Suzanne Lacy (Los Angles 1980)
On Halloween, audience in a large industrial warehouse was ushered to the fifth floor by young women in white gowns with deathly white faces carrying candles. Along the way journal entries on sleep and nightmares were inscribed on the wall--the last signed “Jonathan Harker, on the event of his final confrontation with Count Dracula.”

At the top of the stairs the guide motioned silently to a large metal door. Inside the sound of organ music repeated over and over and large shapes covered with white cloth and cob webs at first obscured one’s vision. Walking toward the light the audience stumbled upon a tableau much like a Renaissance painting: a wood coffin washed with blue light, a lamb carcass hanging, and a Dutch Master painting at a paint-by-number canvas. Over the course of hours the painting emerged: a copy of Rembrandt’s “Flayed Ox.”

The soundtrack swelled with frenzy as a Victorian gothic monologue ensued. With many a curious turn of phrase, the painter’s story emerged—how she had been tired, sick, an artist despairing of ever again finding joy in her work. Looking for causes, she found she was turning into a creature of the night, a vampire painter forced to forever contemplate, as she painted, the relationship between the victim, the violator, and the observer. “This, the sign I long ago did not heed, that in avoiding my nightmares, all other dreams took their leave as well.” The audience stayed as they wished and was able to return over the next two days as the painter slept by day in her coffin filled with dirt and, by night, completing the painting.