"Eulogy," Patricia Piccinini
“I did not imagine this creature, and it’s stranger than anything I could create.”
Patricia Piccinini is referring to a photograph of one of her sculptures being projected on the screen behind her at the Frist Center artist lecture she presented last Friday evening. A very normal looking white man is on his knees, reverently holding a smiling fish that looks like a white, smushed, peeled Mr. Potato Head, whose scientific name means Fat Head.
I’m not sure if she’s referring to the fish or the human until she proceeds to explain that the fish lives 2,000m deep off the coast of Southern Australia, and was unknown to science until quite recently, when trawler fishing began dragging the gelatinous, boneless fish up from the depths. Despite their recent emergence, they are also on their way out; Picinnini says they are being fished to extinction.
