Thursday 4 September 2008

pork flesh vagina sculptures by geza szollosi

this art is mainly about the body. the artist wanted to depict the body as true to the original as possible, and to achieve that, he used pork flesh. clever.
obviously the pork flesh he is using has to be dead prior to sculpting, and as a result, the sculptures seem more like corpses than live bodies. something that also enhance this quality about the work is how the bodies are brutally stitched up and divided into parts. the artist, being a man, has chosen women as his subjects, and it comes as no surprise what sort of "parts" of them he has chosen for the base of his work.




as if showing pork flesh vaginas isn't enough, he then gets intimate with his flesh creations. associations of women seen as meat and objects comes to mind (not to mention necrophilia):




i didn't intend to sound this negative about his work, i actually really LIKE it. i think it's ace how he has created these sculptures, and it really says something dark about the body and mortality.

it's just that in our society, the body is always female, and the eye that sees belongs to a man.
unless it's a male body being seen by a homosexual man. this is nearly the only case where a male body is objectified. if you see porn with cocks and naked men, or even art with naked men, it is nearly always labeled "homosexual".

i have this book on the male body, and when looking at it, it's like i see it through the eyes of a homosexual man. it's not that strange; it's probably been published for homosexual men, and all the photographs are taken by homosexual men.

i want to claim the right for women not to see through the eyes of a man, but through their own, and have what they see aknowledged by all as equally important.

there's nothing wrong with the body being an object, it's an aspect of it's existence. but i don't like the notion of female bodies (and thus myself) as MORE of an object, closer to nature and animal, than the male body.
i refuse to identify with these flesh sculptures as they remind me of this absurd untruth.

i have seen this artist in two of my favourite blogs, unscathed corpse and morbid anatomy, and have been wanting to write about him for quite a while as i found his work absolutely fascinating. i didn't think i'd end up with such a gender issue rant. it's not the artist, but society as a whole that bothers me, and i see the symptoms of it in everything, even in things that i truly like, as geza szollosi's art.

here is a photo from his "betelguese projects". it looks like an elf preserved in formaldehyde! :


check out the artist's website for more of his work.

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