As part of the programming for the exhibition, we met with students from Mechtild Widrich's Beauty and Ugliness graduate seminar at SAIC and discussed the exhibition, their readings, and material that we had shared. I was excited to send out a chapter from Maggie Nelson's The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning and talk about our thing-ness and, her words, our "situation of meat".
"If, at the very least, we are human, we must concede that humans evidence an ongoing interest in becoming, at certain times and in certain contexts, things, as much as in turning other people into things. The spectre of our eventual "becoming object"--of our (live) flesh one day turning into (dead) meat--is a shadow that accompanies us throughout our lives."