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Learn Where the Meat Comes From

Suzanne Lacy

1976 00:14:20 United StatesEnglishColorMono4:3Video
Tags:
Independently Produced Interviews

Description

A classic feminist video, Learn Where the Meat Comes From depicts how “gourmet carnivore tastes take on a cannibalistic edge. This parody of a Julia Child cooking lesson collapses the roles of consumer and consumed: Lacy instructs us in the proper butcher’s terms for cuts of meat by pointing them out on her body. As the lesson progresses she becomes more and more animal-like, growling and baring over-sized incisors. Perhaps, in her role as a gourmet cook, she is herself as much consumed as consumer.”

—Micki McGee, Unacceptable Appetites, exhibition catalog (New York: Artists Space, 1988)

This title is also available on I Say I Am: Program 1.

About Suzanne Lacy

Suzanne Lacy is unique in drawing the world into collaboration with her work while maintaining an individual vision. Although art is often conceived and realized as a private act, in Lacy’s work the performance becomes a frame in which many people create personal expressions in relationship to a common issue. A pioneer in socially interactive, feminist public art, Lacy’s large-scale performances have, since the mid-'70s, engaged mass audiences through media and complicated community organizing.  

Also known for her writing, Lacy edited the influential Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, published in 1995 by Bay Press, and Leaving Art: Writings on Performance, Politics, and Publics, 1974–2007, published in 2010 by Duke University Press. She is the Chair of the Graduate Public Practice Program at Otis College of Art and Design, in Los Angeles.