Art of Now: Raw Meat

Susan Bright gets bloody and fleshy with sculptors, performance artists and filmmakers who use animal parts as their raw material.

Images of meat in still life paintings have been a staple in art for centuries, but why are artists now incorporating animal flesh, offal and skin into their work. What draws them to this macabre material and what does it enable them to say?

Photographer Pinar Yolacan makes meat dresses for her models, frills from raw chicken, bodices from placenta and sleeves from tripe. Riffling through butchers stocks, she makes the perfect outfit for her models, designing and moulding it to them like a second skin.

In a high-vaulted church, Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva hangs gigantic curtains of white pigs fat that look like long sheets of lace. Walking down through them, they rustle and reek as you feel encased inside an animal’s stomach.

Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr sculpt with live tissue making a semi-living leather jacket, growing wings from pigs and hosting a dinner party with lab grown meat. While Marianna Simnett violently slices open a cow’s udder reorganising our thinking about the body and gender. And with a cast of 100 performers, Hermann Nitsch's theatrical performances involve climbing inside carcasses, bathing in blood and having sex with offal.

Their work is shocking, disturbing and fun, making us face our responsibility to animals, each other and the planet and giving us a language to talk about the challenges ahead.

We lick our lips and feed on their creativity.

Producer: Sarah Bowen