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 Günther von Hagens's Body Worlds exhibition of preserved corpses is on at London's O2.
from: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/till-death-do-us-sculpt-russian-to-render-human-bodies-into-art-materials-1645363.html

also
http://www.frieze.com/issue/print_article/private_lives_public_gestures_2/
by Jan Verwoert

and
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/triangle/
Sanja Ivekovic

and
http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue5/privateview5.htm
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/ondak/default.shtm

Roman Ondak