Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/03/11/risk_management.php
Friday, March 11, 2005
In past weeks, callers on the Hopkins Center experienced an instance of High Culture. A refurbished meat locker titled 'The Butcher's Bargain' was installed in the corridor next to the Hinman mailboxes and along the way to the dining facilities. Within, divers cuts of decaying meat were wrapped in luxury fur for all to see. The work has since been removed.
The slabs of meat—cutlets, giblets, filets, flanks, poultry limbs, &c.—were shellacked with coats of clear epoxy and left to rot beneath the shell. After approximately two months of decomposition, the flesh was enfolded in swatches of mink hide, placed on Styrofoam trays, and arranged in the cooler.
A young woman in the class of 2005 called Krista Oopik conceived the sculpture. She explained, "I took a luxury fur hide and re-associated it with meat, but with a consumerist mentality I wanted to emphasize the outrageousness of American consumerism in a visceral and immediate way. On one hand I exploit the grotesqueness of reuniting two naturally intimate materials that have been entirely disassociated in the product market. On the other hand, I think there is beauty in the presentation of this unexpected product in a familiar environment."
Somewhere in that thicket of verbiage, it becomes clear that the chief interest of 'The Butcher's Bargain' is our ostensible repression, narrowness, and provincialism. Of course this is not confronted through aesthetic quality, but rather through calculated attempts to shock and scandalize. I am pleased to report that the installation did nothing of the sort. Aside from snide comments, the only resistance 'The Butcher's Bargain' encountered was a band of rogues who kept unplugging it, leaching the stench of death into the corridors. Miss Oopik commented, "If someone threw a brick through it, it would be all the more exciting." The more dialogue, the healthier the art world, eh?
I do not think that 'The Butcher's Bargain' is worthless. All art tells us something about the society in which we live, about its psychology and taste. But one need not be a sentimental, moralizing Victorian to understand that we have long since moved away from the idea of art as a civilizing force, reinforcing the value and meaning of culture—art today challenges, subverts, and transgresses those things, and so forth. Rather, I will simply call attention to the limitations of liquefying tissue as social satire. The stench of death, too.
But more to the point, is 'The Butcher's Bargain' really challenging or subverting or transgressing anything? I found it to be characterized more accurately by the qualities of desperation and boredom, an insufferable sense of tedium. Novelty attempts to scandalize have long since lost their shock value, as we're constantly traipsing from one daring new thing to the next. It is difficult to be challenging, subversive, or transgressive when everybody else is too.
Miss Oopik lists Damien Hirst, the Young British Artist, among her influences. Mr. Hirst was awarded the Turner Prize in 1995, as well as a £20,000 purse, for a work called 'Mother and Child, Divided,' which consisted of a bisected cow and her calf suspended in tanks of green formaldehyde. 'Mother and Child, Divided' was later displayed in New York only after Mr. Hirst's original submission was rejected by curators, which featured a dead cow and bull copulating by means of a hydraulic device. There was no formaldehyde involved, the flesh was meant to rot away over the weeks.
N.B.—In 2003, the B.B.C. reported that one of Mr. Hirst's installations in a London gallery—"a pile of beer bottles, coffee cups, and overflowing ashtrays"—was disposed of by a janitor, who mistook it for trash. The tragedy was devastating, the lot expected to fetch at least £100,000.
But that is neither here nor there. In the strange case of 'The Butcher's Bargain,' we should not reject it offhand in a "visceral and immediate way," but calmly ask: is Miss Oopik really taking risks here? Does the "beauty" of "this unexpected product in a familiar environment" really challenge anything? Does her sculpture really subvert "the product market"? Does it really transgress "the outrageousness of American consumerism"? For instance—in "a perfect world," Miss Oopik remarked, she "would create textiles for haute couture designers." Come again?
What would actually be daring and provocative—truly fraught with risk—would be to produce something that is not challenging, subversive, or transgressive. Because who's doing that today? (At Dartmouth, risks are managed.)
While the contemporary avant-garde might deserve obloquy, that would only betray susceptibility to manipulation. Perhaps the only appropriate response to arrant nonsense is antinomianism. So do I want to be challenged, subverted, or transgressed? In a word, no.
We're all white-hot about the injustices of American consumerism. Consider the systematic cruelty our society inflicts on plant life every day, when more than a trillion plants are slaughtered just so we can eat them. The industrialized genocide of these living, feeling, photosynthesizing beings in this age of corporate factory farming is carried out on a grotesque scale. Crops are treated like machines and held in bondage from germination. They are crammed together on overcrowded fields, their affliction ending only when they are put to the scythe or pulled under the thresher.
In the interests of the humane treatment of vegetables, my readers should forsake 'traditional' textiles—even haute couture ones—and instead employ common-sense items like leather shoes, down jackets, and alligator-skin tarps. A poultice of ivory tusk makes for a serviceable toothpaste. And mink hide beats two-ply.
Moreover, all should adhere to a diet based entirely on animal products—on the meats, the fish, the milks, the eggs, and the cheeses, on the butters and the other churnables. Remember, rendered beef tallow will give tang and smack to any dish. Bold entrees like panda bisque, orang-utan turnover, plover au jus, or a platter of succulent penguin sirloins will be the piece de resistance of any dinner party. In my experience endangered species are most delicious.
While we are all hard at work challenging, subverting, and transgressing the horrors of cruel plant servitude, make the compassionate, healthy choice yourself—make meat your daily bread.