AR-News: (US) NY gallery features "artisitic" sliced dead pigs

[cathy goeggel]

      Artist 'hams' it up in bed

      by Brendan O'Neill on 6/7/04 for Meatingplace.com


      A New York City bed is covered in more than 300 pounds of sliced ham -
all in the name of artistic expression.

      The four-poster bed resides in a street-level gallery space of the
Roger Smith Hotel in midtown Manhattan as part of an art installation by
Cosimo Cavallaro, an artist who once repainted a New York hotel room in
melted mozzarella.

      "I feel like I am back in my mother's deli," Cavallaro said.

      The installation took 3 1/2 hours and will be kept in the
air-conditioned room for two days.

      Cavallaro worked summers in his mother's delicatessen in his youth.

      "I was a good slicer back then," he said.

      Outside, pedestrians peer through the glass as nearby delis pick up
business thanks to the appetites the mounds of meat seem to trigger.

      Sliced ham is "a pure form of America - all kinds of parts, boiled and
pressed together," said Cavallaro, who rejected prosciutto because, "It
would have been pompous."




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