Marco Evaristti is an Danish-Chilean artist. After subjecting himself to liposuction in 2006, he used the fat obtained by this procedure to make meatballs. Both the liposuction as well as the preparation of the meal and Evaristti's subsequent consumption of his own body fat was documented in a video, with musical accompaniment provided by the well-known Danish Fluxus artist Henning Christiansen. The meal, not so very tasty according to conventional standards, was then canned as Polpette al grasso di Marco and outfitted with labels where all product information is precisely declared. All possible doubts about the genuineness of the product are dispensed with by the obligatory bar code, the "best before" date, the listing of ingredients, as well as detailed serving suggestions and cooking instructions. The interested consumer not only learns the amount of the artists' fat contained in the canned product ("No less than 10 percent grasso di Marco"), but also that the producer is not a supplier to the Danish crown something usually considered a seal of quality and proof of better taste. To certify the contents, the artist poses for the label in a cover-boy style, displaying his fresh operation scar. Other pictures on the label show the artist preparing the meatballs, a detailed enlargement of the operation scar, as well as the artist eating the meal.
Evaristti, who is considered the "enfant terrible" and "bad boy" of the Danish art scene due to his shockingly hyper-realistic installations and frequent use of bodily fluids like blood and sperm, here seems to want to finally explore the limits of good taste, for the notion of eating human fat alone represents the violation of a taboo or an absolute disruption of a worldview that is otherwise taken for granted. Eating human beings, either in the ritual form of endocannibalism / exocannibalism or cannibalism in situations of dire need, always triggers shock, disgust, and fear, while at the same this monstrosity evokes a certain fascination for the absolutely forbidden. Although very few of us have ever met a cannibal in "real life," the devouring of fellow humans has been an omnipresent theme in legends, geographic treatises, and travelogues since ancient times, just as in literature, theater, film, and the fine arts.
In light of the disappearance of taboos and the kitschification of evil and cannibalism by the culture industry, the feelings of disgust that Marco Evaristti's Polpette al grasso di Marco can evoke can particularly be explained by the fact that it plays with the taboo of cannibalism in a Dadaistic manner. Here it is important that Evaristti wants his auto-cannibalistic happening to be understood as critical-ironic commentary on Western consumer society and the culture of eating, while at the same time placing it in the context of a gluttonous art world with its constant demand for something new; with this work, the art market is offered the ultimate possibility to directly incorporate an art work: "Eat me, I am art, and the art devouring public will finally be satisfied." By canning what was once part of his body as consumable and the declaration of unique traces of his own body as commodity, aesthetic art consumption is transformed into an anthropophagic devouring of art in the sense of devouring, annihilating, destroying. In so doing, cannibalism, which in Western thought is traditionally attributed to the primitive and other, is revealed as a cultural cannibalism in our own culture and in ourselves.
Its price is not fixed, but varies according to the current gold price. The hunger of the art market is also exhibited in the case of Evaristti's cans of Polpette al grasso di Marco, where the fat content is supposed to be less than that of standard supermarket products: two of these cans, according to newspaper reports, have already been purchase by collectors for $23,200.
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