Look Around You 1987/88
With the project LOOK AROUND YOU, the connection between animal and machine becomes a merciless mirror to social reality. The hybrid sculptures—bull bodies, pig and horse figures, some fused with technical components—defy any harmonious interpretation. They appear disturbing, grotesque, at times barbaric. It is precisely in this aesthetic of horror that their truth lies: they expose what is systematically suppressed in the industrial everyday life of meat production.
While the hybrid beings initially appear to the viewer as an artificially exaggerated imposition, the artistic argument points to a paradoxical and uncomfortable insight: the practice of the modern meat industry is far more radical in its cruelty than any artistic representation. Machines that kill, rationalized slaughter processes, and the everyday instrumentalization of animals—all this occurs while images of suffering are systematically removed from public view.
The sculptures thus occupy a paradoxical space: they are not merely provocative fiction, but a reflection of a reality that remains invisible. The “aesthetically barbaric” points to a real barbarity, legitimized by economic logic and stabilized by visual repression.
In an autobiographical dimension, the project connects childhood memories of the taken-for-granted nature of slaughter with an analysis of the industrialized present. A field of tension unfolds between necessity, tradition, and economic machinery, revealing the contradictions of the human-animal relationship: here, the “best friend,” the dog; there, the “farm animals” that are systematically degraded.
LOOK AROUND YOU confronts us with a suppressed truth: that our cultural bond with animals is characterized by radical ambivalence – by affection and brutality, care and exploitation, closeness and instrumental distance.
Dr. Pelle Solus
Dr. Pelle Solus
SIEH UM DICH: Objekte im Kontext von Mensch, Tier und Maschine