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This book on Stephen Willats pulls together key strands of his
practice and threads them through histories of British cybernetics,
experimental art, and urban design. For Willats, a cluster of
concepts about control and feedback within living and machine
systems (cybernetics) offered a new means to make art relevant. For
decades, Willats has built relationships through art with people in
tower blocks, underground clubs, middle-class enclaves, and
warehouses on the Isle of Dogs, to investigate their current
conditions and future possibilities. Sharon Irish’s study
demonstrates the power of Willats’s multi-media art to catalyze
communication among participants and to upend ideas about
“audience” and “art.” Here, Irish argues that it is artists
like Willats who are now the instigators of social transformation.
Often controversial and sometimes even shocking to audiences, the
work of California-based artist Suzanne Lacy has challenged viewers
and participants with personal accounts of traumatic events,
settings that require people to assume uncomfortable positions,
multisensory productions that evoke emotional as well as
intellectual responses, and even flayed lambs and beef kidneys.
Lacy has experimented with ways to claim the power of mass media,
to use women’s consciousness-raising groups as a performance
structure, and to connect her projects to lived experiences. The
body and large groups of bodies are the locations for her lifelike
art, revealing the aesthetics of relationships among
people. In this critical examination of Suzanne Lacy, Sharon
Irish surveys Lacy’s art from 1972 to the present, demonstrating
the pivotal roles that Lacy has had in public art, feminist theory,
and community organizing. Lacy initially used her own body—or
animal organs—to visually depict psychological states or social
conditions in photographs, collages, and installations. In the late
1970s she turned to organizing large groups of people into art
events—including her most famous work, The Crystal Quilt, a 1987
performance broadcast live on PBS and featuring hundreds of women
in Minneapolis—and pioneered a new genre of public
art. Irish investigates the spaces between art and life, self
and other, and the body and physical structures in Lacy’s
multifaceted artistic projects, showing how throughout her
influential career Lacy has created art that resists racism,
promotes feminism, and explores challenging human relationships.
Often controversial and sometimes even shocking to audiences, the
work of California-based artist Suzanne Lacy has challenged viewers
and participants with personal accounts of traumatic events,
settings that require people to assume uncomfortable positions,
multisensory productions that evoke emotional as well as
intellectual responses, and even flayed lambs and beef kidneys.
Lacy has experimented with ways to claim the power of mass media,
to use women's consciousness-raising groups as a performance
structure, and to connect her projects to lived experiences. The
body and large groups of bodies are the locations for her lifelike
art, revealing the aesthetics of relationships among people. In
this critical examination of Suzanne Lacy, Sharon Irish surveys
Lacy's art from 1972 to the present, demonstrating the pivotal
roles that Lacy has had in public art, feminist theory, and
community organizing. Lacy initially used her own body--or animal
organs--to visually depict psychological states or social
conditions in photographs, collages, and installations. In the late
1970s she turned to organizing large groups of people into art
events--including her most famous work, "The Crystal Quilt," a 1987
performance broadcast live on PBS and featuring hundreds of women
in Minneapolis--and pioneered a new genre of public art. Irish
investigates the spaces between art and life, self and other, and
the body and physical structures in Lacy's multifaceted artistic
projects, showing how throughout her influential career Lacy has
created art that resists racism, promotes feminism, and explores
challenging human relationships.
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