Jana Sterbak. Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic.

A dress from the butcher's counter

In 1987 Jana Sterbak, a Canadian artist born in Prague, made a dress. The cut was ordinary: a sleeveless shift, below the knee, with a ragged hem. Only the material was not ordinary. The dress was sewn from slices of raw flank steak.

It was first shown at Galerie René Blouin in Montreal. According to the Walker Art Center's catalogue, the work consists of a mannequin, flank steak, salt, thread, and a colour photograph. The full title is long and cold: Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic.

Each part of the title pulls a different way. Vanitas is the genre of seventeenth century European still life in which skulls, guttering candles and wilting flowers remind the viewer that everything passes. An albino lacks pigment; an anorectic refuses food. Such a body is dressed in precisely what it lacks and refuses.

Sterbak adds no explanation. The dress speaks through colour, through shape, and above all through smell.

Sewn again for every showing

Meat does not last. So Vanitas cannot be a fixed object. The Walker Art Center, which acquired the work in 1993, holds the right to remake the dress for each exhibition. The Centre Pompidou in Paris also holds a version.

The Walker has documented the process. A team with knives and upholstery needles cuts slabs of flank steak to fit the pattern, front and back. The pieces are sewn together. Then the dress is packed in salt for about three hours, with roughly 60 pounds of salt, so the meat dries and bacteria cannot take hold.

At the opening the dress is still red, still soft, still smelling of fresh meat. Day by day it loses water, shrinks, darkens. The fibres stiffen like leather. In the end it is a blackened shell, closer to a shroud than a dress.

A visitor in the first week and a visitor in the last do not see the same work. Nor do they smell the same smell.

A vanitas for our time

Classical vanitas painting worked through symbols. A skull stood for death, a flower for youth. Sterbak skipped the symbol and used decaying matter itself. The viewer does not need to decode a metaphor, only to stand close enough.

When it was shown at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the dress set off a national controversy. Some called it a waste of food, others a provocation. But that discomfort is part of the work. A pretty, clean, odourless dress would make no one think about their own body.

The work also touches fashion where it is most sensitive. Fashion sells youth and an unchanging surface. Sterbak's dress is put on a mannequin, which never ages, and then ages in its place. Here clothing does not cover the body. Clothing is the body.

Smell does the final work. A photograph of a meat dress can shock, but it is clean. A room holding the real dress is not. Like the cheese filled suitcases of Dieter Roth almost twenty years earlier, Vanitas lets smell bear witness to what the eye has learned to skim past: that everything we wear, eat and are is heading the same way.