In exhibit devoted to meat, some offerings are a cut above
"Flesh and meat are life," said the great, dark British painter Francis Bacon. "If I paint red meat as I paint bodies, it is just because I find it very beautiful."
Beautiful, bloody, nourishing, disgusting. No matter how you look at it, meat is packed with meaning. "Meat After Meat Joy" at Pierre Menard Gallery features artists who work with meat as material, subject, or both. Curator Heide Hatry organized it as a follow-up to her 2006 "Skin" show. The exhibit, while spotty, is viscerally unnerving and occasionally daring.
The title references "Meat Joy," a 1964 performance staged by feminist artist Carolee Schneemann, seen here as a projected black-and-white video. It is part orgy, part feast, part epic struggle as men and women smooch and wrestle amid dead fish, plucked chickens, sausages, and wet paint. I expect Schneemann intended to capture the abandon that comes with passion, whether for flesh or fowl, and perhaps 44 years ago "Meat Joy" shocked, titillated, and provoked its audience. Today it's just unintentionally comic, almost slapstick.
Zhang Huan's iconic 2002 performance "My New York," in another video projection, makes a fascinating parallel. Zhang's work, like Schneemann's, is ritualistic: It begins with men bearing the artist on a shrouded plank on their shoulders. They remove the white silken shroud, and Zhang emerges, clad in a suit of red meat that mimics the bulging muscles of a superhero. He walks through the streets of New York, handing doves to passersby. In "Meat Joy," the meat stood as a symbol for the object of desire; here, it has to do with might, masculinity, and protection. "My New York" is funny, but it's also poignant, made the year after 9/11.
Outside of Zhang and Schneemann, Betty Hirst is the edgiest artist here. At the opening, she had several sculptures made of raw meat on display. She depicted, among other things, a baby, an American flag (with lard for the white stripes), and male and female genitalia. Photos of all are still up, and each piece has a different resonance - the genitals, again, have to do with desire; the flag might comment on war or the meat industry. One flummoxing piece, "Book," remains on view, sealed in a case and rotting. Certainly, the flag would have had more punch, had it been left to rot.
Other works include David Raymond's realist paintings of floating cuts of meat, which should have more to say, and Anthony Fisher's expressionistic paintings, for which his model was a lamb carcass; he builds up and slashes the paint over his panel to create a ghoulish portrait. Tamara Kostianovsky's soft sculptures, huge sides of beef made from her own clothing and linens, have a weirdly comfy aura about them.
Hatry pointed out in an interview that while skin is about whom we present to the world, meat is what you have left when identity is stripped away. It represents us at our most essential, and most vulnerable, and that's bound to be disturbing.
Slow motion
Schneemann would probably appreciate the feminist spin of the works of Swedish video artist Maria Friberg, who has two short, humorous videos being projected at MIT's Media Test Wall 24 hours a day. "Embedded" puts black-clad men in a feminine, round bed under a fluffy white comforter; slowly, the bed seems to birth the men, who slide out onto the floor and wriggle away in different directions. The men come across as helpless and larval, but nonetheless striking out on their own.
For "Commoncause," Friberg wrapped scores of half-inflated basketballs in black velvet and set them bouncing down the steps of the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. They look like tribbles, the furry, cute, and endlessly reproducing critters in a classic "Star Trek" episode, and like the tribbles, there's something mindless about them. They recall large groups of people, like commuters clambering down stairs to the subway. Both videos are purposefully repetitive and slow. They're almost clinical, making the viewer an observer of behavior and habit, yet they're hypnotically beautiful.
Portrait season
The summer group show at Samson Projects is what a group show should be: thematically tight, with artists from near and far. All the paintings feature people. That's a broad topic, but it makes for a moving, humane, and often puckish exhibit. It's exciting to see the spare untitled painting of a man sticking out his tongue by local artist Steve Locke hanging beside the great Alice Neel's deft and telling portrait "Stephen Shepherd."
Ida Applebroog's endearing, appalling "Brian" is nearby, depicting a lumpy and noseless fellow, in a digitally crafted photographic print that Applebroog shot of a sculpture she made with hands crippled by arthritis. Balint Zsako's watercolor and ink works seem to have sprung from myths, with the figures delicate and translucent in watercolor surrounded by hard-edged foliage in ink. The exhibit has been hung salon-style, with more than 40 works in a small space; it's a marvelous buffet.
