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Who was inside? �Just the dogs and cats I find on the road. I wanted to ask the zoo, for maybe they had an elephant.� So far, he has a whole range of volunteers, from a French porn star to a BBC journalist. He's planning to write to lots of international figures and, when he dies, plans to be made into oil himself. �Maybe I can be enough energy to drive a short way in a Porsche,� he laughs. �Or 50km in a Japanese car. Or an economical light.�
Molodkin wonders, in an abstract sort of way, whether this sort of thing is already happening. We talk about the massive population decline in Russia after the collapse of communism and the huge death toll in Iraq. The number of people went down, and the amount of oil went up. �Maybe they not die,� he cackles. �Maybe we just send them into Europe by the tube. We send them by Gazprom [the state-owned energy company]. It's a new way of immigration. And you don't need a passport!�
The Russian oligarchs tend not to be too keen on Molodkin's stuff. �They feel uncomfortable,� he says. �They are busy with dirty materials. It is a criminal world. And they want art to be beauty. A very kitsch beauty. They go to work with the oil or the blood and after they want to return and be a kind of aristocrat. And you propose the same dirty thing as art? �Noooo! Cleeeaaaan!'� After he first started filling stuff with oil, his mother suggested that he do a Chelsea FC badge. He doesn't think Roman Abramovich would have bought it.
Molodkin's work is, indeed, very, very dirty. He only ever wears black, unless he is doing a photoshoot, in which case he sometimes wears white. He thinks he might be addicted to the smell of oil, but his girlfriend hates it. �She says she is the slave to oil,� he sighs. �Every gallery and every way oil, oil, is leaking, is leaking.� At a recent New York show, 200 litres of oil leaked out of a piece called Saddam, ruining not only that gallery, but also the gallery on the floor below. Afterwards, somebody tried to buy part of the ruined wall. For Molodkin, this is what capitalism is all about. Oil into art into profit. �It is such a f***ing crazy thing,� he says.
Andrei Molodkin: Liquid Modernity (Grid and Greed) is at Orel Art, London SW1 (www.orelart.com), from April 22 to June 12 [2009]
Andrei Molodkin: black gold, blood red
Molodkin's obsession with oil began when he ate it on bread as a recreational drug.
Now he wants to make it from human corpses
From The Times
By Hugo Rifkind
April 14, 2009
_____________________________________________
Andrei Molodkin has made moulds of praying hands and a brain which eventually will be filled with the boiled down crude oil from the body of the BBC reporter Sasha Gankin
Till death do us sculpt: Russian to render human bodies into art materials
Fancy a long-lasting keepsake of your loved one?
What better than a statue made from the resin of their mortal remains?
Andrew Johnson reports
The Independent, Sunday, 15 March 2009
It gives a grim new meaning to the term body art. A leading contemporary Russian artist says he has perfected a technique to boil human corpses into crude oil from which he will create permanent sculptures, and he has already signed up willing volunteers.
Andrei Molodkin, who will represent Russia at this year's Venice Biennale, claims that after spending three to six months in a high-pressure machine, a corpse becomes oil that can be used to power cars or be moulded into a permanent memorial statue to sit on the mantelpiece.
His work is the ultimate extension of a growing trend for artists to use human bodies as art materials. The sculptor Marc Quinn made a study of his head from his frozen blood; Gilbert and George regularly use bodily fluids in their art, and G�nther von Hagens's Body Worlds exhibition of preserved corpses is on at London's O2.
Paris-based Molodkin, 43, has already signed up the BBC reporter Sasha Gankin, who wants to be rendered into a sculpture of a brain, as well as a French porn star, Chlo� des Lysses, who wants to be turned into a model of praying hands. Conscious he may have to wait several decades before putting these plans into action, Molodkin has also signed up some HIV sufferers in New York, whom he expects to die "in one or two years".
The artist says the machine acts like a pressure cooker as it applies heat to a corpse, turning it into "yellowish, sweet crude". This can be turned into petrol or gas, or poured into a transparent mould to become an "oil sculpture". He has already tested the machine with a dog.
"It only takes two or three months to turn a body into crude oil," he said. "As soon as I learnt that oil is made out of organic matter I thought it would be a really great idea. When you're driving in California where dinosaurs used to live it's good to think that the car is being run on dinosaurs. Maybe this is a way to solve the energy crisis. To turn Sasha into oil will take up to six months. I cut the body into a few parts and put it in the accelerator and apply high pressure and temperature. I have signed contracts with Sasha and Chlo�. I'm also looking for older people, and I have signed some people in New York who will die in one or two years because they have HIV. Someone may want to give the oil to their parents to put in their car, or to be turned into gas to light a lamp for a few months, or as a memorial sculpture."
Molodkin, a former Soviet soldier, adds that the machine he will use will produce between 1.5 and 2.5 litres of oil. He is already known for his so-called "liquid sculptures" of oil and light and will exhibit in London for the first time between April and June before going to Venice. Much of his work is inspired by oil because he had to deliver it while serving in Siberia as a soldier.
His plan to turn corpses into oil follows a recent trend among artists to address the final taboo. Last year the German artist Gregor Schneider advertised for someone who would be willing to die in an art gallery, and the Wellcome Trust displayed portraits of people pictured shortly before and after death.
Mr Gankin, 47, said he agreed to donate his body after interviewing Molodkin for the BBC World Service. "It started off as a joke, but then I thought, why not?" he said. "I work a lot in Africa. There is a lot of disease, such as malaria, and my death could happen any day. I haven't told my family yet, or thought about how my funeral might take place. Perhaps I'd better start thinking about that."
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Web Links
Daneyal Mahmood, New York
Kashya Hildebrand, Zurich
Orel Art, Paris, London
Andrei Molodkin on wikipedia
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