The idea is toinvestigate the paradoxical relationship meat has to the body. Meat combines flesh, skin, muscle, organs, blood — each with its own relationship to the body, yet meat’s only reference to the body is as a once-upon-a-time living biological thing. By putting these artists together, "Meat After Meat Joy" seeks to investigate the uncanny effect meat as a medium is for artist and viewer. This is not a show about meat as spectacle but about meat as signification, precisely because meat does not signify (a body) but its very annihilation. You'll see work by Nezaket Ekici, Anthony Fisher, Betty Hirst, Zuang Huan, Tamara Kostianovsky, David Raymond, Dieter Roth, Carolee Schneemann (whose work is in the photo), Jana Sterback, and Jenny Walton.
     The following, we plucked from the Gallery's release about the exhibit: Skin is the body’s largest organ and greatest protection. It is the body’s most public point of vulnerability and private realm of pleasure. Flesh is associated with the body; it cannot be separated from the body except when it is torn, crucified, burned, flayed. Muscle and fat are anatomy, as well as the fit body, the football body, the anorectic body, the fat body. Meat is the body without skin. It has no identity. Meat cannot have a mood, cannot feel, nor have an intention. It cannot die or even remember having been killed. It is not a metaphor but matter. Meat cannot have a soul. When a suicide bomber blows up a wedding, a funeral, a café creating sprawling mass of bloody, fleshy, skinless, blobs and chunks human beings and animal are turned into meat. In William Gibson’s "Neuromancer" (1984), when Cases’s body is unhooked from the computer and no longer jacked into cyberspace, it becomes “meat”. Meat has no notion of being-in-the-world.

And yet, an exhibition on meat seems like an obvious continuation of discussions of contemporary art and the body. Certainly in relation to feminism, meat has been an erotic and eschatological component of a liberatory, transgressive discourse of female sexuality and the body beginning with Carolee Schneemann’s path-breaking 1964 "Meat Joy." After "Meat Joy," the female body was no longer the ‘poulet” or chick but an erotic and political force of the laugh of the Medusa (Helene Cixous) — the writhing ecstatic female body freed from the constraints of patriarchal definition (meat is the indefinable flesh) that expresses an epistemology ("Interior Scroll," 1975) into ontology (the feminist movement). In "Meat Joy," although controversial, raw meat — animal human — and the human body are at their most uncontested and merged, for meat is not the absence or the other the body but an act of reclamation and affirmation of all that patriarchy had previously “disemboweled” from the female body.

Noted bow-and-arrow hunter/rock guy/lunatic Ted Nugent is unlikely to attend, as is famed vegetarian Morrissey, ex of the Smiths. For the rest of us, somewhere between those poles, it presents a challenge and a temptation. The gallery is open noon-8 p.m. It's free.

10 Arrow St., Cambridge 617-868-2033 www.pierremenardgallery.com