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IN 1973, while still in graduate school, Suzanne Lacy organized an elaborate happening. Titled Maps, the piece instructed fellow students to travel to points across Los Angeles’s Southland—from campus to a mental-health hospital to a meatpacking factory—carrying butcher-paper-wrapped lamb’s organs, and to reassemble the entrails into approximate anatomical order at the final stop. The performance was quietly provocative, otherworldly. The following year, she partnered with a lawyer to prepare another, similarly visceral work. That piece, titled Body Contract, 1974, took the form of a fourteen-page legal document that outlines the terms of sale of body parts and organs between the artist, as seller, and an unnamed potential buyer, in accordance with California’s organ-donation laws; it included a lengthy addendum speculating on the tax implications for applying property concepts to human anatomy. Expressions of the young artist’s nascent concerns, Maps and Body Contract make explicit the unspoken social contracts we—and all living beings—enter into simply by virtue of existing. In each, Lacy proposes a deconstructed physical self to interrogate the arbitrary structures that determine a subject’s value or utility.
Maps and Body Contract offer coordinates for Lacy’s future concerns: the value of a body (specifically, a female body) and its constituent parts; the value of art (market or otherwise); collaboration with a coauthor (the lawyer) and an audience; and the negotiation of institutional systems (the meat industry, pedagogy, medicine, California law, property, profit, taxation). As with so much of Lacy’s early work—and so much West Coast Conceptual art—humor commingles with horror, and an imprecise violence gets coded by the absurd. Yet there is a redemptive force propelling the work, an attempt to reconstitute or at least reframe a fractured social system. These elements have informed nearly five decades of Lacy’s artistic production and shaped the development of what can now be characterized as social practice or socially engaged art, a field that Lacy has helped shape and define.
A NATIVE OF CENTRAL CALIFORNIA, Lacy studied premedical science, zoology, and chemistry as an undergraduate. In 1969, she enrolled at Fresno State College (now California State University, Fresno) to pursue graduate studies in psychology. She soon met Judy Chicago, who had founded the Feminist Art Program at the school in 1970. Lacy began studying art...