Suzanne Lacy (Los Angeles, 1976)

The first of a series of performances exploring the experience of aging, this performance was staged in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel, then undergoing renovation that was compared, in the media, with face lifts and other gender/age associations.

The American Theater Association was registering for an annual conference and the performance was set up in the lobby to look like three demonstration booths. In the first a smartly clad young woman passed out news articles comparing the building to an aging dowager. In the second, a surgeon’s assistant provided before and after information on plastic surgery. In the final booth, Lacy was worked on by a Hollywood make up artist, becoming aged as the afternoon progressed.

A long line of red chairs in the lobby opposite Lacy was filled over two hours by old women dressed in black. When there were ten older women seated and when Lacy’s make-up was complete, the older women surrounded Lacy, pulled black clothes from purses and tenderly dressed her. The transformation completed, Lacy and the women posed together, a tableaux on red chairs, before dispersing into the crowd.

The next day as a conference workshop, an audience coming to the next act of Inevitable Associations was seated in three circles—each one with a red chair for an older woman from the previous day’s performance. Part I, what was seen from the outside, was Lacy’s interpretation of aging, and was represented to this audience through slides of the first performance. Part II, what is experienced, then began, with each of the three women talking about their lives after sixty.