Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic

The artwork consists of a "Flesh Dress", constructed of slabs of beef sewn together, hung on a tailor's dummy. It is a one-piece, sleeveless, calf-length "house dress", with a jagged edge. The marble texture of steak and the thick fat are fully visible, displaying its expressive and bloody appearance. A photograph of a young woman posing in the dress appears on a nearby wall. The dress is stitched together from 50–60 pounds of raw flank steak and must be constructed anew each time it is shown. Initially, the steak is fresh and fiery red, and then it gradually turned beige and brown, changing its shape and size to conform to the dummy's hourglass shape. The work included either $260 As suggested by the title, the work is considered within the genre of "vanitas", a category of art showing death and decay. The work includes non-traditional materials, a trend in 20th-century art. It "stands in the Surrealist tradition of the uncanny, of the informe, disturbing the distinctions, by which we categorize experience". There were some earlier instances of meat being used as clothing in art. Seafood outfits, including a lobster bikini, were featured at Salvador Dalí's The Dream of Venus pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair. The cover of The Undertones' November 1983 compilation album, All Wrapped Up, showed a female model wearing cuts of meat held in place with plastic wrap. The clothes are mostly bacon, with a sausage necklace. In 2010, singer Lady Gaga attended an awards show wearing a meat dress similar to Sterbak's in style. ==Exhibition==

Montreal gallery Galerie René Blouin exhibited the Flesh Dress in 1987. The exhibit received "scant" attention. The dress also appeared at Regina, Saskatchewan's Mackenzie Art Gallery in 1989, with the curator remembering minimal negative reaction. Regina Leader-Post called the work "disturbing," but justified in doing so, noting the "work should be seen – and experienced." At age 36, Sterbak was given a retrospective show at the National Gallery of Canada called "States of Being", reviewing the past decade of her works. The exhibit was relatively well-attended, compared to other shows, due in part to the controversy, When the meat was shriveling, flaking, and falling off, one anonymous donor gave the gallery $260 for replacement meat. (This number was of some debate, with $350 worth of meat listed in one vegetarian magazine.) Because of the negative publicity the work had received, gallery staff pretended to be caterers when finding a butcher in the Ottawa area to provide replacement meat. It was reconstructed by a small team in 2011, for the show "Midnight Party". The work was later exhibited at the Tate Modern in London, for the exhibition "Rites of Passage". When the small retrospective of her work was taken to Antoni Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona, the show was "edited down to an arid minimum" by the artist herself, which included editing out the dress. In 2011, the work was presented at "Tous Cannibales" at la Maison Rouge and in 2010 at Elles@Centre Pompidou, Paris Jana Sterbak / Couture sanglante . ==Controversy==

The work was one in a series of controversies surrounding the National Gallery of Canada in the 1980s and 1990s, including the acquisition of Barnett Newman's Voice of Fire (1967), less than a year before. The Toronto Sun and its sister paper, the Ottawa Sun, printed a cartoon featuring "a curvy, spaghetti-strapped slip" made of the same materials as the meat dress. The editorial cartoon suggested readers cut out the image, smear it with foodstuffs, and mail it to [show curator Diana] Nemiroff; her address was included with the image. The mailroom opened mail with gloves for weeks after the cartoon; one was covered in feces. A sexually-threatening letter was sent to the NGC communications officer, who had been quoted in articles about the work. The writer for Canadian Art suggested reaction would have been different if the genders of the artist and curator were different, that the work would have likely been deemed sexist, for starters. New York Times writer Ann Wilson Lloyd noted in 1998 that Sterbak's work "has inspired reams of humorless, abstruse theoretical writing that leaves none of her layered metaphors unturned. Yet Ms. Sterbak's work – seductive, intensely physical and edged with dark absurdity – delivers a mind-body frisson unknowable by intellect alone." ==See also==