Flesh / Pure Holy Cow Proof Print

Having seen the TDR™ issue of Emigre magazine, and our proposed work for Ronnie Cutrone’s Synaesthesia show at Broadway’s Mary Anthony Galleries, Customized Terror curator Ronald Jones approached us to feature in a show at Artists Space in SoHo NYC. The theme was Transmogrification — the conceptual point where one thing evolving into another is neither/nor. He was interested in our consumerism-as-religion work, and shared our fascination as to why we think what we think and why we’re (happily) seduced into needing something we never even knew we wanted.

We interpreted the idea as being about things which aren’t described / defined for what they really they are. So, we presented the Bank of Jesus as church / religion, and the church as a financial institution (Beware The Voice of The Profit etc), the barcode as the swastika of consumerist Fascism (on a faux Nuremberg Rally banner and this Flesh Burger design commenting on the fact that however meat is prepared / marketed, the reality is that you are consuming Flesh. It’s an observation rather than a political point in this context.

Whereas Work Buy Consume Die riffed on the Pepsi logo, this message was expressed through a playful re-hash(brown) of Burger King.

Flesh was originally designed as 2m x 1m banner for TDR’s part in the group show ‘Customised Terror’ curated by Yale’s Ronald Jones at Artists Space Gallery in NYC in 1995 (along with Playfair?, Work Buy Consume Die and the Bank of Jesus triptych etc) and slightly re-engineered for TDR’s own Customised Terror show at The Forum in Sheffield.

This A3 print design, available here as an A2 uncut printers proof dated 06/07/96, was adapted for a series of prints published in conjunction with the Forum show. The original print run was 100, and a small number of proofs were supplied by the printer to check the print’s colour and repro.

Like all printer’s proofs these have never been commercially available being archived subsequent to serving their practical sign-off purpose prior to the print / crop of / for the finished product.

So, at the time, proofs were like demos… what we wanted was the finished thing. So we kept the proofs purely for future reference not a cherished prints in themselves. Now ‘everything's computers’ and most proofing is done digitally, these printed proofs have a charm that speaks of the process locked in the time they were run. Because the proofs were typically run-off in ones and twos they have acquired an inherent rarity. Sometimes, we’d have up to 10 proofs for stakeholder sign-off but generally  we would just grab one while overseeing the print run itself.