Suzanne Lacy (Los Angeles and Bellingham, Washington 1975)

Building on the story of Frankenstein and using the metaphor of a monster birth, this performance explores the relationship between identity and the physical body with imagery from medical literature on transplantation and curious news articles about body parts. The performance deconstructs Mary Shelley’s novel—the dynamics of her own birth that killed her mother, and how her tale reveals an author’s overreaching and ultimately fatal desire to make something (in this case a human life) which turns out in the end to be monstrous.

A series of images form the narrative of this performance that operates as a novel: projected text from the introduction of Shelly’s book, a silent black and white film of Lacy and another artist sewing their clothes together and ripping them apart to explore constructions of merging identities, projected news articles and cartoons on transplantation and organs, a professorial deconstruction of Frankenstein, Lacy in a lab coat drawing blood from her art—all woven together to create an intricate story of the frailty of the body, the replaceableness of its parts, the relationship between identity and flesh, and the desire to create.