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For 30 minutes, Professor Jessamyn Lovell’s art class was a pack of cannibals.
A group of students passed out petitions outside of Johnson Gym on Monday, representing Students for the Promotion of Alternative Meats (SPAM), an organization that fights for its right to eat human meat. Much like the organization’s acronym, Lovell said the group was fake.
Lovell teaches Art Practices II, an intermediary course that explores different art media. Her class took part in creating a “social sculpture,” which required students to interact with the class and the University community as a whole. She said the class’s project helps push the boundaries of what many students consider to be art.
“As opposed to aluminum or bronze or wood, they were sculpting with people’s expectations — with people’s interactions — and that’s really the goal of the assignment,” Lovell said. “I hope (students) get a broadness of media so they don’t think of art as only painting, drawing, sculpture, photography; that there are medias of 4-D or time-based media and that this idea, a media of social practice, is very much a part of art making.”
Lovell said the students walking past the fake protesters were the piece’s unknowing audience.
“The people walking by, they’re the viewers, they don’t know it, but they’re the viewers,” she said, “and my hope would be that they understand that there’s something going on, that something’s fishy, that this is something they’re participating in.”
Lovell’s class was broken up into groups at the beginning of the semester, and students were assigned to come up with a plausible social sculpture. Student and SPAM member Mona Stipe said her group looked for a cause that would elicit a negative response from onlookers.
“We were thinking about slavery or incest, but we believed cannibalism was probably the most believable thing,” Stipe said. “We thought we were going to get discrimination, we thought somebody might get punched, we weren’t sure.”
Leading up to Monday’s protest, SPAM posted fliers throughout campus, created a Facebook and Wordpress page, as well as a banner for the group’s table. At the event, Stipe and other members of her group pressed students to pass a petition for legislation for the legal consumption of human meat. Having gained a few signatures from students passing by, Stipe said she was surprised by the group’s mostly positive outcome.
“I was actually pleasantly surprised that people were very open to our lifestyle, especially when we told them ‘You don’t have to be a cannibal: just because we have our lifestyle, we just want your support,’” she said. “I did have one person ask me if we were going to murder people and I was like ‘No, no, our purpose is to have the option for people to donate their bodies to be eaten.’”
Student and SPAM member Random Fass specifically stuck to character throughout the event. He said his stance on cannibalism rose from his interest in indigenous religions. At one point, he admitted to eating some of his own flesh.
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To Fass’s and the group’s credit, the Daily Lobo attended the event fully expecting to interview cannibals.
“I especially loved your reaction, because you really looked like you didn’t know if you would die today,” Fass told the reporter.
Student and SPAM member Asuka Okuyama said the fake group’s positive outcome is a result of their passion for cannibalism.
“Words are powerful and you could really convince people of anything, people are a lot more accepting than I thought they were,” Okuyama said. “If you are genuine and passionate about what you talk about, no matter what it is, people are going to want to support you.”
