Suzanne Lacy, network art without the support of the Internet

Sorority, collaborative art, collective intelligence, networking ... these are current concepts of feminist discourse on which Suzanne Lacy has been working for half a century and which are nurtured by the Unavoidable

exhibition

, the first exhibition of the American artist in Spain, which opens this Friday at the Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art (CAAC).

• Photogallery: The Collaborative Art of Suzanne Lacy

Suzanne Lacy (Wasco, California, 75 years old) —who cannot be present at the inauguration due to mobility restrictions imposed during the pandemic— presents a retrospective in Seville with 17 projects carried out between 1973 and 2019. They are multi-channel installations,

videos, paintings, photographs and documentation that show the working method of Lacy, a student of Judy Chicago, the pioneer of feminist art in the United States, who led the way with her work

(1979), which it can now be seen at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

“In the selection we have included

(1979), a

promoted by Suzanne Lacy and Linda Pruess the day before the opening of

by Judy Chicago, and which consisted of feminists from all over the world celebrating dinners in their cities in honor of outstanding women.

There were more than 200 dinners with about 2,000 participants, which Lacy was pointing to with a red triangle on a large world map, next to which he placed the telegrams sent by the different groups ”, explained this Thursday Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes, director of the CAAC and commissioner of the sample.

Although Lacy's work has been seen before in Spain in group exhibitions and in 2010 she performed the

at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid

never before had a solo exhibition of the work of this pioneer of networking been held, but without the support of the internet.

Precisely, the documentation of the

(1973) is the first that receives the visitor in this exhibition, open until March 14, 2021. “It is a collaborative work in which the artist involved the public to show how humans are trapped in our own biology.

She placed calf kidneys in a net, sewed them and attached them to a person with a thread that she tied to a part of her naked body, so that it was tied to the spectators, who could manipulate her movements and vice versa ”, he commented the commissioner.

Lacy explores the aging process of women in works such as

(1976), which gives the exhibition its title, in which she speaks of the fear of old age and the sexist language of the media, based on information that appeared in A newspaper in Los Angeles, the city where he works, in which to tell about the rehabilitation of the Biltmore Hotel they compare it to the

that an old widow has to get.

The invisibility and fears of older women is also the theme that he addresses in

(1983-1984): a gathering of 154 ladies over 65 dressed in white and seated at tables distributed along the shore. from La Jolla beach (California), in which the participants talk about their loss of social and political visibility.

Violence against women is another of the recurring themes in his career, as can be seen in one of his best known works,

(1977), in which during that time he was marking with a red stamp, in a large plane from the city of Los Angeles, all the reported violations, or

(2014-2015), a social project in which 1,500 people gathered in the ring of a bullring in Quito (Ecuador) and different men they read stories written by women who had suffered gender violence.

The exhibition, produced by the CAAC after the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Sfmoma) and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts jointly held a major retrospective of the artist in 2019, includes an unpublished work:

It is an installation that talks about the working class in the United States and in which he reproduces the room of his father, Larry Lacy, who appears in a video next to a B-17 like the one he piloted during World War II and in the one that the man tells, amused, that the fight is over because his squad bombed a German Pilsner brewery and "as they ran out of beer, the Germans surrendered."