Community-wide art projects seem to be all the rage in some metropolitan areas of this country--painted cows in Chicago, pigs in Cincinnati, etc. As interesting, even exciting, as these arts awareness projects might be, they're really quite modest compared to that taken on by the city of Ghent, in Belgium. Imagine the entire facade of a building completely covered in ham. That's right HAM, ham pillars, ham walls, ham door jambs, ham window sills, with twenty-four hour a day guards to keep away all the hungry cats, dogs, mice rats and other prowling creatures without the least bit of respect for avant-garde urban art at it's best/worst! Check your calendars, it's May 18, this is NOT an April Fools joke. The law school at Ghent university is up to it's eaves in HAM. And though the "work of art" went up on April first, it isn't coming down until June 30th so you can imagine how "ripe" the whole exhibit stands to become during it's final weeks when the stench of the rotting meat begins to draw it's real admirers--FLIES!

The citywide exhibition is called "Over the Edges" and as if a helping of ham on the side isn't enough, how about a giant pink statue of a nude Cyclops overlooking the city's most famous bridge. There's no indication what IT'S made of...watermelon maybe? A busy intersection has a naked sunbather suspended over it. That ought to slow traffic down a bit! A total of fifty-five international artists are participating in celebration of the 500th birthday of the city's most famous personage, The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who once ruled an area from the Netherlands to Sicily including a considerable part of German, Spain, and major hunks of Central and South America. Some of the exhibits are deliberately in bad tastes, others merely questionable, a few are just plain goofy, while some are quite fantastical. From the towers of one of the city's many Gothic churches can be heard the distinct cry of Tarzan, seemingly lost from his jungle habitat. At another busy intersection drivers are confronted with a giant aquarium filled with goldfish (and for the first week of the show at least, a nude female bather).

In the goofy category, near one of the city's canals, plates periodically come flying out a window as if the couple inside are having a boisterous row. Organized by the SMAK contemporary art museum, the various exhibits are sprinkled throughout the city's ancient streets and medieval architecture. It takes more than a day to see them all. Hoping to link the very OLD city with very NEW art the curators have had to withstand the objections of antipoverty groups who have decried the waste of ham that could have been used to feed the poor while other critics have found themselves searching their thesauruses for new words meaning deviant, decadent, degenerate, detestable, and...well...you get the idea. However other, more broad-minded, writers have given the show high marks for its daring originality and progressive creativity. One thing for sure, it's made the city a boom town for tourists, even if some, such as a rather dismayed woman from Uruquay, aren't sure quite what to make of it all. She's informed, "It's about bringing ART to the people." Oh...right...I knew that.

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(Copyright, 2000, Jim Lane)
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