when you attempt to prosecute
RAPE IS the rapist, and find yourself
on trial instead.



The traditional representation of rape in art
(with the exception of Kollwitz8) represents the
experience of the rapist by focusing on his
strength, activity and beauty, and further re-
moves rape from a realistic experience through
mythological disguise. Lacy first forces the
viewer to enact a metaphorical rape (“deflower-
ing” the book by tearing the sticker) and then
confronts the viewer with what rape means to
its victim.

In Karen Carson’s drawings of beds (1971-75)
woman is the bed. The drawings are expression-
istic in style and imagery, powerful as well as
satirical statements about the myth of happi-
ness in sexual relationships. In this case, too,
the “disturbing” feminist content of Carson’s
drawings arises from the art-historical tradition
of reclining female figures on beds and sofas.
Many of these women become an integral part
of the inanimate, passive, yet sexually inviting
surface on which they are reclining. Unlike
males, Carson identifies with the oppressed —
the woman/bed—and at the same time, as art-
ist, she takes active charge of that surface, pen-
etrates it with a giant screw (Screw), converts it
into a carton of eggs (Easy Lay), severs it with a
saw blade (Edge of Night), or crowns it with a
giant camera (Easy Shot).

These surreal visualizations are take-offs on
popular puns, which function as titles and were



Suzanne Lacy. Rape Is. 1972. Printed book. 6” square.

often the starting points for the drawings. The
series began as a macabre though humorous
comment on popular sexist consumerism. What
emerges is a violent denunciation of sexual
roles, until finally the bed—former haven of
consumer pleasure—disintegrates from within
(Cracking Up and Shattered Dreams), smashing
any illusions we might still have about bed and
woman. In these most recent drawings the for-
merly inanimate object erupts uncontrollably,
and its fragments fly into space. What is com-
monly labeled Women'’s Liberation is in fact, as
Carson expresses it, an excruciatingly painful
process beginning with the recognition of exte-
rior oppression, leading to the experience of
oppression from within, and finally building
toward a complex re-integration —represented
by the artist’'s new work—collages in which the
torn and mutilated fragments are reunited on a
cohesive surface.

| would say that these drawings were intention-
ally propagandistic. . . . It had to do with con-
sumer and sexual politics. ... The frame of
mind that | was in when | did these drawings
was severe frustration over treatment by men.
... The drawings were also politically charged
for me because | talked about them to all kinds
of groups from Valley housewives to a con-
tinuation high school culture-hour class; |
thought people would be bored by these draw-

75