Legacy, 1988-89, multimedia performance

Lynn Book’s original, multimedia performance work Legacy, originally titled “Leg(s)eee!!”, premiered at the Cleveland Public Theater, Cleveland, OH in 1988. The performance was the first of what the artist saw as a trilogy of works concerned with the cultural construction of the feminine within a patriarchal system. The name of the performance project came to be referred to as “Legacy'', with the exception of an artists’ publication for the Chicago journal, Whitewalls (1978-2002). In this project, Book was explicitly interrogating representation, the male gaze, and performing critique of popular stereotypes of Woman as object of desire. She used disruption to challenge these roles and norms in an effort to locate subjectivity as critical to agency even as it must work within deeply embedded systems of oppression. In this performance and the two related works - “Physical Vision”, 1989-90, and “Gorgeous Fever”, 1994-97 - Book collaborated with experimental filmmaker, Sharon Couzin, to create a short film that was projected during the live performance. Simultaneously, Couzin was collaborating with Book to create a 16mm film ‘portrait’ entitled, “Bouquet”, which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. There were several important scholarly references for Book, including the pivotal “The Legs of the Countess” by Abigail Solomon-Godeau in October journal, volume 39, winter 1986. It inspired Book to research a portfolio of mid-19th C photographs of the Countess Maria Di Castiglione held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art archives.

Legacy was developed within the context of an Artist Residency at the Cleveland Institute of Art and included faculty and students in the production of this and another short work titled, “Well of Miss Thriplow”, also performed at the Cleveland Public Theater. “Legacy” ran about 45 minutes as a live performance; a shorter video documentation, shot and edited by Dawn Wiedemann is included in this Collection. Book also performed “Legacy'' at the Getz Theater of Columbia College, Chicago as a benefit for the Peace Museum, and at the Memphis Center for Contemporary Art, Memphis, TN in 1989. Editors for Whitewalls, “a magazine of writings by artists” published in Chicago, invited Book to create a piece for the Fall 1988 issue; “LEG(S)eee!” is included in this project Collection. Other artifacts in this collection include project development notes, scholarly research used to lay groundwork for the project, including the above mentioned, as well as the well-known essay by Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, versions of the performance text, process notes, photo slides, performance object, handwritten performance structure notes.