Tête à tête with Suzy Lake

For many art historians of my generation, Suzy Lake has been a beacon. She has shaped how we think about photography, staging, performance, gender, embodiment, and the politics of representation. To map the questions that ­traverse her practice is, in many ways, to trace the preoccupations in contemporary art over the past six decades. Throughout, she has worked with equal measures of rigour and irony, ­technical mastery and conceptual precision. What ­follows is drawn from three rich hours of conversation, during which Suzy and I revisited key moments of her practice, from her Montréal years (1968–78) to more recent series in which she pushes against the limits of representation.

In our initial exchanges, I mentioned to Suzy that I wanted to draw attention to some of her newer work, which I had the thrill of seeing at an exhibition at Bradley Ertaskiran last year. This came as a sort of relief to her, not because the work produced in the 1970s had lost any of its sharpness but because she had a sense that it had been thoroughly covered by critics and theorists. Her arrival in Montréal -seemed to have happened at the “perfect moment,” she said, “amid reductive minimalism, pop influences from graphic culture, and the broader student movement,” when “artists were asking how to engage politically through their work and respond to what was happening in the streets.” She continued, “I wanted [my work] to address a broader audience because social change affects everyone. Montréal in the 1970s felt magical. We truly believed we were building something new.” I couldn’t resist a few initial questions on that era.