Acting Like Women: Performance Art of the Woman's Building

The Woman's Building, on Spring Street near Chinatown, was arguably the first art space to open in downtown Los Angeles. Named after the Woman's Building at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, it quickly became notorious internationally as a center of women's culture. When it closed its doors in 1991 it was calling itself "the oldest feminist institution in history." Cheri Gaulke, as graduate student and artist, then teacher and administrator, was essential to the development of the Woman's Building. Here she puts her finger on why it was so important a catalyst of change for art and for women: its deliberate fusion of art and life. —Eds.

When I was growing up I used to make my bed with precision movements, imagining that somehow the boy I wanted to marry was watching my performance and judging it. In the magazines and on television, we see women posing while mopping the kitchen floor, and we too learn to pose—as women. We played house only to grow up to get the starring role. Performance is not a difficult concept to us. We're on stage every moment of our lives. Acting like women. Performance is a declaration of self—who one is—a shamanistic dance by which we spin into other states of awareness, remembering new visions of ourselves. And in performance we found an art form that was young, without the tradition of painting or sculpture. Without the traditions governed by men. The shoe fit, and so, like Cinderella, we ran with it.

Judy Chicago introduced women to performance in the first feminist art programs at Fresno State, and later at California Institute of the Arts. Consciousness Raising (CR) was the process by which each artist's content was discovered; often, exploring this personal experience was painful. Performance was a way of exposing the raw material, transforming it, and healing oneself. Much of this early work was crude and done within the context of the classroom.

Womanhouse (1972, Los Angeles) was an environmental artwork collaboratively created by women in the CalArts program. It brought women's performance art out of the school environment, into the public sphere, communicating through the media to a national audience. For one month, the artists took over a whole house, filling it with images that ranged from elaborate theatrical fantasy to simple real-time activities (reflecting current mainstream art concerns about the relationship between art and life). The shared intent of these different works was to make public women's private lives within the home. Each evening, packed audiences watched while a woman scrubbed the floor, applied make-up or enacted dramatic characterizations.

As in Consciousness Raising, the first step for these early performances was to make private experience public. In 1972 Judy Chicago, Suzanne Lacy, Sandra Orgel and Aviva Rahmani put together a performance about rape entitled Ablutions. From the personal experience of several women, recounted during the piece, a collective, thus political, reality was portrayed. Ablutions explored both internal and external constrictions on women through rape—how we are prisoners of our fear as well as the social system that supports rape. A woman was bound to the chair and then tied to everything in the room. In the end, the entire set was immobilized and the last line of the audio repeated: "I felt so helpless all I could do was lie there and cry." The piece took place at a time when there was little social information about rape in the culture. The powerful images shocked the art audience, who, like the general population, did not yet understand women's experience of violence. Ablutions, strong as a contemporary performance, as well as in its revelation of women's hidden experience, paired an avant-garde form with feminist political vision, contributing to the beginning of the anti-violence movement.

In 1973 the Woman's Building opened. The organizers, Judy Chicago, Sheila de Bretteville and Arlene Raven, saw it as a physical space that women would occupy and bring alive—a vision conducive to performance. Women performance artists from across the nation came to share their work, many using the supportive atmosphere to try out new ideas. Eleanor Antin did her first performance before an audience at the Woman's Building in 1974. Before her premiere in New York, she presented for the first time her autobiographical work as the Ballerina on her way to the Big Apple. Helen Harrison performed making strawberry jam—from growing to picking to canning—an early performance of the large-scale ecologically concerned work she did with her husband Newton.

The Woman's Building also provided a place where important connections could be made. In 1974, women in the Feminist Studio Workshop (FSW) and performance artists in the community organized a month of performance art that included performances, lectures and the first documentary exhibition of West Coast women's performance art. The following year, the first national conference on women's performance art was held at the Woman's Building. At the conference, Linda Montano spent three days blind, patches on her eyes, and first met composer Pauline Oliveros, who performed sonic meditation for the conference. These meetings provided dialogues and collaborations that enriched the performance community. Others who performed or lectured at the Woman's Building are Bonnie Sherk, Nancy Buchanan, Barbara Smith, Martha Wilson, Yvonne Rainer, Joan Jonas, Rachel Rosenthal, Lynn Hershman, Sharon Shore, Barbara Hammer, Mary Fish, Martha Rosler, Ulrike Rosenbach and Motion, a women's performance collective.

Perhaps the most significant contribution of the Woman's Building to performance is through its educational programs. Out of the Feminist Studio Workshop (FSW), the first independent feminist art-educational institution, a new aesthetic has emerged, informed by the collective experience of the feminist educational process. This aesthetic has moved beyond simple theatricality and incorporates elements of networking, working within a real-life environment, and communicating with a mass audience. Performance content reflects a wide range of topics, such as women's participation in the work force, sexuality, relationships and violence, all recreating our definition of women. With voices intensely personal, as well as broadly political, women performance artists are establishing women's reality as a cultural fact.

This work has affected both women's and men's art, which can be charted through mainstream trends in autobiographical, erotic and social art. Very little writing has been done about this historical movement in art (and what has, has been done mostly by the performance artists themselves). This article and its accompanying exhibition at the Woman's Building are the first attempt at looking at the performance art of the Woman's Building as a body of work.

In the second year of the FSW, performance artist Suzanne Lacy, who had been a student in feminist art programs at Fresno and CalArts, was invited to join the staff. She describes the next three years as a "hothouse." Unlike other art schools where students' work is compared and molded to fit the mainstream, the FSW was a "room of their own," a nonstifling environment where women's work was allowed a maturation period. The staff put much of its creative energy into teaching, nurturing new and distinct forms. Out of that embryonic space came autobiographical images and fantasy characters. Fantasy was a step in taking personal power, and the characters reflected women's images of themselves in the world. Eleanor Antin established characters as a legitimate concern in art with her creation of four characters: the Ballerina, the King, the Black Movie Star and the Nurse. At the Woman's Building, Nancy Angelo created a nun, Sister Angelica Furiosa, as a symbol of her search for order in a community of sisters. I created Cinderella, who runs from male-identification to self-definition in feminist community, and finds herself continually running, in a constant state of transformation.

Ritual performance has figured significantly in the educational programs of the Woman's Building. Ritual takes the audience on a journey of catharsis and self-healing. In 1975 Cheryl Swannack, Marguerite Elliot, and Anne Phillips presented a healing ritual, From Victim to Victory. It was the exorcism of an experience of being brutalized by the police. In Cancer Madness (1977) Jerri Allyn transformed her studio into a hospital ward and confined herself to bed for a week. Her purpose was to heal herself of her death-wish related to her mother's cancer and grandmother's madness. She created a performance structure that allowed her community to participate in her move toward health, and presented information about health issues. Evening bedside events included a poetry reading, psychic healings and a lecture on the politics of cancer treatment.

Anne Gauldin, who was studying prehistoric goddess worship in the FSW, began doing rituals in her backyard and invited other women to participate. Here ritual became a community exploration and expression of female spirituality—a lost religion once officiated by women. Gauldin's concern with spirituality combined with my own work about the religious repression of female sexuality in a collaboration entitled The Malta Project. Gauldin and I traveled thousands of miles to the Mediterranean island of Malta, where they brought together an international group of artists, Maltese people and government officials to participate in a ritual performance in two prehistoric temples of goddess worship.

Consciousness Raising has affected the form and structure of performance art as well as the content of the works. The basic structure of CR is equal time and equal space for each woman to share her experience and define herself. Arlene Raven defined the function of feminist art, "to raise consciousness, invite dialogue, and transform culture." Performance artists have taken the invitation to dialogue literally by creating CR-like "performance structures" in which others could participate.

One way this has been done is by bringing people into the space of the Woman's Building. Barbara Smith brought various older people who frequented a nearby city park into the Grandview Gallery at the Woman's Building, while she took their place in the park. At another time the entire third-floor performance space was transformed into a carnival-like setting for College Art Association convention participants. Performance artists lined the walls in "booths." Activities included Nancy Angelo's nun swinging from the rafters; a kitchen confessional where you could confess food over-indulgences to housewife Mary Yakutis; Helen Harrison reading her meditations on California rivers while a woman in a wetsuit graffitied the parking lot; Laurel Klick auctioning personal items that had been in her house when she was raped; Vanalyne Green in a "portrait booth" revealing her impressions of the buyer's personality; Mother Art hanging a laundry maze; me as Cinderella occasionally dashing through, and Barbara Smith's "kissing booth," where you could apply various colored lipsticks and kiss her body painted white like a canvas.

In other work, this participatory structure has been applied to a larger community, moving out of the space of the Woman's Building. When Suzanne Lacy had her first one-woman show, she called it One Woman Shows, and asked other women to participate with her by forming a word-of-mouth community the month before the exhibition. On opening night she performed for three women, and the community previously formed made its appearance through performances that evening. One Woman Shows was a visual expression of how our community is formed. It was also a portrayal of the Woman's Building's intent to democratize the artmaking process by broadening the definition of art to include a diverse women's culture, created by artists and non-artists alike.

In 1977 Lacy produced a series of events entitled Three Weeks in May, expanding the performance format to include the space of the entire city and three weeks in time. She documented rape in L.A. on a large public map, and enlisted the participation of artists and nonartists in bringing feminist issues to the attention of government officials. She demonstrated that rape is not indigenous to certain ages, classes, or races of women or geographical area, but strikes women everywhere, at any time, for any "reason."

During the five years since Ablutions, performance had matured through feminist education into sophisticated forms that provided for real social change. CR had moved simple personal expression and political analysis into a concern with how this information could create change. During the same time, performance had focused on creating forms for the transformation of mass consciousness.

In recent years, several exciting collaborative performance groups have developed out of the educational programs, groups that continue to explore the boundary between art, education, and political action. The Waitresses and Mother Art are issue-related collaborations in which the artists work out of the reality of their own social situation. The Waitresses was founded in 1977 by Jerri Allyn and Anne Gauldin with women who came together through the FSW. Their first series of events, Ready to Order?, included performing in restaurants and presenting panel discussions and workshops on issues around work. The Waitresses bring feminist issues to a truly general audience—unsuspecting restaurant employers, employees and clientele—in a performance style that is accessible and fun. Through exploring their personal experiences as waitresses, they have found the waitress is a symbol for women's role in society, as nurturer, slave and sex object. The group is flexible and sometimes expands to include many other women as in The All-City Waitress Marching Band, that performed in a parade. In addition, they have performed in galleries, at conferences and fundraising events. Currently the core group in composed of Jerri Allyn, Anne Gauldin and Chutney Gunderson. Mother Art are mothers and artists who first met in the FSW. By "cleaning up" the banks and performing in laundromats, they bring the values of mothering into the public sphere. Mother Art is composed of Gloria Hajduk, Helen Million-Ruby, Suzanne Siegal and Laura Silagi.

An Oral Herstory of Lesbianism was a play conceived by Terry Wolverton, and collaboratively created out of the life stories of 13 lesbians: Jerri Allyn, Nancy Angelo, Leslie Belt, Chutney Gunderson, Brook Hallock, Sue Maberry, Louise Moore, Arlene Raven, Catherine Stifter, Cheryl Swannack, Christine Wong, Terry Wolverton and myself. Like The Waitresses and Mother Art, Oral. . . addressed important personal as well as political issues as interpreted by the people who experience that reality.

Feminist Art Workers—Nancy Angelo, Vanalyne Green, Laurel Klick and myself—directly express the philosophy of feminist education through performance art. Our work grows out of a deeply collaborative relationship and finds new forms to respond to continually changing political situations. We have performed a float in the streets, conversations with strangers on the telephone, airplane and bus tours—each time functioning as facilitators of a transformation with their audience/participants. The Feminist Art Workers' form-language has developed around a constantly changing responsiveness to women's needs.

Leslie Labowitz has contributed significantly to the communication of feminist concerns to a mass public audience through her exploration of the "media performance." In Record Companies Drag Their Feet she collaborated with Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) to draw media attention to record companies' use of violent images of women in advertising. Staging the event beneath a billboard on Sunset Blvd., Labowitz created the piece to be seen by the general public through television news coverage. She scripted the event, including offensive album covers, roosters portraying record company executives and women carrying protest signs to fit the design of a news broadcast. Her concern with the media performance was to portray women's political information that could pass the distorting mechanism of mass media.

Labowitz and Lacy collaborated in another piece for the media, In Mourning and In Rage. . ., a massive public mourning for the victims of the Hillside Strangler. Sensational media coverage of the Hillside Strangler murders was portraying women as random and inevitable victims without political analysis of violence against women. In Mourning. . . presented statistics about the pervasiveness of violence against women in all its forms and presented positive images of women fighting back. After this piece, Lacy and Labowitz cofounded Ariadne: A Social Art Network, as a conceptual framework for women artists, women in the media, government officials and the feminist movement to continue works on violence against women. The Incest Awareness Project is the most recent collaboration of this ongoing performance structure.

Feminist performance art has become an integrated part of life at the Woman's Building—used as a tool for education, community organizing and mass-media communication. It marks the flair with which all activities are carried out. At an opening, guests were surprised to see a middle-aged woman serving as a bathroom attendant—a performance student, Betty Gordon, carrying on the charade. When confronted with the storage problem for Kate Millets' Naked Lady sculpture, an eight-foot-tall Amazon of papier-maché, Sue Maberry and I came up with a plan: to hoist the Naked Lady to the roof of the Building as a beacon of women's power to the community. With the collaboration of media artist Labowitz, the hoisting was made into a media event, communicating the "performance" to L.A. and the world through a front-page photograph in the Los Angeles Times. Women's lives, the politics of their situation, how change can be implemented—all these are the material of performance at the Woman's Building, material that is shaping the direction of contemporary performance by bringing art/life/politics together to express a feminist vision of the future.

This article originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Fall/Winter 1980.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002