Three piglets were stolen from an installation in Copenhagen after the artist behind the work had placed the animals in a cage and left them to starve.
Marco Evaristti had shown the work, titled And Now You Care?, in a site that was once home to a butcher’s warehouse. Per the New York Post, the piece was intended to shine a light on the ethical issues associated with pig farming in Denmark, a country that has received a particularly level high of scrutiny for this industry.
Evaristti, who was born in Santiago, Chile, and is now based in the Danish capital, had placed the piglets in a cage. He did not provide them with food or water, ensuring that they would die of starvation. Alongside the work, he exhibited paintings of slaughtered piglets dripping with blood on a Danish flag.
It was yet another shocking work from an artist who has previously offered meatballs crafted using his own fat, which he harvested via liposuction. He also produced a golden model of Auschwitz that was partly made from the teeth of his grandmother, who was Jewish. And he even has used live animals in his work on one other occasion, exhibiting goldfish that swam in blenders that could be operated by viewers.
Yet all did not go as planned with Evaristti’s latest provocation. After going on view on Friday, the piglets were stolen over the weekend. Evaristti told the New York Times that the piglets seem to have disappeared while a cleaning crew was working on Saturday.
Even before the theft, the piece rankled more than a few people in Denmark. The Danish publication Politiken called the exhibition “old-fashioned avant-garde,” and as controversy spread, animal rights groups took notice of the piece.
“We understand Marco Evaristti’s intentions with his exhibition, but it is not acceptable to protest one form of animal cruelty by committing another,” Gitte Buchhave, director of World Animal Protections’s Danish arm, said in a statement. “We have long criticised the conditions in Danish pig farming and will continue to do so, but this is not the way to create change.”
Evaristti told the Times that he closed his exhibition on Tuesday because, without any live piglets there, the work would be “boring.”
Prior to the closure, he took a much stronger attack. Speaking to the Danish news bureau Ritzau, he said, “These are three pigs that had to die anyway because they are too weak. And here they get food and drink and more space than they would have had in conventional Danish pig pens, where more than 20,000 pigs die every single day.”
The controversy has not entirely died down in Denmark, even with the piglets gone. Pia Kjærsgaard, an MP with the right-wing Danish People’s Party, has reportedly called Evaristti a “pervert ‘artist’” in a Facebook post that has more than 20,000 likes at this time of writing. Evaristti claimed on Instagram that this was defamation and threatened legal action against her.
