists wanted to create a piece that would be evocative.
However, the effect seemed bigger on the victims, who told their stories, then on
the audience who were mostly just shocked by the performance. Instead of
creating a better understanding the main effect seemed to be that some of the
spectators left immediately.
In contrast, the effect of Untitled (Rape Scene) on its audience seemed to be
more reflective. Mendieta created a strong image that was linked to the already
existing narrative in her community and gave her audience the time and space to
be confronted with it. Where the first effect was maybe the shock of this reenactment,
the second, more powerful one, was that the audience sat down and
started to talk about what they had seen. Important to note is that the created
time, place and real bodily encounter between spectator and performer were
necessary to create this effect.
66 Referring to a quote of Sharon Irish earlier, Irish, p. 34
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So, in other words I argue that besides giving a context, through a narrative, an
added time, space and a real encounter should be given to an audience in order
to create this wider understanding. Furthermore, this time, space and encounter
should give the spectator the possibility not only to observe, but also to relate to
the created image and narrative.
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Goldsmiths, University of London
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‘REBELLE. Art and feminism 1969-2009’, ed. by Westen, Mirjam is published
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Student ID: 33304613
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26
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Student ID: 33304613
Goldsmiths, University of London
Radical Performance, 2014
27
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Films
!Women Art Revolution, dir. By Lynn Hershman (Zeitgeist Films, 2010)
Appendix
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[Ablutions 1972, Figures 2-4, used from: http://www.suzannelacy.com/ablutions]
[Figure 2]
[Figure 3]
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[Figure 4]