Suzanne Lacy, Aviva Rahmani, Sandra Orgel, and another collaborator (Los Angeles, 1971-2)

This performance began with Lacy’s exploration of rape through her early painting and sculpture and a book entitled “Rape Is.” Tape recording women who had been raped, she and her collaborators created a sound track that was the relentless backdrop to a performance. As the performance began, the audience entered a large open artist studio. Three body-sized galvanized metal tubs on the concrete floor were each filled with a different substance--eggs, blood, and clay. Around the tubs broken eggshells, piles of rope and chain, and animal kidneys were strewn. The soundtrack played continuously, one woman after the other telling the intimate and explicit details of their rapes—information not part of public culture at that time. A nude woman was slowly bound from feet to scalp with gauze bandages while two others bathed in the tubs, first eggs, then blood, then clay. As each emerged from the final tub caked with clay cracked to reveal rivulets of blood, she was wrapped like a corpse in a sheet.

Lacy nailed 50 beef kidneys to the wall, encasing the room like a spinal column surrounded by its organs. The performance ended with two women stringing rope over the set, until the performance stage was a spider web of entrapment. The voices on the tape droned on as if there was no escape from the brutalization, ending with the audio tape stuck on a chilling note, repeating like a broken record: "I felt so helpless, all I could do was just lie there."