State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970
Orange County Museum of Art, 2011-2012
Featuring Lamb Construction, Anatomy Lessons, Learn Where the Meat Comes From
Learn Where the Meat Comes From (1976) is a performance created specifically for video and television broadcast. Utilizing the archetypal cooking show format, Lacy instructs her viewers on the proper techniques for dissecting a lamb carcass while subjectively transforming her own body in reaction to the lamb’s physical dismantling. Conversely, Lamb Construction (1973) is a sculptural performance in which Lacy reconstructs a lamb’s internal organs on a wooden sawhorse skeleton. Learn Where The Meat Comes From is part of a larger body of performative photographs and videos titled Anatomy Lessons (1973-1976), in which Lacy conflates physiological and psychological perceptions of the female body.
All three works were selected for State of Mind: New California Art, circa 1970, an exhibition co-organized by the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) and the University of California’s Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time. State of Mind is a thorough investigation of seminal conceptual and related avant-garde activities among California artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the critical interchange between them. From 2011-2013, the exhibition traveled to the Bronx Museum of Art, the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, and SITE Santa Fe.