Meat Show
by Clark Buckner
The San Francisco Bay Guardian, Dec. 22-28, 2004, Vol. 39, No. 12

ELEMENTS OF "Meat Show" are as gory as the title suggests. In the front room of the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery hangs a row of exquisitely photographed skinned cats with fur only on their faces and paws. The pictures, by Laura Splan and titled Dissected # 1-4, are difficult to look at but are ultimately more than merely shocking. Posed upright with distorted expressions on their faces, the cats look like derelicts wearing skin suits. And, like perverse responses to William Wegman's syrupy-sweet weimaraner photos, Splan's pictures speak to the human condition as violent, fragile, and, above all, visceral. However, the show's focus is not particularly on gore but rather on questions of national identity and what it means to be American. One video monitor in Jackie Sumell's diptych Fanfare for the Common Man shows a roasting turkey in the process of being dressed up as a bald eagle (almost as if it were being re-feathered) while the second monitor presents the "eagle" flying through the sky with trumpets playing on the soundtrack. The effect is comical but also suggests an obscene underside to American patriotism ˆ perhaps specifically, the history of racism intimated by the pink flesh of the Thanksgiving turkey. For their contribution to the show, Elizabeth DiGiovanni and Tim Sullivan have constructed a hot dog stand, titled Die Wiener Bar, complete with mustard, sauerkraut, horseradish, and ketchup. (At the opening, they were actually selling hot dogs and beer.) The installation is rife with Americana, including tacky wallpaper, postcards, pictures of the artists in their uniforms, and the uniforms themselves. It speaks to the early work experience of adolescents across the country and presents the United States as a nation of immigrants with traditions that originated elsewhere. Jeanne Friscia extends this study of immigrant experience in the video First Generation, which shows a piece of moldy deli meat revert to being fresh while "That's Amore" plays on the soundtrack. Lava Thomas's Left Wing, Right Wing, Chicken Wing is a drawing of a chicken wing with bones piercing through the flesh of the joint and the title written beneath it. The drawing speaks with subtlety and humor to questions of African American identity ˆ and regional rural experiences ˆ as politicized but irreducible to politics.