LAST CHANCE!: Exhibition runs until 21st August at the me Collector's Room.
It’s not every day you find yourself confronted with the image of a woman eating her own breast with a spoon. But then the ME Collectors Gallery isn’t your run-of-the-mill gallery. It is a private institution which presents a series of rotating exhibitions, the only difference being that things here tend to be a little on the macabre side.
The ‘breast’, incidentally, turned out to be a watermelon. But elsewhere within this deceivingly spacious building, the horror is authentic. I write this sitting in the gallery’s very sleek upstairs ‘lounge area’, though the objects on display are, it’s fair to say, less than welcoming. The cabinets of marvels and curiosities, the ‘Wunderkammer’ as the collection is known, is a permanent feature: just feet away include a chandelier made from stuffed birds, numerous skulls, and a painting of a human head on a platter. Yet somehow I feel as though I’ve walked into someone’s living room; an Adams Family bachelor pad of sorts. There’s even a DVD player to hand if I have the urge to watch, say, Night of the Living Dead. In this context, the current exhibition entitled All Cannibals? scarcely raises an eyebrow.
And yet, it has gathered its fare share of controversy, for the work to be found here makes for graphic viewing; so much so that some visitors fainted at its display in Paris. Perhaps the Germans are made of sterner stuff.
All Cannibals? takes its name from the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. ‘We are all cannibals’, he noted provocatively in 1993. ‘The simplest way to identify with another is still to eat them.’ De-contextualised, it is hard to know how to comprehend such a statement: is this to be taken literally? It soon becomes clear, however, that there is more going on here than simply the desire to shock or confuse. Rather, the complicated topic of cannibalism is dealt with as a far broader concept. It deals with anthropological concerns and the relationships (biological, imaginary, social-political) to oneself and to another from the perspective of ingestion. Levi-Strauss’s interest, in fact, was to draw comparisons between ritualistic forms of cannibalism and the contemporary practice of organ transplantation, and the exhibition takes on a similar viewpoint. Throughout, a variety of themes associated with cannibalism are addressed: the cultural phenomenon of vampires following the success of the ‘Twilight’ franchise; excessive consumption; religious sacrifice; primal fear. In this light, are we not all potentially cannibals ourselves? Clearly, this is an exhibition that shares more with Hannibal than his grisly palette; it also has something of his keen intellectual appetite.
The exhibition draws together an eclectic mix of works, 100 in all, spanning several centuries and continents. There is a contemporary section including photography, video, installations, sculpture, drawing and painting as well as many historical works that focus on this topic, documentation of the first ethnographic explorations, and artefacts from non-European cultures. It doesn’t take long before you realise that aspects of cannibalism run deep within Western culture: the image of consuming the body of Christ, for instance, or the darkly playful fairytales of the Brothers Grimm in which fears of being eaten crop up time and again. It is interesting to see ‘shocking’ contemporary work in this context, for it appears to partake in an ongoing dialogue that is, in fact, centuries old. After a while it all makes the notorious Chapman Brothers (whose work is featured) begin to look a bit tame.
Elsewhere, there is a room dedicated to depictions of the mother/child relationship in art, from a 15th century painting of the Virgin Mary lovingly breastfeeding the baby Jesus to a more sinister parody of this enactment by Cindy Sherman. Toshio Saeki inverts this image: a mother eating her own child. Perhaps the hardest to deal with is the colonial aspect of the exhibition: a collection of postcards dating from as recently as 1934 that recall the human zoos in which people were forcibly taken from their native countries and staged in suggestive acts of ‘cannibalism’ in order to satisfy a warped European perspective of ‘savagery.’ One of the major concerns of this exhibition, it seems, is to re-address cannibalism’s original, ritualistic significance which had, in such cases, been completely disregarded. Yet I couldn’t help but wonder why there wasn’t any more information regarding these highly sensitive issues. The art work speaks for itself, as it should, yet these historical works which are not ‘art’ as such are in need of more contextualisation in order for their significance to guarantee comprehension.
This was to be my only major fault with an exhibition that remains otherwise highly recommended. It certainly won’t fail to disappoint fans familiar with this well-established institution, or anyone with a particularly morbid fascination. But it’s also a true eye-opener for the rest of us. ‘Some people asked me whether I was right in the head’, says Jeanette Zwingeberger, the curator, ‘but the idea of the exhibition is to confront basic human fears, desires, suffering and pain that is represented in the collected works.’ Indeed, a ‘confrontation’ seems the perfect way to articulate the experience of being here. Everything that makes us human beings, all the mess that we try to cover up or forget is suddenly unmasked and made all too apparent. ‘Eat, shit, die: we all come from the same place’ is written in neon lighting on the wall of the gift-shop. While it may not be to everyone’s taste, all in all this is powerful, thought-provoking and surprisingly poignant stuff.
