"Spirituality in the Flesh"
Sandy Skoglund’s Spirituality in the Flesh, created for Artforum
magazine in February 1992, shows a photograph of a mannequin as she sits on a stool. She wears a sleeveless blue dress and has a blonde wig on, the whole portrait, at first glance, looks just like a stereotypical commercial portrait photograph. However, when looked at closer we start to notice some oddities about the image, her skin isn’t smooth and shiny as it should be if it were a plastic mannequin, and it is of the same material as the stool, floor and walls. It is only with further inspection that we begin to notice that the material the mannequin and other objects are made from is of raw ground beef. We find this image repulsive and shocking, however the sight of a raw beef burger does not have an effect upon us at all. I feel that this is because we are shown for what the human really is, raw flesh and meat. Sandy Skoglund wrote a six line text to accompany the image: “The body is buried in animal flesh. A russet field of ground beef surrounds folds of blue velvet. It is the hour before decomposition begins. The glowing, moist field will turn dark and crusty, as the oxygen molecules in the room begin to invade the bits of fat and muscle. Yet the appearance of the torn tissue is far from the violence that made it. Its colour is not bloody; the stench is gone. A muted calm overwhelms the grim evidence. Although the event is over, we see it still. Death is arrested as the enemy approaches-and it is a photograph
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