Art of Now: Raw Meat
Seriously...
BBC
4.1 • 885 Ratings
🗓️ 12 May 2020
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Susan Bright gets bloody and fleshy with sculptors, performance artists and filmmakers who use animal parts as their raw material.
Images of meat in still life paintings have been a staple in art for centuries, but why are artists now incorporating animal flesh, offal and skin into their work. What draws them to this macabre material and what does it enable them to say?
Photographer Pinar Yolacan makes meat dresses for her models, frills from raw chicken, bodices from placenta and sleeves from tripe. Riffling through butchers stocks, she makes the perfect outfit for her models, designing and moulding it to them like a second skin.
In a high-vaulted church, Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva hangs gigantic curtains of white pigs fat that look like long sheets of lace. Walking down through them, they rustle and reek as you feel encased inside an animal’s stomach.
Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr sculpt with live tissue making a semi-living leather jacket, growing wings from pigs and hosting a dinner party with lab grown meat. While Marianna Simnett violently slices open a cow’s udder reorganising our thinking about the body and gender. And with a cast of 100 performers, Hermann Nitsch's theatrical performances involve climbing inside carcasses, bathing in blood and having sex with offal.
Their work is shocking, disturbing and fun, making us face our responsibility to animals, each other and the planet and giving us a language to talk about the challenges ahead.
We lick our lips and feed on their creativity.
Producer: Sarah Bowen
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This was an impregnable fortress. The only way you get out was in a wooden box. |
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| 0:12.5 | The IRA inmates who found a way. |
| 0:14.5 | I'm Carlo Gableer and I'll be navigating a path |
| 0:19.5 | through the disturbing inside story of the biggest jailbreak in British and Irish history. |
| 0:25.0 | The narrative that they want is that this is a big achievement by them. |
| 0:28.5 | Escape from the maze, listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:35.0 | BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
| 0:39.0 | Hi, I'm Riana Dylan, |
| 0:42.0 | and you're listening to another seriously great |
| 0:44.3 | podcast from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:49.2 | I'm Susan Bright, and I'm an art historian and curator, and I've recently put together an exhibition on food and photography |
| 0:56.6 | I've been unpacking giant images of hamburgers |
| 0:59.7 | hanging photographs of spam |
| 1:02.0 | selecting videos of performances with fish and chicken. |
| 1:06.5 | Images of meat have been a stablin art for centuries. In painting, |
| 1:10.8 | heaps of hunted animals are piled high in Baroque splendour. |
| 1:14.6 | Rabbits and birds hung abundantly in aristocratic kitchens. |
| 1:18.8 | Artists have long been fascinated by representing meat, but how are they now working with it as raw material? |
| 1:24.7 | It's an increasingly politicized and contested subject, but sculptors, performers and |
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