Suzanne Lacy and Barbara Smith (Los Angeles ______)

Part I: Lacy and Smith began an all-night vigil at the University of California at Irvine gallery as the audience arrived with sleeping bags to spend the night. Lacy, dressed as an elderly woman, tended a wrapped body in a bed on the opposite side of the room from Smith, dressed as a young girl, who played with toys on her bed.

Each woman wrote immediate thoughts and physical sensations as stream of consciousness writing on the wall. Beginning apart their writing moved toward each other as the night wore on. At 4:00 am, with the gallery visitors asleep, Smith and Lacy’s writing finally collided. Furtively they unwrapped the body in Lacy’s bed, a raw meat lamb carcass, and suspended it from the ceiling with its bandages forming great soaring wings. They rocked in chairs under the carcass, waiting for the audience members to awake.

Part II: In the middle of a noisy opening Lacy and Smith were clothed in white, faces stained pale white, and with elaborate ceremony and perfect silence they consumed the cooked shank of their lamb.