An Anarchitectural Body of Work : Suzanne Harris and the Downtown New York Artists’ Community in the 1970s

The artist, dancer and educator Suzanne Harris (1940–79) was a protagonist of the downtown New York City artists’ community in the 1970s.

With her boundary-transgressing practice, she played a decisive part in avant-garde projects, such as the Anarchitecture group, 112 Greene Street, FOOD, the Natural History of the American Dancer, and contributed to the Heresies Collective.

Nevertheless, her own oeuvre fell into abeyance. Friederike Schäfer reconstructs Harris’s dispersed, postminimalist body of work, which broke the mold of art categories, art practices, art spaces, and the common notion of space.

In her publication, the author draws on post-Marxist feminist theory to trace how Harris transcended both sculpture and dance to create site-specific, ephemeral installations avant la lettre, which she conceived as body-oriented, choreographic situations.

Harris’s anarchitectural work and her method of sensory awareness led her to conceive a holistic philosophy of space.

This idiosyncratic approach is paradigmatic for the conception of a social production of space that started to emerge at the time.