Chilean-born artist Marco Evaristti first made world headlines in February 2002 when he exhibited fish swimming inside 10 food blenders in the Trapholt gallery in his adopted country of Denmark. It wasn’t long before a visitor pressed the button and turned two of the fish into paste, committing an act of public murder that enraged animal-rights activists and catapulted Evaristti into the ranks of the bad boys of Danish art.

Since then, Evaristti has sprayed a Greenland iceberg red, covered his own hardened faeces in gold (with diamond flies!), and canned and sold his own flesh. For materials in his work he has used semen, heroin, blood and used condoms.

One of Evaristti’s more well-known works is Crash, completed in 1995 when he first travelled to Bangkok. There, with the cooperation of the local police, he spent his nights racing to the scenes of car crashes and collecting blood, as well as shreds of clothing off the streets. He used these in his paintings and sculptures. As well as the paintings, Evaristti also displayed a destroyed car, and a motorbike smeared with real blood.

“For Crash, I collected blood from accident victims in Bangkok, where more than 30 people lose their lives a day,” he tells Bizarre. “It was to make the viewer feel and reflect on the accidents – not by talking about statistics, but confronting people with live material from the casualties, causing a reaction in the heart and stomach. To this day I have all the terrible scenes in my head.”

These scenes, Evaristti says, no longer bother him since his conversion to Buddhism 10 years ago. The fish in blenders aren’t quite in keeping with Buddhist ideology though, are they?

“With the goldfish in the blenders, the issue was dark: Ruling over life and death by a single press on a button, and in the same movement dividing people into three groups – the sadists (those pressing the button); the voyeurs (those waiting for somebody else to press so they can passively enjoy the result). And the moralists (those pointing their fingers at the two other groups). Thereby, the piece becomes dark, and in my opinion very existential – which one of the three groups do we belong to?”

Evaristti’s latest work is entitled Polpette Al Grasso Di Marco, or ‘Meatballs in the fat of Marco’, and is just as controversial. This time, Evaristti travelled to France to undergo liposuction, then cooked and ate meatballs fried in his own fat. Forty-eight meatballs were prepared in all, and what was left was promptly canned and put on display in a museum (two cans were sold to collectors for ,200 each). Then, in January this year, and back in his homeland Chile, he held a dinner party and invited guests to eat some of the meatballs, declaring, “You are not a cannibal if you eat art.”

“It is a piece that comments on several things,” he explains. “For one thing, plastic surgery, which is a result of a very fascist dictation of beauty. This world is becoming smaller and smaller, by means of easy and fast communication tools, and instead of rejoicing over our differences we seem to promote and salute uniformity. It is also a comment to Manzoni, of course.” Italian artist Piero Manzoni preserved and canned his own faeces in 90 tins in 1961, then sold them for their weight in gold.

“I have put my fat in cans and am thereby inviting people not only to view my work but to devour me! And for the event, covered by the BBC, by the way, I prepared the meatballs with my own fat, which I then ate, accompanied by a nice bottle of Chianti – the ultimate action of recycling and an example of a closed foodchain!”

But his aim is not, he claims, to court controversy: “I’ve read that people today are hard to shock. That’s never my intention. But if what I do shocks people I have achieved a reaction, and I have no problem with that. My intention is, rather, to confront people with realities, taboos or the like, that they tend to shut their eyes to. Maybe I can explain it like this: If you have a given situation, a status quo, I try to shake the ground to stir things up – for a moment getting things out of balance, so when balance is restored it’s a new, and hopefully better, balance. Better in the sense that my visual comment has made the viewer reflect on something they wouldn’t have reflected on otherwise.”

But shock art is not without its hazards. “I have received death threats, especially when I have touched on religious subjects. I am a Jew, and I made a piece with an Arab woman, the only Arab pornstar in Denmark, giving me a blowjob. That triggered some very unpleasant reactions.
“The happening was part of a larger project called Brotherhood, which was an attempt to unite that which culturally, historically and by religious belief has divided people, making them enemies by definition.” Another part of the project is to film a live blood transfusion, between Evaristti and an Arab man, of the maximum amount of blood that can safely be transfused between two people.

Evaristti deals almost exclusively in dark themes: Sudden and unexpected death, drug addiction and war, and much of his work revolves around confronting and trying to break down taboos. His output is prolific, and much of it genuinely disturbing. Yet his work can often be humorous, and even optimistic. In 2004, the artist placed a 1.6km red carpet in Copenhagen city centre and photographed how people reacted.

“It’s a reference to Warhol’s famous sentence: ‘Fifteen minutes of fame.’ In fact, it’s a very democratic piece, where I invite all the ordinary people to take on their fame. In a very easy way. They just had to step onto the carpet, and they had the opportunity to feel like a star at a grand premiere. It might be seen as a critical view on how easily fame can be achieved and how that can be disproportionate to the powers of fame. That put aside, I tend to agree you can see the piece as joyful – a celebration in the street where everybody can be a star.

“I like to give people the understanding that they are important, every one of them. Like in my Super Heroes project. In that project I invited the drug users in the worst part of town [Copenhagen] to take time out of their restless lives. I rented a mobile home in which I made a studio. Working on paper and canvas with a material made of heroin and cream, the drug users came in and painted – using heroin in a creative process instead of a destructive process. They became in control of the drug instead of the drug controlling them. It was amazing to see the change in their eyes.”

As shock art increasingly becomes mainstream – as it is promoted in high-profile contests like the Turner Prize and patronised by multimillionaires such as Charles Saatchi – it’s refreshing to see Evaristti hasn’t lost his ability to genuinely stir things up. Right now, he’s waiting for someone to die, so he can put the mummified corpse behind the wheel of one of his latest projects, Me And My Ferrari Forever! – a project for which, he tells Bizarre, he already has 11 future corpses signed up.

It’s not without complications, however, as a body in Denmark can only be burned or buried. The corpse, therefore, will have to be transported to another country first and be embalmed there. It will then be shown worldwide and sit forever in the front of the 1973 model 308 Ferrari.

Do YOU fancy spending eternity in the jumpseat of one of Italy’s finest sports cars? Body donors are welcome to sign the legal consent form downloadable on Evaristti’s website: www.Evaristti.com