Disparate Threads: A Conversation with Suzanne Bocanegra on Confronting Art Histories

By Laurel Rand-Lewis

Feb 12, 2024

Walker Publishing Filed to Performing Arts · Part of Performance as Healing

Honor, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Lili Taylor. Photo: Stephanie Berger.

The artist lecture is a familiar event for museum goers—large dark theater, colorful slides projected as the artist stands behind a podium and presents a monologue. Honor, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Lili Taylor gives the form a twist. Over the course of the performance, Bocanegra tackles the concept of honor through the lens of one of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s greatest tapestries, weaving in narratives from her own life, the history of the tapestry, and beyond. In advance of the performance’s three-day run at the Walker, Bocanegra spoke with Laurel Rand-Lewis, curatorial fellow in Visual Arts, to discuss process, the collaborative nature of live theater, and the joy of falling down rabbit holes in research.

Laurel Rand-Lewis

I was thinking we could start a little bit with your research practice. I know, as you’ve moved more into these artist lectures, there’s a lot of work that goes into them—the writing, the timing—and I just wanted to know more about how long it takes. Do you have multiples of these going at once? Thinking about the shape of a project, is there something that you start with at the beginning? And how far does it stray from that? Or is it just a very open-ended concept when you really get started going?

Suzanne Bocanegra

Well, I kind of fell into this by accident. It was 2009, and I was asked by Larry Kardish, who was the film curator at MoMA. He’d seen this piece I did called Rerememberer. It’s with an amplified loom, and an accordion is playing the loom tie-up instructions, which are on a staff just like music, and then I had 50 people who’ve never played violin before playing violin, and they were playing a version of the thread count. That was my first foray into performance, and Larry had seen that, and so he asked me to do one of those typical artist slide lectures.

So I thought, I’ve always wanted to tell the story about how I became an artist. I grew up in this working-class neighborhood in Pasadena, Texas, outside of Houston, and this scandal happened in my Catholic Church when I was 8 years old that made me want to be an artist. As I started writing it, it became a story. I mean, it was a story.

I have kids, and I realized a lot of the stuff I was talking about they would have no context for. For example, this was the ’60s, and what we considered long hair was just something that wasn’t a crew cut, and they don’t even know what a crew cut is. They’re not raised Catholic, and so they didn’t understand all the stuff about the Catholic Church. So I ended up putting in a lot of information about the Church in order to make it clear to people who didn’t grow up Catholic, or who didn’t grow up in that generation. And then, after I finished putting the whole lecture together, I realized I wanted someone who was a really good storyteller, a professional, to tell a story.

And that’s when I called Paul Lazar, my best friend’s husband. I said, “Can you do this, Paul?” He goes, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, fine.” You know, he just did it as a friend, as a one-off. But that kind of kicked it off, and now I’m starting No. 5.

LRL

It’s amazing to see how the shape has changed over the course of these different lectures, starting with this very personal introductory story and moving toward what we have with Honor. It has some elements of yourself and your own background integrated into it, but is more focused on the titular tapestry and the threads that you’ve pulled out.

How do you balance the personal versus the research? And when there are so many different ways that a particular piece can go, how do you narrow it down?

SB

There’s a ton of rabbit holes. And Joey, who’s the tech director of these shows, he always laughs because I start every single show talking about these big homecoming mum corsages they have in Texas. When I started talking about it, nobody really knew about it, but now they’ve gotten some press in different places. And it’s in every single show when I start out, and then it always gets cut. Always. And someday maybe it’ll actually be in it! But there’s a lot of things that I find in the library or just in my past or whatever, and they all get crammed in. And then they slowly get taken out because it has to hold together as a narrative, even though it’s going in so many different directions. And it has to come back together at the end.

And it’s really helpful ’cause I’ve worked with a lot of the same people over the years, and so when we’re developing the piece and rehearsing it, I come in with my rough draft. And I remember Lili [Taylor] saying at the end, “But I still don’t know what a tapestry is.” So I said, “But I said it right here, Lili, right here.” And she goes, “What? You can say it but it doesn’t mean that I got it.” And so it helps me when I run it by people to realize what I need to explain better and clearer. Sometimes you can’t go down too many rabbit holes or else you lose the trail.

LRL

Going more into your elements of collaboration—how has working with actors and a crew affected the way you approach the work? Is there a difference in how you frame things, compared to previous works that were made for gallery spaces, with more of a solo focus?

SB

Well, the interesting thing about the whole theater world is how collaborative it is. I remember the very first time we had done When a Priest Marries a Witch, we decided—mainly because Paul has been in theater forever—“You know, I think this works as a piece. I think we should do it places.”

And so we started doing it at little theater festivals, just tiny little things. The Museum of Modern Art has somebody who does the tech—the slides, and the lights, and everything—but when we started doing it different places, I had to hire a lighting designer or tech people. I remember we did a run through, and then we sat down to talk about it afterward, and I invited a friend or two whose opinions I trusted, and the tech people that I’d hired, they gave their opinions about it! And I was so shocked because I thought, “Well, I didn’t ask you!” Then I realized, after being in the theater world for a while, everybody contributes. You don’t have to take their opinion, but it’s their job, actually, to contribute to the whole genesis of the piece.

That was a kind of a shock for me because when you’re working in your studio—usually I’m just by myself, but let’s just say you hire somebody to help you out—they don’t give their opinion unless you ask for their opinion. You’re the artist, you do what you want to do. Of course a lot of times along the way you’ll ask different friends their opinion, but it’s not just assumed that everybody contributes to how you shape the piece.

So that’s part of the joy of working in live theater; you have so many brains all coming together to create this final product. And sometimes somebody will come up with this fantastic idea, and you’ll go, “Oh, wow, OK, let’s do that.”

LRL

I think [that collaboration] gives a really lovely space for the strange little moments that come up with live theater, and then also the fact that you’re speaking into the ear of the performer, where mistakes can happen, or you need to take a pause, or things like that.

SB

I wasn’t even on stage when I first did the pieces with Paul. When we did the second one, Bodycast, that was with Frances McDormand and Paul. Before, my voice was in the room—you could hear it on the loudspeakers with Paul’s voice at the same time. And Paul, who was directing Bodycast, he realized that [my and Frances’s] voices were too similar. It didn’t make any sense; it just sounded like two of the same voice saying the same thing.

That’s when I started coming on stage, so you could tell that I wrote it and the actors were performing it. Over the years we’ve realized that we have to really spell that out for people, so now we explain what’s going on, what the device is. Otherwise, the audience spends the whole time going, “Well, what’s she doing over there—reading something?” It’s hard to understand.

We had a show in the fall. Afterward, a friend of mine who’s a very sophisticated art person said, “You know, even though you explained it, I still didn’t really get it.” So we’re realizing, OK, we have to be crystal clear about this. And now we’ve even added more language and more pauses to make sure it sinks in. Once you know what’s going on, you know what’s going on.

In the first show that we had this year, the tech went out. [Lili] couldn’t hear me. We had to totally stop the show, and the tech people had to come out and do something, and then we went back again. Afterward, people said, because of that tech going out, “I really understood what the connection was between the two of you.” But to do something like that artificially, it doesn’t feel right. So now we just try to really, really make it clear at the top of the show.

LRL

There’s so much room for exploration for the audience in both the material and then also in that process element of it. I don’t think that’s necessarily something that a casual audience member will have experienced before.

SB

It’s so funny because, when we’re in New York, a lot of people use that technique. It came from Liz LeCompte at the Wooster Group, which Paul used to be a part of, and I got introduced to [it] through Paul. We assumed, well, everybody in New York that goes to the theater knows this because people and other theater companies have been using it. But, not necessarily. So we’ve learned to explain.

LRL

With the rise of video essays, there’s a certain way in which the audience perception that someone has an hour- or two-hour-long presentation memorized, when they’re [in fact] either being fed lines or reading it off a prompter, is blurred. And I do love that moment of obviously breaking that preconception and saying, “No, this is what’s happening. We want you, the audience, to understand, and we want you to have this connection to both the performer and to the artist and the way in which the interactions between you color the piece as a whole.”

SB

It used to be I would tell Lili, or whoever the actor was, “Oh, you know, I changed this part or I added this.” After a while she would say, “You don’t have to tell me because I’m listening to you, and I’m just repeating. And I know how to deliver whatever you say.” So I thought, OK, that makes it easy. Having actors who are so confident in their own technique is such a joy because they’re able to take that and just run with it. And the other thing that really amazed me is how they can relate to the audience. Afterward they’ll critique the audience because they are really paying attention to how their lines are falling.

[When Honor premiered at the Met] we didn’t have time to workshop it because it was the end of Covid. We did a dress rehearsal, and I had this long essay about what honor was, and it’s such a gnarly subject. I could feel—even though there was no audience—I [had] lost the audience. So I cut it. We never had a chance to see if that worked or not, which was exciting in a way.

I have a part where Lili talks about what honor is and what it can be. And then she throws up her hands and says, “Who knows, you know, I don’t. I can’t even grasp this.” But in later versions, I’ve had more time to work on it, and I come back later in the piece and talk about how a lot of philosophers and scholars now think honor is completely obsolete, and [that] it should be replaced with dignity, because honor is about hierarchy and putting something above somebody else. Even when I’m saying this, I’m thinking: Well, that’s not a bad thing because I know sometimes competition can be good. But I did want to somehow work in this whole idea of dignity as opposed to honor. I’ve done that in the later versions. That’s another thing I love about doing these live pieces: I can change them or I can add to them or take things out. It’s great.

LRL

That’s also something that is fascinating to me. When we were trying to schedule this, you were telling me that you had completely reworked one of your previous pieces. And it’s so fun and interesting to be able to have that space to go back, whether it’s within a certain closer time period or over many years, and reflect and change and have it still be the same work. Thinking more about it as this living piece—modular, almost.

SB

Yeah, it is modular. That’s a good way of putting it, because I feel like it’s building blocks of different subjects, and they’re all kind of put together to make a tower.

LRL

Turning the focus more to the material of the piece, so much of your discussion of honor is about context and the way that people’s perceptions over time have shifted. Your framing device is this large tapestry from the Met collection, also titled Honor—which, if someone had no context for it at all, no knowledge of the 16th century, no knowledge of the larger courtly history that it came out of, it just becomes this flat piece that’s obviously very decorative. How did you find this particular piece?

SB

Limor Tomer, who was the performance curator at the Met, had seen my Rerememberer piece. It was about tapestry, and I’ve done a lot of drawings and stuff about textile work. It was her idea for me to do one of these lectures, but about a piece of art. So she introduced me to the tapestry curator at the Met. We looked around, and you’re looking at these things and they’re really foreign, all the mythology and very obscure stories that we’ve forgotten over the centuries. They can be very seductive, too, because they’re so huge. And I ended up choosing the one that I chose, Honor, because it has 69 characters and they’re all labeled.

I thought, well, if I can’t think of anything to say about this, I could just go through and say who each person is. That’s 69 minutes if you spend one minute on each person. I really didn’t know what I was getting into. But then, as I dug into it, [I] realized how much the context of when it was made and history of what was going on in Europe at the time and those people labeled are [still so obscure]. We were at the Institute for Advanced Studies, in Princeton, and there are a lot of scholars there who specialize in this particular time period. And I would ask them, “Who’s Florence of Rome?” And they [answered], “I don’t know.”

Sometimes these [characters] were so obscure—you could finally find them, but not much about them. That was really fascinating. Just rummaging through the libraries, I realized how important it is to have a really good [book] spine. Wandering the aisles, you’ll see a spine in gold letters. One time I saw Shame, and that’s when I first started looking. And I thought, “Hmm, shame. Interesting.” That’s when I started thinking about shame and honor. Anyway, good spines. They’re important. A tip to all book designers out there.

LRL

There’s a section in the piece where you talk about public executions as a form of theater, and then specifically thinking about that as a form of shame. I’d love to dig into that—how within this historical framework, you’re thinking about shame and honor as counterpoints, or as cyclical. How there are certain elements that were shameful that then become honorifics and then come back to being shameful again.

SB

For me, it was just interesting to think of shame as the flip side of honor. I never thought about that. There’s a lot of people who’ve written books on shame. And parallel to that, I was reading a lot of books on the history of theater, and that’s where I ended up going to royal entries. That’s one of the first things that the curator at the Met told me about the Honor tapestry; it’s set up like one of the stages for royal entry. And so that’s got me on the path of the history of theater. When you get into the history of performance, you end up with how those executions were planned, directed performances with an intended audience. It just became fascinating to think of those two things together.

When you were just saying things that used to be honorable and that are not anymore, or vice versa, what were you thinking about?

LRL

There were a couple of moments where you were looking at specific people within the tapestry—like Semiramis, who’s in that honorable women section, a queen who had these stories of bestiality and incest surrounding her but still ended up in the list of honorable people.

SB

Oh, Semiramis. She was a real find. She’s been flipped back and forth, depending on the century. It was amazing to me, considering her history, that the church decided to embrace her as somebody who had a backbone, or knew how to run Babylonia, or whatever it was. There’s all kinds of strange stories about Semiramis; some people would say that those stories come up through the centuries because there’s something about our culture that likes to shame powerful women. Anyway, she was really interesting, and I had never heard of her before, but she was a big deal back then.

Another thing I found interesting was that during the Inquisition—Ferdinand and Isabella had started the Inquisition and Charles the Fifth [who was king when the tapestry was made] continued it—they were burning Jews at the stake constantly. Yet who was in the row of honorable women? Deborah, Esther—I can’t remember the rest of them—but Jewish women were in the row of honorable women! Yet the flipside was any Jew they could find, they were burning them. It was very anti-Jewish. So it’s like: What is that? What’s going on there? Of course they were very antisemitic in Spain, but also it was a way to get their property. You would accuse them of still practicing, even if they were conversos, and they’d get burned at the stake, and you could have their property or their business. And that’s what happened to Juan Luis Vives, who I talk about in the piece, who was a really interesting character I happened across. History is fascinating.

LRL

I know. When I was first watching the piece, I thought: Oh, there’s so many things I want to look into now.

SB

It’s really, really fascinating. I had never heard of Charles the Fifth, and when you say that to people in Europe, they roll their eyes like, “You stupid Americans, how could you not know who Charles the Fifth is?” But I know Henry the Eighth because of his wives and the movies. I had never heard of [Charles the Fifth]. And then I’d quiz my friends, too, and they’re all smart people—they’ve gone to college, some of them even have PhDs—and they go, “Oh, was he the father of Henry the . . . ?” Nobody knows. I find that really fascinating. How could we miss that? But, yeah, we did.

LRL

There’s so much with the [reign of the] Hapsburgs that gets lumped into one general period despite it being four centuries of people.

SB

They kind of bleed into everything. I found this old textbook from high school or college, a textbook on world history. And I flipped through it to see how much was written about [Charles the Fifth]. I thought, he’s got to be mentioned in here, right? Sure enough, he is. But it’s just a couple of pages, and it’s just not going to imprint on you because it’s in a world history book with God knows how many hundreds of other things. After you’re done with the course, you close the book. It’s what you see in the movies, or The Crown, or whatever that’s going to stick with you.

LRL

Yeah, the perception of media versus more niche scholarship. Coming back to something you had said a couple minutes ago, this idea of using shame versus honor to either discredit or empower women is such an interesting thread throughout the entire show. Especially the little moment on Home Economics, which was something I’d never really considered, and the ways in which that was intended to be this moment of empowerment for women. But within the larger societal context, nobody ever thought to challenge the fact that that was still always going to be considered women’s work and therefore a lesser kind of subject.

SB

That was really interesting to me. I found a book on the history of Home Ec years ago in the library, and I pulled it because my mom kept trying to make me take Home Ec. I was always scornful of it, and I was really surprised at what I found: that it was trying to professionalize housework and make it honorable. And you understand the thinking of Ellen Swallows Richards, the woman [behind it].

But the other interesting thing about her, which I didn’t mention, is [that] she started the field of modern ecology. Her goal was to make drinking water safe. It was still looking at it through the lens of the kitchen and the home and how you’re providing for your family, but that got her very interested in how we were polluting water. And she started these groups and did conferences. I mean, see? It was just too much to put in there. I had to just focus on her Home Ec; maybe ecology will come in some other time. But what an incredible woman!

LRL

There’s that perception of very highly gendered labor, with Home Ec being obviously for girls and shop class being for boys, that then extends to the much larger structures that informed all of that. And there’s something so fascinating about the ways in which the craft revival has also had that same moment: all of these historical tasks that were based within the home, relegated to unpaid female labor, that then became these moments for joy and connection and an alternative to mass consumerism, that then got discredited because it was part of a counterculture, or subsumed into the mass culture in certain ways that made it seem lesser again.

SB

Well, it became Hobby Lobby. Craft is a very interesting thing to think about. I talked about it a little bit in Farmhouse Whorehouse because my grandparents did make everything themselves—but not because they thought it was cool. It’s just like, “Yeah, of course we’re going to do that. Why would we buy it if we can make it?” But they didn’t pat themselves on the back for it. They didn’t think it was cool. It was just the way they thought about things. And so it’s interesting to see this other thing that’s happened, when we’re so used to buying things really cheap and not even thinking twice about it. When we do make it ourselves, we feel so virtuous. That whole way of looking at things is very interesting to me. So much of the way you think about it is how you grew up and the economic conditions that you grew up in.

LRL

There’s a big rise on social media of “cottagecore,” which is this movement toward handcrafting and making your own food and being self-reliant and things like that, but all packaged under the guise of an aesthetic. I find it really fascinating because obviously there are folks who have been and will continue to be self-reliant: people who are farmers, people who prefer to make their own clothes, who have the skills. It’s this strange moment where more and more people are actually making things for themselves, but it’s being packaged into this idea of cutesiness, where it has to be marketable through social media rather than just being something you can do in and of itself.

SB

It’d be interesting to think about that stuff more. At the very end of Honor, my mom is making these pot scrubbers that she’d made for years. She hated making them, and she would sell them at the craft fair for about what you’d pay to get a machine-made one at the dollar store. And I never could understand it. I would go, “Mom, you’re spending all this time to handmake something that’s so cheap. And it’s so humble, too. It’s just a pot scrubber.” And she would say, “But these scrub pots better than anything you can buy.”

There’s still part of me that feels like, “Well, why don’t you use your skills to make something beautiful? A beautiful scarf, or something that’s one-of-a-kind?” No, that’s not what she did. She made the same pot scrubber over and over and over and over again for the craft sale to sell for what you would buy it for at the dollar store. That stuff is really interesting to think about. Maybe my next piece is going to talk more about that because I’m going to do it on clothing, and that goes in so many different directions.

LRL

So many things that we’ve pulled out over the course of this [interview] were little moments that didn’t make it into previous works. Obviously, with the written pieces it can live in a hard drive somewhere. But is it something that stays in the back of your mind as you’re working on something else? How much do they cross-pollinate?

SB

I save all the little bits and pieces that didn’t make it. It’s fun when you see a piece you did a long time ago, and you think, “That’s a thread I didn’t follow. Maybe it would be interesting to add that.” I like doing that. Another piece I want to do is about flowers. And you can bet that when I start the flower one, it’s going to be about the big mum corsages they have in Texas at homecoming.▪︎

Experience Honor, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Lili Taylor at the Walker February 22–24, 2024. Learn more or get tickets here.

Discover more ideas and artists exploring Performance as Healing here.