Real Body Art

Just received this article this morning from a former professor of mine. I happen to have my own 'body art' project in progress. Luckily mine does not involve waiting for people to die like this Russian artist. And you thought I was weird......

TILL DEATH DO US SCULPT: RUSSIAN TO RENDER HUMAN BODIES INTO ART MATERIALS

Andrei Molodkin has made moulds of praying hands and a brain which eventually will be filled with the boiled down crude oil from the body of the BBC reporter Sasha Gankin. It gives a grim new meaning to the term body art. A leading contemporary Russian artist says he has perfected a technique to boil human corpses into crude oil from which he will create permanent
sculptures, and he has already signed up willing volunteers. Andrei Molodkin, who will represent Russia at this year's Venice Biennale, claims that after spending three to six months in a high-pressure machine, a corpse becomes oil that can be used to
power cars or be moulded into a permanent memorial statue to sit on the mantelpiece. His work is the ultimate extension of a growing trend for artists to use human bodies as art materials. The sculptor Marc Quinn made a study of his head from his frozen blood; Gilbert and George regularly use bodily fluids in their art, and Günther von Hagens's Body Worlds exhibition
of preserved corpses is on at London's O2. Paris-based Molodkin, 43, has already signed up the BBC reporter Sasha Gankin, who wants to be rendered into a sculpture of a brain, as well as a French porn star, Chloé des Lysses, who wants to be turned into a model of praying hands. Conscious he may have to wait several decades before putting these plans into action, Molodkin
has also signed up some HIV sufferers in New York, whom he expects to die "in one or two years"._IndependentUK