when to say when

This picture disturbs me and makes me sad. I don't think people have a right to take pictures like these, it is so voyeuristic. There is some great discussion about this kind of thing except under different circumstances on Richard Renaldi's Photography Blog.

"Photographers take pictures of an injured man during clashes believed to be linked to recent anti-foreigner violence in Reiger Park informal settlement in South Africa on May 20, 2008."

Wim Delvoye

Wim Delvoye has been tattooing pigs since the 1990s. In recent years it seems that more artists are killing animals in the name of art. What are your thoughts on this project? Should a line be drawn between branding animals for slaughter and consumption and tattooing and slaughtering animals in the name of art? What say you?

i copy and pasted that sentence. In the name of art??? what a strange phrase.

Bringing Home the Bacon: Wim Delvoye ArtAsiaPacific, pp. 154-159 30 September 2007

Interview with Delvoye and Paul Laster
SPERONE WESTWATER

WIM DELVOYE: I started in 1992, did one or two pigs in 1994 and in 1995 I tattooed 15, but they were dead pigs; I got the skins from slaughterhouses. I started to tattoo live pigs in 1997. I was interested in the idea of the pig as a bank – a piggy bank. I didn’t have the concept formulated yet, but I decided to place some small drawings onto these living organisms and let them grow. From the beginning, there was the idea that the pig would literally grow in value, but I also knew that they were considered pretty worthless. It’s hard to make something as prestigious as art from a pig. It’s not kosher."

"In the early works, the imagery was as banal and trivial as possible: skulls, hearts, crosses. It was an encyclopedia of trivial things. I wasn’t really interested in the pig’s anatomy. But once I started tattooing live pigs, I was forced to take an interest in their anatomy, and that affected the composition. I gained new respect for the animals and began making tattoos for them. For example, the tattoo would follow the butt and shoulders and, as the pig grew, it became paler while the lines became thicker."

"There are two schools of thought about how the pigs should be exhibited. Some people like the flat skins hanging on the wall because you still see bits of the head and legs. Others prefer the hairy skins stretched like a canvas. If I have a complete skin with hooves and ears intact, and I like the tattoo, then I stuff it. It becomes more sculptural that way. I used to have the stuffed pigs standing, but now I prefer them sitting, like a stone lion outside a Chinese restaurant." ‘Because they grow fast and they are so much better to tattoo than fish.’

Controversy!
The artist is killing animals for art. Well, other people kill them for food and that is unnecessary too. I think this work is very powerful and full of arguments, reasons, meanings and so it seems contradictions. I think Delvoye has taken it as a fact of life that these pigs would have died anyway so is treating them as a commodity but for novelty value rather than nourishment. These pigs would have lead a much better life than those we buy as bacon in the supermarket. They even get coal in winter when they're cold (bad!) Personally I wouldn't kill animals for the sake of art but criticism from people that eat meat is meaningless to me. love the tattoos of disney, Louis Vuitton and other 'iconic' things. Delvoye is a vegetarian.

"Some designs I try for the first time on people and, if they work, I will surely re-create the tattoo on a pig."

SO many people have the courage to say that this is cruelty online (as always). Calling tattoos mutilation! And saying it isn't art. haha. People are so quick to condemn him for allowing these animals to be slaughtered for their skin. Fucking morons. Even after they are dead these pigs are revered and on display, thats kind of sick but i think it's better than just being made into a ball or a piece of furniture. It is the people that purchase the pigs that decide to kill them, and the artist says that none of them keep the animal as a pet. Some let the pig die of old age, emphasis on the word let. I don't think that "it's better than" or a least he's not...: are justification for tattooing the pigs. I'm confused. You can never really do the animal's justice. Keeping them as a pet, releasing them into the wild, theres a form of cruelty involved in everything and it can't be avoided unless you were to go back hundreds of years and never eat the pigs in the first place. fuuuck i dont know. This work is powerful and i like it I'll leave it at that.

Tattooing, skin, life, permanence, animals, commodity; Delvoye's work contains many ideas that interest me and that i want to have within my own work. I've decided now that i don't really want to deal specifically with the animal issues and make it more about the female body and perceptions around that. I will still draw comparisons between humans and animals but will not let this take over my work. I think my work will be much stronger than last year with the added elements of feminism and the abject.

Delvoye's work Cloaca is shitty i love it, commodifying poos, not even real poos. thats the interesting part. He sells cloaca paraphenalia including tshirts and key chains. His shit is highly sought after.

alterations explorations in images and composition

powder puff. This nicely formed little ball looks a lot less menacing than the unruly mass of tangled hair it began as. It's more inviting to touch because it seems to have a shape and hence is made with purpose/intent and is not discarded body waste.
green. The fingers are posed weirdly, like waiting for something rather than grasping at the edge of the bath.
hair could probably do with a wash/cut/dye but i can't be flucked
oooh a vignette. I love the reflection you can see in the metal of the bathroom sink. There is a lot i think that can be explored in this room with the mirrors and other shiny surfaces. Very feminist and abject, not so much the political activist path I was heading towards.
blurry what could this be?? I like the warmth and familiarity of this photo. I blurred it more because I didn't want it to be too identifiable.
dead skin, decay, death, waste. These tones convey that feeling and transform the body into something unearthly. Churr photoshop i heart you.

your skin

"Oddly enough each animal has just enough brains to tan its own hide. Brain tanning produces a beautiful buckskin and it does require a bit of work to produce it."-SOURCE


WOOOOAH! That site describes a few ways in which you can tan a hide and gives a few tips and methods on preventing it from shrinking. Apparently the tanning process destroys genetic information, that is a very interesting point when it comes to issues of identity and ownership. I found another website which must is quite funny Human leather Exclusive. Haha. You can even find some library books that are bound in human leather. The reason being that it was cheaply available at the time (late 1800's), durable and waterproof. The memoirs of George Walton, a highway man are bound in his own skin, but most of the books bound in human skin are medical books. So it can be done, I'm just unsure how different it will be using living flesh.

Nicola Costantino

Nicola Costantino works with leather and latex to create what looks similar to human skin because of the nipples! creepy and so cool! Her website is so great I love the little pig that navigates the page. One review i read by Roberta Smith denouncing her work as tasteless and gimmicky. It seems a little that way to me, a bit too obvious and a 'one liner' but nice ideas all the same.

150 words concept/ areas of interest

I want to explore the relationship between humans and animals in terms of skin and other things produced by the body that can be fetishised and commoditized. I will explore ways in which you can adorn your body and ways you can use your body for adornment. I am interested in the permanence of acts performed on the body, cutting hair, tattoos, skinning animals, shearing them etc. The way we are repulsed by images of human bodies at times, bare skin, hair is fascinating yet to wear the skin of another being is normal and not something we can relate to. I will look at Abject art and feminism and artists that deal with this such as Kiki Smith and Cindy Sherman. Lacan's theories of the Gaze and Maurice Merleau Ponty's phenomenology of perception will be some things i look at theoretically.

Mona Hatoum

"Keffieh," by Mona Hatoum, (1993-99), human hair on cotton, 1993-1999, collection Peter Norton, Santa Monica

Mona Hatoum uses Human hair as well as images and footage of her own body in her work. In the above piece she has interwoven pieces of women's hair into a traditional Arab head scarf worn only by males. Issues of gender and suppression surround this piece. There is something beautiful and at the same time grotesque about wearing the hair of another human as decoration and I find this ibject quite unsettling and repulsive. The use of hair makes the work quite intimate and is a familiar thing as we all have it although it shifts to being uncomfortable when taken out of context and removed from our bodies.

"The macho style is an externalized response to the powers of domination; but it is also a form of domination turned inward, within the community poised against the presence of women, whose voices are either repressed, or sublimated in the cause of struggle. Hatoum's feminized headscarf reveals this disavowal of the place of women and re-inserts their point of view through the embroidered strands of hair that hang loose beyond the boundary, breaking the pictorial grid of the material in the process of redefining the symbolic surface of political struggle." source

A series of etchings called 'Hair, there and everywhere' are collections of hair which look as though some have been arranged into patterns and others just laid there. You can make out images yourself and imagine what creatres could be hiding amongst the interweaving curling lines but you can't quite tell if she had intentionally made images amongst the hair.This work is very intense and involves a lot of human hair, I would love to know who it belonged to and how she obtained it because this has a lot of implications. I likt to think that it is her own, that in a way she suffered for her art and what she believes in, putting a part of herself into the work. This seems to have been the case with previous works such as 'Corps étranger' (1994) or ‘Deep Throat’ (1996), installations that use endoscopic journies through the interior landscape of the artist’s own body. This work also used leather and beeswax, materials from animals in conjunction with human derived material. The leather is durable, the human hair seems fragile, not holding the suitcases together, awkwardly fumbling across the gap.This work 'Van Gogh's Back' (1995) is very light hearted and fun. It reminds me of playing in the bath with shampoo in my hair and making fun shapes. I love her different uses of hair and the Human body, all of them have vastly different effects on me wether that be repulsion, fascination or just very thought provoking.