MEAT AFTER MEAT JOY

Half naked people tossing a dead chicken

By CHRISTIAN HOLLAND

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Nathan Censullo managed to singlehandedly lift half of a bovine carcass, wrapped in a clear plastic sheet, out of his pickup truck. It was one of the hottest days of the summer, but he carried the carcass across the street and up the stairs of the Pierre Menard Gallery, where he assumes role as director. Without wholly denigrating Censullo’s physical fitness, it is safe to conjecture that the object in question, despite its likeness, was not real meat. He carried a sculpture titled Abacus (2008) by artist Tamara Kostianovsky, composed mostly of polyester stuffing and bits of fabric rendered in a scale model of a cattle carcass. Kostianovsky is one of 10 artists in a show titled Meat After Meat Joy at the Pierre Menard Gallery, which opened June 21st. Curator Heide Hatry, who curated another anatomically oriented exhibition at Pierre Menard in 2006 titled Skin, takes that body reference a few steps deeper to concentrate on the denser, bloodier flesh we call meat. Meat After Meat Joy is an experiment in meat as a medium. Hatry doesn’t want the meat in the show to be seen as a spectacle, however. To her, meat symbolizes “annihilation,” because its only reference to the organism whence it came is that organism’s death. There may be something lost in the meaning of 28.1 billion pounds of beef, which the USDA reports the United States consumed in 2007. That is 28.1 billion pounds of flesh that was sliced and sawed from the bones of cattle with the highest efficiency available by today’s technology. Hatry chose artists that exploit meat’s physical qualities to transcend its rather bland existence. Zhang Huan’s Meat Suit (2002), a full-body suit comprised of raw beef resembling the cartoonish physique of a body builder, is a metaphor for the vulnerability of anything stretched beyond its capacity. Betty Hirst’s phallic Homage to Schwarzkogler (2005) appears to be a rolled-up piece of meat, vaguely resembling a penis and referencing performance artist Rudolf Schwarzkogler’s rumored death by penis amputation. The work plays on one of the many nicknames for male genitalia, but also strips meaning by taking away its form and recognized sensual feature—its skin. Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964), a performance the gallery will project throughout the exhibition, features a group of half-naked men and women rolling around outdoors while tossing about and biting a dead chicken. It is also the work from which Hatry implies the other works in the show owe their aesthetic: They are “after” Meat Joy. Meat Joy’s daunting inaccessibility could intimidate many visitors to the gallery, but the very spectacle of meat, which Hatry wants to diffuse, may prove welcoming. “Meat is such a wonderful aesthetic subject,” says Phil Dmochowski, the gallery’s assistant director. “Its textures, color variance, striations and marbling are very seductive, really. There's such a great history of painting meat,” he says, mentioning Rembrandt, Van Gogh and … Bacon.

MEAT AFTER MEAT JOY

UNTIL SUNDAY 7.20.08

GALLERY HOURS SUN-SAT 12PM-8PM

PIERRE MENARD GALLERY

10 ARROW ST., HARVARD SQ.

CAMBRIDGE

617.868.2033

PIERREMENARDGALLERY.COM