The semi-naked performers writhe about the floor, getting lewd and intimate with the dead mackerel, hotdogs, plucked chickens and other offerings being strewn among them by someone wearing an apron. There seems to be a lot of wet paint and plastic tarp lubricating all the flailing about in Meat Joy, which the artist, Carolee Schneemann, described as “an erotic rite”. The footage is grainy, the air of worthy transgression a picture of its time. It was 1964. Do not point that mackerel at me.
Meat Joy was first performed at a festival in Paris, where a male spectator apparently attempted to strangle the artist. Schneemann – and her accomplices from New York’s Judson Dance Theater – performed again a few days later in London, and were chased off the stage by the police, before being exfiltrated in a fleet of cars. Some time later, London’s Whitechapel Gallery restaged the event, but without the police.
