An Interview About ACTING LIKE WOMEN

In the 1970s, a rebellious art form exploded onto the scene known as “performance art as protest.” ACTING LIKE WOMEN is a highly personal, first-person documentary about the artists who gave birth to this art form. Led by female, feminist artists determined to bring women’s bodies and voices into the art world, from a foundational feminist art space called The Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, the radical rebellion gave rise to powerful activism at the apex of the Women’s Movement. Their pieces brought about awareness, discussion, and even change.

I spoke with the co-producers and co-writers, Anne Gauldin and Cheri Gaulke, who also directed the doocumentary about their artwork and its influence:

Tara
So I heard about this because of the Bentonville Film Festival and your documentary was accepted. I got to see the screener and know you’re still going through the film festival circuit. Can you share a little bit about the documentary and how you decided to make it?

Cheri
Sure. Anne and I met in 1975 at the Woman’s Building, which was a public center for women’s culture, as we called it. It was a place where women came from all over the country and some from other countries to deal with a time in history when women were not being shown in galleries and museums. So, we were all mad as hell. We all needed each other. We needed to create a supportive community in which we could create our work and share it with the public.

Anne and I met in the Feminist Studio Workshop, an educational program in the Woman’s Building. And that’s where we began to do performance art. So fast forward to 50 years later, I’m retiring from my teaching job and thinking I need a big project, and I decided to make my first feature documentary film about this era that we experienced. And that was in 2019, so it’s been seven years of making this film.

Anne
Yes, Cheri and I knew each other as students in 1975 at the Feminist Studio Workshop, but then we began to collaborate doing performance art. We had a group called Sisters of Survival that did anti-nuclear work and another piece that’s in the film called THE MALTA PROJECT. And both of us had our working careers, earning money, raising our families, and then Cheri started doing more film work.

She got me involved in GLORIA’S CALL, a short documentary about women and surrealism. And I helped co-write and produce and did some animation on that. And she kind of got me hooked. So, when she got the idea to do this film, she asked me what I considered coming on as a co-writer of that. And I realized when we did GLORIA’S CALL how much I enjoyed the writing process. I didn’t realize it was going to take seven years, but it’s been great to collaborate with her.

Tara
Can you explain what performance art means?

Cheri
Back in the early 70s, performance art was a brand new medium. As I was saying earlier, you know, as women, we were so frustrated by not being included in the art world, in galleries and museums, and, you know, painting and sculpture were mediums that were, you know, dominated by men. And when performance art came along as this new medium, we thought this just feels right for us as women, especially because we had grown up learning things like costume. We grow up with this external gaze. It’s like performing is something we know as women. Plus, it was an art form that had no history, so we could forge a new history. But what is it? It’s often using your body. It is not about entertaining the audience per se. It doesn’t mean it can’t be entertaining. Often the performance artist is going through some kind of catharsis, or ritual, or experiment, and the audience is witness to that. You know, it’s taken many forms over the years and in the 70s it was more experimental in those ways. In the 80s and 90s, it began to be a little more about cabaret and monologues and stuff.

We realized (performance art) was this incredible tool that we could use for activism.

Cheri
Back in the early 1970s, performance art was a brand-new medium. As I was saying earlier, as women, we were so frustrated by not being included in the art world, in galleries and museums, and painting and sculpture were mediums that were dominated by men. When performance art came along as this new medium, we thought this just feels right for us as women, especially because we had grown up learning things like costume. We grow up with this external gaze. It’s like performing is something we know as women. Plus, it was an art form that had no history, so we could forge a new history. But what is it? It’s often using your body. It is not about entertaining the audience per se. It doesn’t mean it can’t be entertaining. Often the performance artist is going through some kind of catharsis, or ritual, or experiment, and the audience is witness to that. It’s taken many forms over the years and in the 1970s it was more experimental in those ways. In the 1980s and 90s, it began to be a little more about cabaret and monologues and stuff.

Tara
And they had the support of the male artists because they’re like, well, we know what you’re trying to say, right? And I think it shows a bit the other favorite part kind of quote. I wrote it down, it’s at around 40 minutes in the documentary, they were saying that, “There was this romantic idea of what an artist is. It’s usually a male, misunderstood, you know, secluded, you know, sort of thing.”

This movement, particularly in the in the 1970s, you guys were concentrating on, and that it kept expanding, was about coming together, and it wasn’t about your individual ego and about collaboration and bringing about a message. Women collaborated with men, and they collaborated with owning back their bodies; there was nudity. There’s always been female nudity in artwork, but to your point, in the history of it, it was usually a male artist that we know of that used the female body. So, it was under a male gaze. Well, what if we just use it from the female standpoint of this is my body and this is how I’m going to show it.

Cheri
We’re still waiting for that visibility and, that’s why we made the film to document it, to help people understand what it is we did and why it was important and to open up an intergenerational conversation because as one of our producers says, “contemporary protest activism in the streets today uses the language of feminist performance art from our era.” You see it in the film in that wonderful montage at the end where you see all these activist performances around the world and you’re like, whoa, very similar to what we were doing in the 1970s. And those people don’t know about this history.

It’s not just about us being acknowledged, we can’t change culture if we don’t know about our foremothers, and so we’re trying to, push history forward in those ways.

Tara
Thank you guys so much. And if anyone wants to learn more about how they can try and find the documentary or maybe have it as a screening or something, what can they do?

Cheri
Yeah, absolutely. Super easy. Just go to our website: actinglikewomen.com And we have a place where you can sign up for the mailing list to follow our journey. We have a contact form if you’re interested in hosting a screening. And we’ll get back in touch with you. We’re at the beginning of our impact campaign, and we would love to hear from people.

A longer interview will be out for MediaMaker Spotlight Podcast.

Watch the trailer: