Suppose you’re someone who’s been struggling with a painful deformity your entire life. When you’re finally freed from those chains, how would you celebrate?
The adventurous among us try to keep their amputated limbs, but even they might be taken aback by artist Alexander Wengshoel, who ate the flesh that came with his deformed hip, in the name of art.
Wengshoel fought tooth-and-nail to film the procedure and to keep the removed hip that had been the cause of his grief for years. Upon recovery, he went home, hip in hand, unwilling to let go of something so integral to him.
Prepared to use the bone in his art project, he began to boil it. Noticing that there was flesh coming off of it, he made a snap decision to chow down. He claims that he did this in order to get people to open their minds about their bodies, and to think about what their body means to them.
Since then he has presented a video of his surgery, a table of medical paraphernalia collected over his hospital stays, and a suspension rig which he used for performance art.
The question remains – is eating yourself the key to understanding yourself? Surely something that will come up at the next neo-futurist dinner, and hopefully someday we’ll have some answers.
Alexander seems quite pleased with his decisions, after all.