About the Work

The Politics performance took place on September 11, 2007, at 6am in Central Park (near 106th Street and 5th Avenue)

I skipped down a little hill in wearing a white dress. I had previously placed an American flag sewn together out of untreated pigskin on the ground. l painted the appropriate stripes of the flag with blood. I undressed myself and poured a gallon of pig’s blood over my naked body, covered my bloody body with the flag, and then disappeared up the hill.

This work is a consideration of the relationship of the individual to politics, asserting that the individual, no matter how personally innocent, remains responsible for the guilty actions of her polity; that we, as a country, may be victims and violators at the same time; that the desire for justice may result in acts of injustice and unjustifiable violence. We mantle our “behavior” in the cloak of politics and convince ourselves that our actions are just, but we are in fact covered in the blood we have shed. The state cannot look at itself and see the quality of its actions: that remains the responsibility of its individual citizens.