WHILE living, the pieces needed constant monitoring, especially the example shown on plate 20, which would throw itself off balance if the tongue from its over-sized maw swung around too much. Incidentally, Lorret made sure never to give his pieces vocal cords, so they were silent except for the dull thuds of their toppling over.
Plate 21: An escapee, broken loose from some hideous living-art installation. When art began exploring new forms of expression, tortured life-forms were created practically willy-nilly, without much thought for the humanity of humanity. But then these were troubled times and the new sciences and over-population had displaced the value of singular organisms.
Plate 22: After a time all artists either become self-derivative or begin to explore, usually unsuccessfully, new expressions. Lorret, by the end of his career in the limelight, must have felt he’d explored all the combinations of anatomical rearrangement he could achieve. He could shock and surprise no more, and gracefully bowed out, becoming a patron and supporter of the electronoise trauma-trance experiments*.
Plate 23: If art is a form of self-expression, then we can divide them in a number of ways. There are artists who intimate that there is an essential meaning and purpose to human existence, and others who demonstrate that there is no point to anything (especially their art). In-between we find a group who make it a ritual to construct a meaning and design to our existence. I like to think that Lorret was poking holes in their fabrication.
While at the time the Museum existed, most of Lorret’s pieces weren’t technically ‘alive,’ we displayed footage of the times when they were. With all their blinking, yawning and drooling, their life span was mostly under a decade long – artifi cially maintained since few had digestive abilities. The recreations we had in the gift shop were popular items, especially the pencil sharpeners.
* Where catalepsy represents the highest form of human experience.
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