Heide Hatry's Meat Art is All Shock, No Awe

Photo of Heide Hatry's Heads and Tales by Sarah Ewick.

People like to see corpses. It's part of being human to look at the sharp shock of death with a wondering eye. Take away that humanity though and a body becomes just rotting meat, and almost entirely repulsive.

Heide Hatry's new show Heads and Tales at Pierre Menard Gallery illustrates this point pretty well. The show features photographs of mask-like sculptures made with untreated pigskin and fresh pig eyes. These are the "heads" of the title, and the effect is like a badly embalmed cadaver. The pictures are twinned with framed stories, the "tales," by various writers that Hatry invited to contribute.

The centerpiece of the show is a replica of a full-length corpse on a gurney in the
middle of the gallery, the sheet pulled back to reveal her decaying grin and empty eye sockets.

The technical skill is pretty incredible, and it's likely that there's an important subtext. All of the faces in this show are of women, and Hatry has written about how meat can be used as a artistic medium to address questions of feminism. But this work is so uniformly blunt and physically. off-putting though that the viewer doesn't want to linger to find out more. The most pressing impulse is to get out of the gallery and back into the sun and air.

Shock is important. But if a work is any good, it's got to follow up with at least a little awe. As in: I am awed by how this made me reconsider the world, even for a second. Without awe, shock makes us squeamish until it doesn't. Then it just makes us something far worse: bored.

Heads and Tales is open until March 15th at Pierre Menard Gallery, 10 Arrow Street, Cambridge.

Post contributed by Arlo Crawford