I would like to share photos of a performance “Ablutions” (1972) by Judy Chicago, Suzanne Lacy, Sandra Orgel and Aviva Rahmani. The project concerned rape and was based on the audio recordings of experiences of women who had been raped. Here is the description of the performance that I took from Lacy’s website:

Three body-sized galvanized metal tubs on the concrete floor were each filled with a different substance—eggs, blood, and clay. Around the tubs broken eggshells, piles of rope and chain, and animal kidneys were strewn. The soundtrack played continuously, one woman after the other telling the intimate and explicit details of their rapes—information not part of public culture at that time. A nude woman was slowly bound from feet to scalp with gauze bandages while two others bathed in the tubs, first eggs, then blood, then clay. As each one emerged from the final tub, caked with clay cracked to reveal rivulets of blood, and was wrapped like a corpse in a sheet. Throughout the performance, Lacy nailed 50 beef kidneys to the wall, encasing the room like a spinal column sur- rounded by its organs. The performance ended with two women—Lacy and Jan Lester, the bandager—stringing light rope over the set, until the performance stage was a spider web of entrapment. The voices on the tape droned on as if there was no escape from the brutalization, ending with the audio tape stuck on a chilling note, repeating like a broken record: “I felt so helpless, all I could do was just lie there.” 

I chose it after seeing one of Judy Chicago’s paintings in an art museum and looking up her other works. The amount of work behind this performance and how “graphic” it is drew my attention. I view it as activism because it drew attention to a really big problem, considering the fact that marital rape was not criminalized in all states until the 90s. This performance could also inspire other women to speak up, following the example of the performers and recorded women.