A spokeswoman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has described a live art performance scheduled to take place in a English art gallery as "sick." In the performance piece, called "Inthewrongplaceness," a naked woman cradles a dead pig for four hours.
Reuters reports the PETA spokeswoman said Kira O'Reilly's show "seems to depend on the shock of using a murdered pig as a prop" and that O'Reilly, "perhaps lacking the talent to make it as a proper artist," should take up a day job instead.
The show will be performed Friday at the Newlyn Art Gallery in Penzance, southwest England.
The gallery's director, James Green, defended O'Reilly's art.
Green told Reuters, "In terms of the gallery's view, we feel very strongly that we should provide audiences in the region with opportunities to see the kind of works that they have to go to London to experience."
Green said only one person is permitted to view the performance at a time. The viewer can watch for up to 10 minutes.
On the gallery's Web site, www.newlynartgallery.co.uk , O'Reilly calls the performance "a slow crushing dance with a pig for one person at a time."
"The work left me with an undercurrent of pigginess, unexpected fantasies of mergence and interspecies metamorphoses began to flicker into my consciousness," she wrote.
