Hi everyone
This (below) is clipped from one of the articles in the
Postmodern
Culture Mag that I sent through to the list yesterday. It
put me off my food for a day....
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/12.3rojas.html
Anyone else find it? I'd be interested in hearing your
reactions to this one.
My theory is that this sort of art is created purely for its
shock value and to gain attention in the art world. A
publicity stunt. As in Parr's arm chopping & lip stiching,
Whiteley's Christie series, Maplethorpe in general and the
'Piss Christ' controversy, to name a few.
Or does it better fit on the category of snuff films?
Josephine
<snip>
Specifically, the photos were taken as
part of a performance entitled "Eating People" (or
"Man-Eater") [shiren] performed
on 17 October 2000 in Shanghai by the 30-year-old
avant-garde performance artist
Zhu Yu (see Figure 1). One widely publicized report
quotes Zhu as saying that "to
create Man-eater, he said he cooked the corpses of
babies that had been stolen from
a medical school. Zhu admitted that the meat obtained
from the bodies tasted bad,
and said he had vomited several times while eating it.
However, he said, he had to do
it 'for art's sake'" ("Baby-Eating").
8.In public comments he made at the time of the
performance, Zhu Yu sought to
address the significance of the scandalous nature of
the his act, while at the same time
attempting to relativize the social and cultural
assumptions which make it appear
scandalous in the first place:
One question that always stymies us--that is,
why cannot people eat people?
Is there a commandment in man's religion in
which it is written that we cannot eat people?
In what country is there a law against eating
people? It's simply morality. But, what is
morality? Isn't morality simply something that
man whimsically changes from time to time based
on his/her own so-called needs of human being
in the course of human progress.
From this we might thus conclude:
So long as it can be done in a way that does
not commit a crime, eating people is not
forbidden by any of man or societies laws or
religions; I herewith announce my intention and
my aim to eat people as a protest against
mankind's moral idea that he/she cannot eat
people. (qtd. in Hua 192)
<snip>
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