Cisco brought all kinds of people together. There were union guys there—ex-union guys, labor organizers. Recently, there'd been some accounts in the national news of an AFL-CIO executive council meeting that had been held in Puerto Rico and it was pretty funny. It had been a weeklong affair, and the union bosses were photographed drinking mammoth rum drinks, visiting casinos and nightclubs—hanging around at hotel pools in flowing bathrobes, swimming the surf, wearing Hollywood-ish sunglasses—doing handstands on the diving board. It looked pretty decadent. They were supposedly there to discuss the march on Washington to dramatize the unemployment problem. Evidentially they didn't know they were being photographed.

These guys at Camilla's place weren't like that, though, they looked more like tugboat captains or baggy-pantsed outfielders or roustabouts. Mack Mackenzie had been an organizer on the Brooklyn waterfront. I met him and his wife, Eve, who was an ex-Martha Graham dancer. They lived on 28th Street. Later on, I'd be their houseguest, too ... sleep on their living room couch. Some people were there from the art world, too—people who knew and commented on what was going on in Amsterdam, Paris and Stockholm. One of them, Robyn Whitlaw, the outlaw artist, walked by in a motion like a slow dance. I said to her, “What's happening?” “I'm here to eat the big dinner,” she responded. Years later Whitlaw would be arrested for breaking and entering and stealing. Her defense was that she was an artist and that the act was performance art and, incredulously, the charges against her were dropped.

All the baggy-pants outfielders, doughboys in khaki, cancan girls now sedate, bathing beauties even more so, cowboys and cigar-store Indians, google-eyed Negroes, apple-cart urchins, lounge lizards and movie queens, cardsharps, clowns, crosseyed lamppost drunks, flying aces, motorboat captains, white hunters on safari and Negroid apes, fat men, chefs in chef's hats, Jewish usurers, XXX jug-clutching hillbillies, comicbook cats dogs and mice, prizefighters and mountaineers, radio stars, midgets, ten-in-one freaks, railroad hobos, marathon dancers, swing bands, high society partygoers, racehorses and jockeys, toddancers, Indianapolis drivers, sailors ashore and wahines in hula skirts, sinewed Olympic runners, tycoons holding big round bags with dollar signs, all join in on a second grand chorus of the song, all the boards of the pinball machines flashing on and off primary colors with a touch of acid to them, flippers flipping, bells ringing, nickels pouring out of the coinboxes of the more enthusiastic, each sound and move exactly in its place in the complex ensemble.

'What do they do here nights?' Al asked.
'They eat the dinner," his friend said. 'They all come here and eat the big dinner.'

In 1984, against the backdrop of appropriation art's tremendous success, she was arrested for breaking and entering the house of a New York dealer who represented many of the leading appropriationists. During a pre-trial hearing Whitlaw maintained that if theft could be art - at least in the hands of appropriation artists - then her action, and those of thousands of other thieves, should likewise be judged by aesthetic, rather than penal, codes. Worried about negative publicity, the dealer dropped charges.

Robyn Whitlaw used her relative invisibility as a black woman to traverse and hide behind the noise of culture and politics through her In-Visibility Project (1973–78). During this time, Whitlaw exaggerated her own professional obscurity by sending simple invitations for a number of her own secret exhibitions after they had closed. Whereas in the 1970s many conceptual artists were using the exhibition invitation as a site for both their work and enhanced promotion, Whitlaw questioned the “publicness” of publicity and the self-aggrandizement of artists by distorting both temporality and the art establishment’s customary use of advertising procedures. A comment on the systemic neglect of non-white and women artists, Whitlaw’s project was based on her concept of the “secret artist” (an incorporation of secret agent behaviour and Watergate-era deception and secrecy). Realizing the role invisibility played in the manipulation of power, she used clandestine strategies to invade zones from which she was prohibited and revealed how such prohibitions were generated ideologically and reproduced. Using a system of authentication to certify the existence of her work and its pre-emptive dismissal, her project’s power lies in its absurdity, existing outside the market system’s logic and expectations.