ce art on political themes could emerge into the open. In 2003 Regina José Galindo walked with basin of blood from the constitutional court to the national palace in Guatemala City, periodically dipping her feet to leave footprints in the work “Who Can Erase the Footprints?/ Quién puede borrar las huellas?”
Women from Hell
In the United States, artists who aligned themselves with the feminist movement in the 1960s and ‘70s worked naturally within collectives. Early radical feminism was driven by direct action political formations, using inventive attention-grabbing strategies. WITCH (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) hexed Wall Street and the Chicago federal building, and agitated against the Miss America beauty pageant in 1968, crowning a live sheep. (In this they clearly followed the Yippie strategy of animal candidacy; Abbie and his group nominated a pig for president in 1968.) The women who joined the loosely cohering radical Art Workers’ Coalition in 1969 after a protest for artists rights at the Museum of Modern Art, soon found themselves dissatisfied by the men’ refusal to address their issues. Ad Hoc Women Artists and WAR (Women Artists in Revolution) formed to launch a sustained campaign of demonstrations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, decrying their bias against women artists. This campaign is continued today by the Guerrilla Girls, a group of masked anonymous women artists.
At the same time, GAAG (Guerrilla Art Action Group), a subcommittee of the Art Workers Coalition, organized numerous street theater actions. Painter turned conceptual artist Lee Lozano announced her work of “total withdrawal” from the artworld, a slow systematic self-alienation from all social and institutional engagements. Like Gaag, Lozano’s was an internal art action, not really public. The work of all these activists functioned for the most part as internal representations, intended to affect attitudes of their peers within the cultural sphere.
Lozano declared her withdrawal to be a work of conceptual art. Even more than the poetics of Fluxus, the conceptual art movements of the 1960s provided artists with opportunities to stake out positions in regard to social reality. Art became a form of investigation, and the exhibition became a report of findings. This is a soft spot in this essay, since the way in which conceptual art laid the baseline for social sculpture is a subject that requires more explication. Working within the style of conceptual art, artists worldwide acted almost like an impromptu research institute, marking out and developing vast territories of social experience for aesthetic investigation.
Bob Says, “The Art Ain’t Here”
One concept basic to the development of conceptual art was the sculptor and earthworks artist Robert Smithson’s notion of the “non-site.” That is the place where the object is but the art is not; that is, the non-site is the gallery. The site is the place where the art action has taken place; the gallery installation is secondary to the “real” art. This strong concept grew out of Smithson’s research into quarries, dumps, and the “monuments” of contemporary urban civilization. As artists began to play with Smithson’s theories, all these sites opened up as fields for artistic activity. For example, the place where the raw materials of art came from, the stone for the sculpture, became the place where art could be done.
Certainly it was among artists committed to the feminist movement that the impulse to work with the social remained strongest. On the west coast, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro jointly began the sex-segregated feminist art program at the California Institute of the Arts in 1971. With their students, the artists produced the collective house-scale installation Womanhouse. This collaborative environmental work was concerned with the domestic situation of American women, with a nude model penetrated by a clothes closet and egg/breast wallpaper in the kitchen. Together with the accompanying dramatic performances and discussions, Womanhouse had a galvanizing effe