Film(s)

After discussing with Cheryl my intentions of COP3 studies and research I decided to use some of the offal I had bought to eat and video as part of my project and ongoing development for COP3.

Facial reactions are the main indicator of disgust. This is why I filmed myself

(I prepared and cooked the meats following recipes on the internet.) I was not willing to eat raw meat.

Too clich'e.

HEART

 

KIDNEY

 

LIVER

 

 

 

Artist: Julie Usel

Julie Usel is a London-based contemporary jeweller born in Geneva. She has just graduated from the Royal College of Art, London, with a Master in Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Metalwork & Jewellery. She completed her BA (Hons) in jewellery at the University of Art and Design, Geneva, after having spent one year in a jewellery school in Florence; Le Arti Orafe. After graduation she launched a collection of laser-cut stainless steel rings called “Trace of Lace” with a prize from the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation (Rolex). In 2008 she won a Swiss Federal Design Grant with her “Generic Pearls” collection and came to London for a six-month artist residency. She exhibited in different galleries and museums including Talente (Munchen), the SO gallery (London and Switzerland), the Museum of Design and Contemporary Applied Arts of Lausanne (Switzerland), the Museum of Art and History (Geneva). She especially likes to experiment with different materials and to figure out how to manipulate them as there is no prior knowledge established. Since she entered the Royal College of Art she expresses her feeling through different mediums concerning the creative process and the role anxiety plays within it. Potato Rings, 2005. Carved, Dried and Dyed Potatoes. Goats Shits, Cotton Thread. Goats Shits, Silver Studs. Holy shit! (2008) Sometimes I want to be a housewife. Steak Necklace. Chicken Heart Necklace. Gut Feeling Polymer Clay, Leather. Pig Skin Dried Skin, nylon. Getting to the Gold - Meat: Beef Meat, 18kt Gold, Carved Pearl \ No Function / No Sense? (Exhibition at DepotBasel in August and September 2012.) At the same time as “Musterzimmer” Depot Basel shows also the exhibition “No Function – No Sense”. Expatriate swiss designers and artists designed objects without function and reflect thereby their self-understanding and deal among other issues with the (supposed?) boundaries between art and design, with function and context and with the relation between beauty and purpose. Three objects who dream to be jewellery. What are these ambiguous objects? Conceptually, visually and aesthetically, they are rings. They look like rings; they have the size and the preciousness of rings. Everything about them evokes impressions of jewellery, but they cannot be worn. They bear the concept of rings but do not have the function. Then what are they? Do we even need to categorize them? Maybe the function of these absurd little things is to frustrate us in a spirit of vengeance because they themselves are not what they would like to be… Untitled 1: Beef meat and zircon

Artist: Jana Sterbak

Chair Apollinaire, 1996. Flank Steak and Black Button Thread on Polystyrene structure. Distraction,1992. Cloth, Human Hair, Photograph, Text.
Golem: Objects as Sensations 1979- 89. Eight Lead Hearts, Red Spleen Painted Red, Lead Throat, Bronze Stomach, Rubber Stomach, Lead hand, Bronze Tongue, Lead Penis, Bronze Ear and three framed gelatin prints.
 
Trichotilomania I, 1993 Glass, Human Hair.
 
Untitled (For Terry Last), 1993. Fountain Pen, HIV Seroposite Blood, Anticoagulant, Notebook.

Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic, 1987. Flank Steak, Mannequin, Salt Thread, Colour photograph on paper.

Artist: Sarah-Jane Lynagh

sarah-jane lynagh is a young photographer who explores large themes in her work from a personal perspective. her photographs are characterized by the use of unconventional materials such as parts of dead animals, which she turns into props. these props are used to augment portraits, where the body is the main concern. ‘her intent is to turn the body inside out and subvert the role of the meat making it an attachment to the outer body in order to evoke feelings that something is habitual yet out of place and threatening.’
 
‘silence 2’, 2008
 
‘mute’, 2007 ‘untitled’, 2008
 
‘I entered nothing and nothing entered me’, 2008
‘dear darkness, won’t you cover me again’, 2008

Artist: Heide Hatry

About

New York-based German artist Heide Hatry is best known for her body-related performances and her work employing animal flesh and organs. She is often described as a neo-conceptualist and, to the extent that the "space" in which her work operates transcends, transgresses, or transforms the normal relationship of artist to both audience and work, this is accurate – her work does not reside in the pictorial plane, the sculptural space, or filmic time. Among her fundamental preoccupations are identity, gender roles (and specifically what it means to be a woman), the nature of aesthetic experience and the meaning of beauty, the effects of knowledge upon perception, the human exploitation of the natural world, and the social oblivion that permits atrocity to persist in our midst. 

Spicula linguarum anitum, New York, NY 2011
 
Spisulae solidissimae sculptiles, pars conchae luteae, New York, NY 2011
pisulae solidissimae, cilia cervorum, oesophagus capreae, Cervi, Dallas, TX 2011
Linguae saeta cervorum, sanguis coagulatus, Dallas, TX 2011
Aures porcorum, Harlem, 2008
 
Becci anitum inferiores, Hong Kong, China 2011
 
Vagina vaccae, penis arietis , Dallas, TX 2011

The flowers depicted in Not a Rose are photographic documentations of sculptures composed mainly out of animal organs, posed in different natural environments. The photographs make the flowers appear to be “real,” so real that it is quite difficult to see that they are, in fact, constructions. They are supposed to look like simple snapshots, or at most “art photographs” of flowers. They appear convincing, in part, as a consequence of visual habit and expectation.

Not a Rose began as an innocent question: Why do flowers exert such a strong and immediate emotional impact on me and, I assume, many, if not most, others? Why do we find them so invigorating, so uplifting, calming, and consoling? In my somewhat perverse way, I immediately imagined a scenario that would undermine the normal relationship between human and flower, perceiver and perceived, at first as something of a personal thought experiment, but then as the basis for a more general exploration of aesthetic reception, the sociology/anthropology of beauty, and, always lurking in the background, the whole question of the human exploitation of the natural world.

For some years I have been working with biological materials – animal skin, flesh, and organs – to create art that addresses issues of personal identity, gender roles, appearance and reality, subject and object, the moral, ethical, and political dimensions of meat production and consumption, and a wide range of other topics. The idea of creating flowers out of animal offal was, thus, a quite natural extension of my work in that eccentric medium and seemed to me to be a great way both to cut through the accretion of social determinants of aesthetic reception and to specifically thematize the ways in which codified expectations play a defining role in what we think of as beautiful, or, for that matter, as morally acceptable. I rather think of the idea of beauty as having seemingly incompatible, but quite real, dimensions, similar to the wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. On the one hand, beauty is certainly a universal, and unitary, concept; on the other, it is a social construct, one that changes over time and place. It is utterly useless, and yet it everywhere seems to serve ulterior purposes. The doomed effort to compel these aspects to coincide, or to make one somehow exhaust the other, is at the basis of our distrust of the concept itself, though the very tension is what I believe actually keeps it vital.

The flowers with which we normally surround ourselves are dead detached sex organs from living things, bred explicitly to serve our pleasure, not our sustenance. The animal materials of which the sculptural flowers of the present collaboration have been created undeniably derive from living creatures bred solely to die for our sustenance, but I use only the “worthless” waste products of that process, that is, they serve no, or only an incidental, role in alimentation – lungs, hearts, stomachs, livers, tongues, bladders and, yes, sex organs as well. Their presence excites abhorrence in us, while that of the defiled plant confers joy.

The biological and social purpose of even the demurest flower is seduction. My flowers are also intended to seduce, but only to seduce the unthinking into thought and the thinking into imagining. In creating images of beautiful flowers from animal parts that most of us would find impossible to consume (even though we eat the flesh of those very same animals, most of them victims of mechanized mass slaughter) without a thought. I want subtly to remind my viewer that his or her every act of mindless consumption is an abdication of our moral and ethical substance, to arouse reflection where there had been mere reflex. We want to be seduced by beauty, to permit difficult questions to remain lingering unasked, hidden behind its veil.

The titles of the artwork, the names of the flowers, have been “scientized” – they are called by simple Latin names reflecting the materials from which they have been formed, for example, Aures Porcorum (pig ears) – so as to minimize even the effects of linguistic association. Of course, the question of historical, social, or gender-specific substrates remains largely untouched by this method. The tension or aporia created by looking upon something beautiful which is, in fact, for most viewers something repulsive, is the locus for my collaborators’ thoughts and meditations for the book:

I have invited 101 colleagues in the fields of anthropology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, philology, botany, neuroscience, art history, gender studies, physics, chemistry, sensory studies, etc., as well as poets and writers to addressed my questions from a plurality of scientific and humane perspectives, . Each uses the experience and concept of the flower and my own “Flowers of Evil” as a platform for their writing. The result is a diverse and extensive, inherently rhizomatic network of image and thought, which interrogates the very process of aesthetic perception and reception itself.

British Offal

   I have realised most of the worlds unusual delicacies tend to be offal.

   Which is an advantage to my studies as my COP3 is surrounded by the idea of disgust. I'm taking my study of the human body as a disgusting object to the animal body as being a disgusting object.

   Even to this day we continue to eat things such as steak and kidney pie in Britain - I can remember my mother telling me they were mushrooms at a small age. Being a true carnivore I am open to eating offal and have eaten the likes of kidney, liver, tripe, haggis, black pudding and my beloved dripping spread (meat juices and fat.)


mmm... blood-cleaning organ pie...

   Just a quick search will allow me to see what organs we actually do eat in Britain today -

• Haggis - Sheep's stomach stuffed with liver, heart, lungs and rolled oats.
• Faggots - Ground pig's offal.
• Steak and Kidney Pie - Veal or Beef kidneys.
• Brawn - Tissue found on an animals skull, cooked, chilled in gelatin.
• Black Pudding - Congealed pigs blood with oatmeal.
• Melton Mowbray Pork Pies (jelly) - Pigs Trotters
• Ox Tongue
• Tripe

Delicacies from around the World

Tuna Eyeballs (Japan) These are commonly eaten throughout China and Japan. The tuna eyes themselves are quite large and are sold by the pound. They are typically served fried and eaten with white rice and soy sauce. To cook, just boil and add any seasoning you please. We prefer Sriracha. Fried Brain Sandwich (USA) You read that correctly. This delicacy is made up of sliced calf brain, which is said to be quite tasty. Served on either a roll or hero, you are going to need a whole lot of bread to handle this meat. While this dish has been banned throughout most of the United States, for certain mad cow disease reasons, you can get one in the Ohio River Valley — the hicks are still whipping these bad boys up there. Fugu (Japan) Commonly known as the puffer fish, Fugu is one of the most lethal foods on the list. Filled with the poisonous tetrodotoxin, this can kill a man if ingested improperly. Some chefs are known to actually keep a bit of this poison in the fish to cause a light tingling sensation on the mouth and lip. Rocky Mountain Oysters (USA) How much more do you need to dominate a species than by selling its testicles as food? We’re talking about every male’s pride and lifeline here. Derived from the good old USA (and some parts of Canada), these weren’t actually conceptualized in the Rocky Mountains at all. There’s no real clear cut definition for this dish either, as you can get anything from cow, pig and even sheep… balls. All up in your mouth. Yum. Down this with heavy sauce to mask the fact that you’re eating nuts. A-Ping Cambodia A street food favorite in Cambodia, these fried tarantulas aren’t as bad as they seem. Especially when there’s food shortages and your city is infested with the creatures. Then why the hell not chow down on these things? Eat them by hand or on a stick, there is no hiding the fact that you’re eating burnt spiders. Haggis (Scotland) Our good old Scot friends decided to concoct one of the most vile and vomit-inducing dishes of all time with this one. Served in stomach lining, you are eating some heart, liver and of course those delicious lungs. Boil these for about three hours and douse it in salt if you don’t want to yack it everywhere. Yak Penis (China) Goat Head (South Africa) Century Egg (China)

Artist: Mimi Moscow