Dali House

Reading about Chaim Soutine going to a slaughterhouse and dragging a side of beef back to his studio at La Ruche in Paris so he could spent several odorific days painting its pageant of festering colours made me hungry for more, so I called up Rembrandt to order a whole “Slaughtered Ox” and he recommended a few other butchers with brushes.

If you missed the reasoning behind Russian expressionist Soutine’s blood-soaked creativity, so did I, but the basic story is here. Pictured is the result, “Carcass of Beef”, which fetched a fatty £7.8 million at auction earlier this year.

Since then meat’s been mostly a matter of angry art. Gabriela Rivera, at the top of this post and the top of her form, chilled a gallery in Chile a few years ago with her “Silence of the Lambs” impressions.

“My work is a metaphor for the relationship that people have with themselves every day when they look in the mirror,” she said from a cloud of appreciative flies, which couldn’t help also noticing her videos of women urinating in the street and smashing boiled eggs with their hands.

In 1991 Jana Sterbak of Montreal stitched together 50 pounds of raw (but salted!) flank steak and neatly hung the result on a hanger at Canada’s National Gallery. Perhaps on the same wavelength as Rivera, she said her “Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic” was about knowing the difference between vanity and bodily decay.

Some people mailed food scraps to the gallery in protest. Others fired up the barbecue. Sterbak promised another helping in six weeks once the original decomposed.

Not to be outflanked, Belgian Jan Fabre unveiled a “Temples of Meat” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Ghent — three days only, though. He too was on about “the cult of decay and death”, but added that he found meat “a very erotic material”. Something to think about when slipping into his coat made of steaks or snoozing in his tent of Parma bacon on a Porterhouse sleeping bag.

At SurrealCoconut.com you can find “The Meat Gallery – A Garden of Surrealist Sculpture”, thinly sliced beef formed into objets de sandwich in the interest of killing time and saying something rich about “eroticism and mortality”, “sex and death” and “carnage and carnality”.

The sculptures, the website says, are “eroticising new domains of reality normally sterilised by the psychologically (and physically) repressive clutches of our imperialist regime(s). Furthermore, these images are truly surrealist in that they liberate the latent sexuality of everyday human existence …

“It could be said that one of surrealism’s goals is the erotisation of all life, including the inanimate world of utilitarian materials, through a poetic rebellion against our current post-industrial sexual repression.”

Exactly what Rembrandt had in mind when he painted “The Slaughtered Ox” in 1655, sometimes called “The Flayed Ox”, but surely the cow didn’t fret over the distinction.

No, sorry, I’ve got that wrong. Rembrandt just liked the daily changing texture and colours.

“The odd thing is that I don’t think that carcass of meat is one of Rembrant’s great pictures,” Francis Bacon once told an interviewer, “because I don’t think it’s very much like meat. It looks to me like a lump of wax hanging there. I don’t think it’s a great painting of meat. I don’t know what the great paintings of meat are.”

Rembrandt was doing a Crucifixion, right?

Never thought of that, said Francis Bacon, whose own name must have been nagging him all his life to paint pictures of some juicy flesh. Mmmmm, Bacon, as Homer Simpson says.

“One has got to remember as a painter that there is this great beauty in the colour of meat,” Francis told the reporter, who was at that moment understandably distracted by Bacon’s own oil and tempera on canvas “Painting, 1946″, which others gave the more descriptive title “the great butcher’s shop image”.

One commentary I’ve seen regards Bacon’s painting as evoking an altarpiece, with possibly a pope beneath the umbrella, evidently holding a press conference. It’s not clear from this commentary whether the carcass was in the original composition, which it says started out with “a chimpanzee in long grass, next to an image of a large bird of prey alighting on a field”.

“Suddenly the lines that I’d drawn suggested something totally different,” Bacon allowed, “and out of this suggestion arose this picture.”

Crazy. But then how do you like David Kennedy’s “Meat Collage”? Somebody, somewhere, has got to be thinking of using this as a webpage background, if someone hasn’t already, but, given the time, I’d get a more energetic jump on things and turn it into actual wallpaper for a dining room.

And this is “Meat Painting II — In Memoriam Rene Magritte”, a 1967 painting by the late Adrian Henri. Who was thinking of chops in 1967?!

And, moving more quickly now because, frankly, I’m stuffed, this is “Morning Exercises at the Meat Fountain”, a photomontage by Nicolas Lampert of Milwaukee, who also does experimental music, to no one’s great surprise.

When it comes to film, I reckon Lampert needs to get himself Adobe Photoshop and a few tutorials, but his website is loaded with interesting “machine-animal collages” like these two.

He calls them “a broad-based statement on the extinction of the animal world due to industrialisation and scientific tampering”, but blow that, they’re just plain cool.

And that’s it! Who’s for dessert?