SANTIAGO (Reuters) - Last year, Chilean-born artist Marco Evaristti mixed fat removed from his body by liposuction with ground beef to make meatballs, which he fried in olive oil and displayed in a public gallery.
This year, he plans to climb Western Europe’s highest mountain, Mont Blanc on the French-Italian border, color the summit pink and declare it an independent state, with himself as president.
His work has been slammed as disgusting, publicity-seeking and immoral but Evaristti says he is simply trying to highlight some of the double standards he sees in the world around him.
“What I’m trying to do with these works is to give society a jolt and make it ask questions,” the 44-year-old said in a telephone interview from Denmark, where he lives with his wife and children.
“And it can answer those questions, and in that way maybe we can be a little better as human beings.”
Evaristti’s meatballs piece consists of 13 tins of the meat on a long table, in an echo of Christ’s last supper.
He says the work is about the sanctity of the body and an unhealthy modern obsession with food and weight loss.
“Firstly, I want to show people that meatballs made with my fat are no more disgusting than the meatballs you buy in the supermarket,” he said.
What a crazy little dude. I sure hope he’s going to eat those meatballs while atop Mont Blanc, and declare it the national food of his little pink mountaintop state.
EDIT: … wouldn’t he just have to paint the tip red? It’s a Blanc/White mountain… the colors would melt together to form pink, anyway.
JEEZ. Artistes! I would never want to smell a perfume made by this guy!
Quick, how many times have we (in our separate lives) tried to define the word or concept of ART, albeit under the influence?
THIS did not come up..
What happened to painting pretty bowls of fruit or lovely nudes with luscious bodies? Now they paint toilets and flush, sheeesh..
This quest for individuality is getting really old, don’t you all think? Enough with jolting the society, already. If this society gets any more jolt, we’ll all spontaneously explode from all this crap.
Meanwhile, across ye olde ponde in Merrye Englande:
LONDON - A British artist has eaten chunks of a Corgi dog, the breed favored by Queen Elizabeth II, live on radio (on radio ?, you bother to eat fried dog on radio ? ) to protest against the royal family’s treatment of animals.
Mark McGowan, 37, said he ate “about three bites” of the dog meat, cooked with apples, onions and seasoning, to highlight what he called Prince Philip’s mistreatment of a fox during a hunt by the Queen’s husband in January.
“It was pretty disgusting,” McGowan said of the meal, which he ate while appearing on a London radio station on Tuesday. Yoko Ono, another guest on the show, also tried the meat.
“I’ve never tasted anything like it — it was grey and had a very funny smell. It was horrible,”
) to protest against the royal family’s treatment of animals.