Suzanne Lacy (San Francisco, 1977)

A meditation on accumulation, alienation, thwarted relationships and survival, this performance began with gathering a shopping cart full of trash in Los Angles that was then shipped to San Francisco’s De Young Museum to be part of an exhibition on The City.

A bag lady carrying several shopping bags sleeps in the door of the museum as audience members coming to the performance step over her. She enters the museum pushing a shopping cart. The audience follows her as she stops to rearrange her possessions. She is a backdrop to an old woman’s narrative, that recounts, through overhead speakers, anecdotes about trash digging, collecting tinsel from discarded Christmas trees, and packaging left-overs from restaurants. At the end of the narrative it becomes clear that the anecdotes are not those of a bag lady but of the artist’s childhood.

The speaker deconstructs the making of the performance: Lacy laboriously sorting trash to collect objects; transporting them from Los Angeles to San Francisco; and trying for days to make contact with a real bag lady in order to include her stories in the installation. Finally one afternoon as she sat on a park bench in the Civic Center, Lacy saw a bag lady she had talked to a few times. From across the park the woman—seemingly oblivious to her surroundings—began screaming apparently to no one. In a rambling manner that to those nearby must have seemed incoherent, the woman yelled, “You leave us alone, we don’t know anything, we don’t want to…” At this defiant pronouncement, Lacy understood the hubris and futility of attempting to engage this woman who didn’t want to be engaged, and that the performance was in fact a self-portrait of emotional homelessness.