In reference to the Flesh Project
In using meat it is almost impossible for the viewer to have an emotionally detached reaction to the pieces. Is this something that you like about the medium?
I don’t generate the effect evoked by my sculptures, the flesh does. Essentially, they can be regarded as Duschamp-type ready-mades, where the original object carries the whole show.
On one hand, there exists a sex centred attitude, further amplified by the mass media, which is solely obsessed with the body and regards people as mere objects, on the other, we live in a prudish world, that’s rooted in Christianity, struggling with a sense of guilt and revulsion against the human body. Because of the latter our society turns away from where it can sense the smell of death. As there is a cult of body building in terms of sports, diet and fashion, to the same extent the opposite of these are considered taboo. Why? According to Hermann Nitsch, facing the reality of flesh is one of the fundamental conflicts of human existence and, since direct engagement with the flesh has become a taboo, our sensory reactions to it are particularly intense due precisely to its being a taboo.
The Hungarian FHM got in touch with me. A magazine that men buy to masturbate over naked women and expensive cars. Half a page is always reserved for “art”, for instance the artist painting with shit, the world’s greatest pumpkin carver and the like. They were asking for pictures of my work and I refused them thinking they do not in any way represent a platform of exposure for me. In the end, they did manage to get hold of some and the article was published. A paper in which the climax is represented by a vagina peeking out did not dare show my “flesh-vagina” sculptures, only the “blowjob” one (using it merely as an excuse to express their homophobia). So that’s what the Flesh Project is about.
What inspires you to create certain parts of the body in isolation?
There is one simple reason for this. The technique. Everything else apart from faces and the genitals is too complex to be sewn “nicely” together using inanimate flesh. As a result of this the story developed in the way it did. Technique influenced content and vice versa... If it’s genitalia, it’s women, if it’s women it’s the loved ones. Now the loved ones are gone.
What is it that drives you to explore the human form in such depth through this type of sculpture?
What’s written above applies to me too. I admire the pictures of bodies and feel repulsed by the sight of my own and other people’s bodies if they do not reach a certain aesthetic standard determined by others.
In creating works from constructed flesh it takes the sculptures one step closer to reality which inevitably causes it to take on a controversial nature, how do you feel about this?
The inner contradiction of flesh constructs lies in the fact that the deceivingly faithful simulacrum, which in essence are made of the material of their imitated originals, paradoxically are only as repulsive as the “original” human ones.
A true “natura morta”, where dead nature is reborn in a different form.
Does the work from the Flesh Project share many of the same ideas or inspirational origins as the Prayer Mats pieces?
I look for means in our culture.
With a small trick (that is “art”) I cause a self explanatory object run into a contradiction with itself.
Please could you describe your intentions and the thought process behind the Prayer Mats.
I think the same way as our brains dream; I use free association where motifs familiar to all of us come into existence in the infinite hunting fields of the internet. I just need hunt them down. Icons and loops fuse together into a trend that only obeys its absurd aesthetics. In the course of deconstruction I rebuild an existing/non-existing religion, of course only for a single Prayer Mat as I’m already thinking of a new faith.
What are your future aspirations for your work?
I would like to continue creating absurd objects.
