Suzanne Lacy | Rape Is

Suzanne Lacy

Rape Is

Los Angeles, USA: Self-published, 1972

[unpaginated], 14.4 x 15.2 x .6 cm., softcover

Edition of 1300

A harrowing book about sexual assault that is sadly no less relevant almost fifty years after its initial publication. Originally published in an edition of 300 in 1972, the title was reprinted four years later in an edition of 1000 copies. 

"Lacy tackled the subject of rape and the cultural attitudes that promote it in her first artist’s book, produced in the Women’s Design Program at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. The title riffs on the Happiness Is book genre. Her mentor Sheila Levrant de Bretteville suggested that it open down the middle, the flaps joined with a sticker seal, to make the reader consciously aware of invading a private experience. Another of her teachers, the writer Deena Metzger, supported the development of the text. "

- excerpt from Suzanne Lacy: We Are Here

"[Art undertaken as activism against sexual assault] can be said to have begun quietly, with the creation of an inexpensive little book by Suzanne Lacy called Rape Is. First published in 1972, it marked a leap outward from individual accounts of personal experience toward a far broader definition of rape and a much wider audience. By early 1977, Lacy and several other artists had organized Three Weeks in May, a program of events that produced national headlines. It proved a turning point in Lacy’s career and, although this has not been sufficiently acknowledged, it heralded—perhaps it invented—a new genre of art. The development of “relational aesthetics” and “social practice” art over the past decade and more is significantly indebted to Lacy and her collaborators. Other artists, mainly women, were beginning to engage in similar efforts. But Lacy, drawing on work with Judy Chicago, and also with a wide range of collaborators including, especially, Leslie Labowitz, was singularly influential in forging a union between artists, civic leaders, community organizers, and the mainstream news and entertainment media.

- Nancy Princenthal, Art News, 2019

David Byrne

David Byrne celebrates his 69th birthday today. 

Wim Delvoye for Dummies

Wim Delvoye

Wim Delvoye for Dummies 

Brussels, Belgium: Rectapublishers/Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, 2008

[6] pp., 15 X 15 cm., softcover

Open edition

A "monograph"/artist book, in the style of both the "For Dummies" series, but also children's bath books, with soft, padded, waterproof pages. The title features images from Delvoye's shit machine Cloaca, his tattooed pigs and his ironing board series. 

Originally intended as an unlimited edition, the title is out of print and valued at around $250.00. 

Richard Nonas

Post-Minimalist sculptor Richard Nonas died Tuesday, at the age of eighty-five. 

Initially trained as an anthropologist, Nonas discovered sculpture accidentally, while walking in the park and picking up some wood to throw for his dog to fetch. He crossed two sticks, one in each hand, and realized that there might be infinite ways of doing this and therefore infinite ways to create infinite forms and infinite spaces. 

He discovered that the variations conveyed “strong and specific emotion” and took the pieces home to play around with. “A couple of months later,” Nonas would recall, “a friend came to my apartment and said, ‘Idiot, that’s called art.’”

Prior to this, Nonas studied literature and social anthropology and spent nearly a decade conducting field work among Native American populations in Northern Ontario and the Yukon in Canada, as well as in Mexico, and the American Southwest. 

Nonas became involved with the groundbreaking SoHo artist-run gallery 112 Greene Street, alongside contemporaries including Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Serra, Alan Saret, Tina Girouard, Suzanne Harris, Jene Highstein and Larry Miller. 

His gallery, Fergus McCaffrey, which announced the news, did not indicate a cause of death. 

Beuys

Joseph Beuys was born a hundred years ago today.