Forbidden Knowledge: Marco Evaristti

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We don’t get enough crackpot postmodern artists on icebergs like these. One day, when I collect enough of them, I’m going to throw them all on some sort of art iceberg. But for now they remain forbidden knowledge.

Marco Evaristti did a lot of things. Wikipedia claims his most famous act is convincing people to eat meatballs made from is own liposuction fat, which I actually didn’t know about until I clicked his article. Some people might also know him for a bit of a spat he got himself into when he attempted to starve three newborn piglets to give attention to, ironically, animal slaughter. The piglets were stolen back from the exhibit by a sect of Greenpeace and a large campaign was made to ban Evaristti’s works from Denmark (where the exhibit was held). Of the thousands of people which signed the campaign, one of them was Marco Evaristti himself.

What he’s actually most well-known for is a 2000 art installation known as Helena. This one will require some explaining.

Helena is a plain white room with 10 blenders, each hooked into a different wall socket. Inside each blender is a single goldfish[1]. The blenders are on, but idle.

Museum goers are allowed to interact with the blenders — that is the only instruction they are given going into the exhibit. You can see where things are going here. Evaristti is making a claim about human morality, a sort of Milgram’s bet if you will: given the full freedom to blend a goldfish into shreds, will you do it just to see what happens?

The answer is, perhaps surprisingly… nope! Not a single person voluntarily blended a goldfish. Though you could argue that there might be some peer pressure involved with at least 10 other museum goers looking at the same exhibit, plus a museum guard. Yes, you are given explicit permission, but implicit permission can feel just as strong.

Okay… if you’ve done research into Helena before, you might sound very confused. Let me clear something up:

No one voluntarily blended a goldfish.

About five or so days into the exhibit, a Danish news crew began to camp outside the entrance to cover the story. Being tabloid reporters more than investigative journalists, the crew began to egg on museum goers to press the blend button so they could catch it on camera. They convinced people to do this twice. After the second time the exhibit was shut down early.

I’m gonna call this involuntary, because — harkening back to my Milgram’s experiment reference earlier — when you have a news reporter breathing down your neck one way and a sign saying you’re allowed to blend the fishies on the other, people are going to feel pressured. This really feels like cheating. I would’ve been a lot more interested to hear about one guy going in there, turning a goldfish on high, and leaving without explaining anything.

Going away from Helena now, Evaristti is also marked by what he didn’t do. In 2008, the artist announced a new project, FIVE2TWELVE, where he collaborated with musician Kenneth Thordal and American death row inmate Gene Hathorn Jr. to perform what I can only describe as the most metal art exhibition in history. As their contract laid out, once Hathorn was finally put to death, he was to be ground up into fish food. This fish food would then be filled into a feeding container for an aquarium full of goldfish (he really hates these things for some reason) and museum goers would have to press a button in order to feed the goldfish. There’s a lot of interesting moral quandries here. Do you dare feed a human to a fish, no matter how heinous their crimes? Would you rather starve the fish in order to preserve human dignity? Would you, even, just overfeed the fish on man meat just because you thought it was funny? There were a lot of ways this could go, but unfortunately we’ll never know the truth: Hathorn’s sentence was eventually commuted to life in prison, and to celebrate the good news he revoked his contract. Evaristti and Thordal couldn’t find another death row inmate batshit crazy enough to agree to this deal, and so they eventually gave up and scrapped it.

[1] – Okay, fine. “Green swordtail”, not goldfish. Who cares, they look the damn same to me. Why even call it green when it looks orange? Fish people suck.

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