I don’t really know where to start getting my head around this one.
One of the central works in the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (until 12 May), Victimless Leather, a small jacket made up of embryonic stem cells taken from mice, has died. The artists, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, say the work which was fed nutrients by tube, expanded too quickly and clogged its own incubation system just five weeks after the show opened.
And furthermore:
Ms Antonelli says the jacket “started growing, growing, growing until it became too big. And [the artists] were back in Australia, so I had to make the decision to kill it. And you know what? I felt I could not make that decision. I’ve always been pro-choice and all of a sudden I’m here not sleeping at night about killing a coat…That thing was never alive before it was grown.”
I also heard that the coat, all cramped up in its incubator, started shrieking “WHY? WHY??? FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE KILL ME!!!” Okay, that’s not true, but if it was, wouldn’t that be cool? I’d wear that.
Surely this will make us question preconceived ideas about science, life, art, fashion, laboratories, pleather (That’s enough – Ed.)