Dali House

Possibly the most amazing thing about Wolfgang Flatz dropping a dead cow from a helicopter five years ago is that the howls of outrage drowned out the trappings of the performance, the point of it all and the noise of the chopper itself.

Or maybe that’s not really surprising at all. The trappings were a load of tripe, there was no clear point to it, and the copter was no louder than any urban jackhammer.

It was in all the papers. The Austrian was making a statement about consumerism (or something). The City of Berlin, which is perhaps a tad liberal nowadays after being home to the last century’s greatest control freak, was asked to have its cops cordon off a major section of posh Prenzlauer Berg so that thousands of people could watch Flatz – naked but for a film of blood and suspended from the helicopter with his arms outstretched crucifixion-style – ferry the dead cow to a point 45 metres above an abandoned building and then drop it.

Fine, the city councillors said with a flurry of tick marks on sheets of paper. Anything else?

Yes, the cow will be filled with fireworks and explode on impact. Oh, and there will be music. Loud music.

Fine, the city councillors said. More ticking.

Patrizia Strunz, a feisty animal-rights activist at the ripe old age 13, objected in court, but was overruled. Another animal lover warned of copycat animal, er, droppings – people throwing their dogs and cats out of windows in the name of “art”.

This is a dead animal, said a city official, and a dead animal is basically, like, food. Council had okayed the dropping of food in this case, so as long as the cow is gutted and checked for mad-cow disease, cue the chopper.

Dub-dub-dub-dub-dub-dub-dub — here comes Wolfgang! It’s July 19, 2001, and what a show, folks! “Fleisch” (”Meat”) is about to begin.

The cow (actually a bull named Bodo) is swaddled in something like butcher paper, complete with something like blood dripping off it. Flatz peels off the sheets and there he is, butt naked, as is the cow, headless and skinned. Flatz goes spread-eagled. The band kicks up some heavy industrial wrenching of gears.

Cables are released, and down comes Elsie. But there’s no explosion or skyrockets, just a bid of a pop-pop-thud, a muffled grumble somewhere inside the old building. The crowd groans.

A string quartet kicks into “The Blue Danube Waltz” and four couples in formal attire dance in the alcoves of a nearby building.

The End.

Wolfgang Flatz, now 54 and old enough to know better, likes to get naked for art, but who doesn’t? He’s been a naked human doormat, a naked human dartboard and a naked human bell clapper, all of which hurt a great deal but didn’t slow him down a bit.

Something a little more conventional from the Austrian cow dangler, though disconcerting just the same, as is his website, a beast to get into if you’re the least bit Flash-resistant.

He also did a photo series with his Great Dane, Hitler, for an exhibition called “Hitler Wird Kastriert” (”Hitler Will Be Gelded”), and sure enough, the pooch’s balls ended up in a jar.

So what, says millionaire shark-embalmer Damien Hirst. So what, says another Turner Prize champion, Martin Creed, toying with the light switch in his empty room.

Yes, indeed, so what. The website Chuck Shepherd’s Newsoftheweird has dozens of anecdotes about artists prodding away at the boundaries of taste and reason. I don’t know if the site is not longer being updated, but they a lot of the items seem to be from 2001, which was a good year for terror, and evidently for terrifying art as well.

In Turkey, the month after 9/11, a pair of bakers won a prize with a five-foot-tall cake topped by two skyscrapers, one with a hole near the top and the other with a jet made of icing embedded in it.

“Fertilising the earth” was the rationale behind a Christmas nativity scene by Spanish artist Antoni Miralda featuring nuns, angels, Santa Claus and the pope, all with butts bared and pooping.

Perhaps New York’s Chrissy Conant was thus inspired to exhibit 13 eggs from her own ovaries floating in silicone at a Connecticut gallery.

Yugoslavian Marina Abramovic, then 56, occupied a New York City gallery for several days doing nothing but drinking water and being stared at while “carrying on all bodily functions” in full view.

An English arts council granted writer Valerie Laws 2,000 quid so she could see whether literature and quantum mechanics would unite when she painted the words to a poem on a flock of sheep in the hopes they would come up with a different poem.

Cue the choppers.