Animal rights activists have described as "sick" a live art performance involving a naked woman cradling a dead pig for four hours.Uh, okay.
Kira O'Reilly's show, called "Inthewrongplaceness" will be performed at the Newlyn Art Gallery in Penzance, southwest England, later Friday.
…On the gallery's Web site, O'Reilly calls the performance "a slow crushing dance with a pig for one person at a time."
"The work left me with an undercurrent of pigginess, unexpected fantasies of mergence and interspecies metamorphoses began to flicker into my consciousness."
I read about this awhile ago in British papers, but now it’s making the news in the US. One thing that seems left out of a lot of the US coverage is that she got the pig at a butcher. It wasn’t killed specifically for her performance, so I don’t really have any objection from an animal cruelty standpoint once it’s already dead. Whether it gets served up as bacon or used in a live art installation doesn’t really matter. (That’s an issue to take up with pig farmers.) My objection is, uh, aesthetic. I’m all for the “unexpected fantasies of mergence and interspecies metamorphoses” (I guess?), but maybe with less nudity and deadness.
(Picture of the exhibit below the fold. Not work safe, unless you work at an art gallery, porn shop, or abattoir.)
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