ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHER - Monoskop

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Community of Mythic Unity
The first model is best exemplified in Suzanne Lacy’s project Full Circle, with its
hundred commemorative boulders. Here it is difficult to discern any community
more particular than the social category of Women, despite the artist’s effort to
honor specific individuals from the city of Chicago. In preparation for the project,
several committees of women were established by the artist and Sculpture Chicago
to oversee the nominating and selecting of one hundred local women who would
eventually receive a boulder commemoration. But the committees did not function
as active creative partners in the overall conception of Lacy’s project (at best, they
were sounding boards for the artist’s ideas). Instead, they were convened to perform
and signify the decentralization of the artist’s authority in defining the “content”
of Full Circle—i.e., the names of individual honorees.
On the one hand, such a move seems logical, even commonsensical, as lo-
cal residents would likely be more knowledgeable than the artist (from California)
in assessing the social and cultural contributions of one of their own. On the other
hand, Lacy’s committee structure, employed as a means to humble the artist’s voice
and elevate those of local women, seems to confuse rationalized bureaucratization
of the decision-making process with creative group participation. The artist’s delegation
of decision-making duties is not really the same thing as sharing of authority.
Only those with authority in the first place are in positions to delegate; that is, the
act of delegating is in itself an act of authority.
The committees, however, did infuse a sense of regional relevance to the
project insofar as their focus was on Chicago residents. Lacy herself emphasized
this aspect when she noted that “the invented nature of the nomination process
grounded the project in the community and with the women selected.” 51 This implies
a locational delineation of the community. But what conceptually gathered all
one hundred women into a coherent “community,” or at least an extension of it, was
not their common place of residence and work—the city of Chicago—or their presumed
allegiance to it. Rather, according to Lacy, they shared a transhistorical,
transcultural, and gender-specific “sensibility”: “As the idea . . . grew, the issue that