an undercurrent of pigginess...
I've just been reading about Kira O'Reilly, a daft Irish 'performance artist' who's been dancing naked with a dead pig in a Cornwall art gallery. She invites one person at a time to watch for ten minutes as she sits in a set with a stuffed rabbit and a plastic swan and performs a ‘crushing slow dance’ with the pig in her arms. Apparently she's trying to ‘identify’ with the pig, which she periodically cuts with a knife. Sounds like a real bundle of fun, and if only Cornwall wasn't practically at the other end of the earth I'd be trotting along to the Newlyn Art Gallery as we speak.

Of course, as Tom Wolfe pointed out long ago in 'The Painted Word', a stunt like this could never attract the funds to stage it without a side-serving of impenetrable art-waffle to make it kosher in the eyes of the Arts Council, National Lottery fund, gallery curators, sponsors, critics, and sundry middle-class pseudo-intellectuals. Naturally enough Ms O'Reilly is keen to get her snout in the trough, and has one to hand:

This work emerges from research with skin biopsies from newly dead pigs, cultivating the skin cells in vitro, in preparation to work from a biopsy of my own skin. The work left me with an undercurrent of pigginess, unexpected fantasies of mergence and interspecies metamorphoses began to flicker into my consciousness; making fiercely tender and ferocious identifications with the pig as stand in, double, twin, doll, imaginary self.

Oh please ...