Art Made of Fat, Velvet Liberace and the Discovery of Bone

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post #100

In the world of found book objects, few I think are as deeply removed and as deeply obscure as the work by Otto F. Fleiss called White Art in the Meat Food Business.  A Practical Handbook for Butcher, Pork Stores, Restaurants, Hotels and Delicatessens on How to Make Lasting and Transferable White Art Decorations out of Bacon Fat Back for Window Displays, Ornaments on Meat Food Cold Buffets and for Exhibits and Advertising Purposes.  Enrich yourself with Personal Knowledge. 

If the title of this book could itself be described in terms of food, I think that I'd have to call it a (warm) Slim Jim Egg Frosty with a crust of French fries, baked.  Or something like that.  If the exhaustive, exhausting title didn't stop you in your tracks, though, the slim pamphlet holds some indelible, indigestible, eyebrow-burning, flat-out remarkable images. (And this coming from a family of vegetarians.) Working your way through this pamphlet is as much fun as stringing together dirty diapers:  you can enjoy instructions on how to make a vase of roses out of strips of fat, or produce the reverse (?!) portrait of Santa Claus in slabs of fat, or marvel at the photos of Mr. Fleiss' "first prize" (?) 200-pound fat sculpture of a cathedral done entirely in slips and chunks and strips of fat.  (We are told of  Fleiss' "Master Piece" that  "the church is still in existence, having become petrified".  (What a magnificent image is this, the petrified church [made of fat].  It was perfect fodder for the wonderful Ephemera blog of Marty Weil, a connoisseur of odd, who posted it to his site earlier.)

This simply must be the most sublime work ever produced on Fat Art.

And, in the annals of art, I should think that Black Velvet Sparkly Liberace paintings may have moved up a level from the most secret depths of the inferno to make way for Fat Art--or, dare I say it, "FAART".

See also my latest post on fat:  Fad Redux: 1920's Fat (Obesity) Quack Cures.

A Note on the Origin of this Pamphlet:
The Fleiss work comes from a singular collection that we purchased of the Library of Congress some years ago.  It was called, simply, "The Pamphlet Collection", and included 90,000 or so pamphlets stored in 2,355 blue document boxes.  They were all categorized and alphabetized, but not according to any truly discernible methodology.  Their greatest common denominator was that the great majority of them simply did not exist.

By "they did not exist" I mean that they were not catalogued in the massive (70 million item)  database and librarian's tool WorldCat/FirstSearch which lists books in libraries world wide.   And they continually do not show up in the mass bookseller databases, or in Google/Yahoo searches, and so on.

The pamphlets in the collection also weren't added, in large part, to the Library of Congress collection, nor were they ever circulated.  They were just kept in their blue boxes, waiting to a-moulder away.  But they didn't, and here they are, and will be, making appearances over the next number of years.

There will also be many other images from much more public and published sources that have simply slipped away from us here in our present—unexpected bits of revelatory history wrapped in a simple image that speak volumes from the dim, deep forgotten.

Additional Images:

Perhaps the most incredible of the photographs in this unleafy work by Fleiss is of that below, of the Welfare Meat Pork Store.  The legend describes "lamb roast ornamented into a duck", meaning that all of the duck-like things hanging there in the window were actually made of lamb roast covered in pork fat.  (One doesn't get to write that ever day.) Then we see a "roast with a rose" (and as we saw in the text the roses in the ornamentation were made out of fat), as well as a "rose on a smoked ham and a bouquet of roses".  Again, virtually everything in the wind of this store was constructed of fat.

Mr. Fleiss also did Christmas ornamentation.
In fat.

Comments

[Dharmamama]

Don't suppose we'll ever see this on a Food Network Challenge...

[Homer Simpson]

MMMMMM Bacon!

[Chris]

wow, bizarre, but interesting

chris @ www.gofrostfire.com

[Jason L]

How would I go about getting a copy of this? I'd love to take a look at it.

[TEd Sawchuck]

This is one of the greatest things I've ever seen.

[Brent]

There is a typo in the URL link.
http://www.thesciencebookstore.com

[Gilbert Wham]

Can haz scans, plz?

[john]

Wow. Can we counter this with seitan art?
that stuff can be molded into anything!

-john
www.YogaWithJohn.com

[Tonsure Wimple]

Seriously, please scan this to Flickr. It is magnitudes more horrifying than the stuff on www.lileks.com

[Jared]

Hell, give a COPY to Lileks.

[Sardonique Schadenfreude Rictus 8^}D-]

What about garments ??? I'd love to have a ground-length cape of Fat-Back, lined with contrasting Goat-Tripe, and surmounted by 2 Cornish Game-Hens (facing gizzards outward) for Epaulets. Talk about straight-up REGAL, Jack ! Maybe even a medieval Plague-Doctor cone-shaped mask made of hardened and salted bacon-strips! The possibilities are almost endless!!!

[Duncan]

My mouth is watering at the thought!