Suzanne Lacy (Los Angeles, 1973)

Beginning at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, north of Los Angeles, this happening was created for Allan Kaprow’s class. Lacy provided butcher-wrapped meat organs to students who were asked to accurately reconstruct the lamb’s interior by nailing its entrails within a lamb outline on the wall.

Repackaging their organs, they carried them in a brown bag and followed a map in separate cars to get to the next site--a hospital for the retarded an hour away in Pomona. There they parked in different parking lots and followed individual maps that led them to a cafeteria where they silently ate lunch from a brown paper bag.

Again they followed maps and traveled separately to their final destination in the Vernon meat packing district. There they were given another package, this one a meat packers gown wrapped in blue laundry paper, and instructed to wear the garment. They wandered through an abandoned slaughterhouse to meet one final time in the back of the factory. There they left their brown bagged lamb organs tied to a fence, again reassembled as if in the animal when it was alive.