Maps (1973)
Maps is a happening created for Allan Kaprow’s class at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, north of Los Angeles. Lacy provided butcher-wrapped meat organs to fellow students who were asked to accurately reconstruct the lamb’s interior by nailing each organ into the outline of a lamb on the wall. Repackaging their organs, students carried them in a brown bag and followed a map in separate cars to get to the next site—a hospital for the retarded, one hour away in Pomona. There they parked in different parking lots and followed their maps that led them to a cafeteria where they silently ate lunch from a brown paper bag. Back in the cars once again they followed maps to their final destination in the Vernon meat-packing district. There they were given another package, this one a meat packer’s gown wrapped in blue laundry paper, and were instructed to wear the garment as they wandered through an abandoned slaughterhouse. They met one final time in the back of the factory where they left their brown-bagged lamb organs tied to a fence, again reassembled in correct anatomical order of organs in a live animal.
California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California and Vernon, California.