The tastiest parts of the human body are the breasts and the buttocks.
So says St Jerome, the church father, in his treatise Against Jovianus, in which he describes the dietary preferences of the Attacots, a tribe living in Roman Britain.
They were, of course, not alone in eating their fellow humans. All Cannibals, an exhibition at the Maison Rouge in Paris, starts with a 1593 print depicting Brazilian women and children sitting around the severed head of a man, happily munching the rest of his body.
Photo: Bloomberg
Whether this edifying scene is a case of exo- or endocannibalism, the consumption of an enemy or a deceased relative, isn’t clear.
The title of the show, which displays works by about 30 mostly contemporary artists, is a quote from anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss: “We are all cannibals. After all, the simplest way to identify with someone is to eat him.”
Gruesome Goya
From Brazil the show jumps forward to Francisco de Goya and the morbid symbolists Odilon Redon, Felicien Rops and James Ensor. Goya appears in different guises: Next to his Caprichos, there are prints from his Disasters of War, altered by the Chapman brothers.
Saturn Devouring His Son, one of Goya’s most gruesome canvases, has morphed into two photographs: One shows an assemblage by Vik Muniz, who recreated the painting out of junk. The other is a self-portrait by the Japanese “appropriation artist” Yasumasa Morimura, who specializes in substituting faces and bodies in famous pictures with his own.
Cannibalism, we are told, is a popular theme in contemporary Japanese art. Issei Sagawa, a mentally disturbed student who killed and ate a Dutch girl in 1981, became a celebrity after he had been found legally insane and even became a food critic.
Jeanette Zwingenberger, the curator, says in the press material that she turned down works that smacked too much of gore. In fact, even the fainthearted aren’t in danger of being overcome by twinges of nausea.
Michel Journiac’s Mass for a Body, a sacrilegious performance during which he distributed sausages made with his blood, is only visible on a video. Adriana Varejao’s painting of guts spilling out of a tiled wall looks almost abstract.
DARK HUMOR
Gilles Barbier’s photomontage displaying six clones of himself butchering each other or Renato Garza Cervera’s Genuine Contemporary Beast, the skin of a tattooed man splayed on the floor like a bearskin rug, are nice examples of black humor. (Cervera has said that he was inspired by gang wars in Los Angeles.)
Much is made of the female breast and the feeding of babies. That seems far-fetched.
On the other hand, the rich world of vampires is only mentioned in passing.
If you expect a systematic and thorough examination of a fascinating subject, you’ll be disappointed. But as an introduction, the show is worth a visit.
All Cannibals is at Maison Rouge, Paris, through May 15. On the Net: www.lamaisonrouge.org
President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday delivered an address marking the first anniversary of his presidency. In the speech, Lai affirmed Taiwan’s global role in technology, trade and security. He announced economic and national security initiatives, and emphasized democratic values and cross-party cooperation. The following is the full text of his speech: Yesterday, outside of Beida Elementary School in New Taipei City’s Sanxia District (三峽), there was a major traffic accident that, sadly, claimed several lives and resulted in multiple injuries. The Executive Yuan immediately formed a task force, and last night I personally visited the victims in hospital. Central government agencies and the
Australia’s ABC last week published a piece on the recall campaign. The article emphasized the divisions in Taiwanese society and blamed the recall for worsening them. It quotes a supporter of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) as saying “I’m 43 years old, born and raised here, and I’ve never seen the country this divided in my entire life.” Apparently, as an adult, she slept through the post-election violence in 2000 and 2004 by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), the veiled coup threats by the military when Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) became president, the 2006 Red Shirt protests against him ginned up by
As with most of northern Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) settlements, the village of Arunothai was only given a Thai name once the Thai government began in the 1970s to assert control over the border region and initiate a decades-long process of political integration. The village’s original name, bestowed by its Yunnanese founders when they first settled the valley in the late 1960s, was a Chinese name, Dagudi (大谷地), which literally translates as “a place for threshing rice.” At that time, these village founders did not know how permanent their settlement would be. Most of Arunothai’s first generation were soldiers
Among Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) villages, a certain rivalry exists between Arunothai, the largest of these villages, and Mae Salong, which is currently the most prosperous. Historically, the rivalry stems from a split in KMT military factions in the early 1960s, which divided command and opium territories after Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) cut off open support in 1961 due to international pressure (see part two, “The KMT opium lords of the Golden Triangle,” on May 20). But today this rivalry manifests as a different kind of split, with Arunothai leading a pro-China faction and Mae Salong staunchly aligned to Taiwan.