The Whole HOG^TM

by INDIRA CHARUNDER-MACHARRUNDEIRA, Alternate Reality News Service Fine Arts Writer

Curiosity may not have killed the copycat, but it sure did earn it a long prison sentence.

Ever since Jimmy Pfiz was convicted of killing his father with a gun he had made with the family's Home Object Generator^TM and turned it into an object d'art, had his conviction overturned because it slipped on appeal, became a darling of the Nanjing art scene, wrote a best-selling biography, drifted gently into obscurity, wrote eight volumes of forgettable poetry and was featured on an episode of Where Are They Now and Why Does Anybody Care?, there has been an epidemic of people using their HOG^TMs to fashion murder weapons and refashion them into art.

• French cattle prodder Henri Trousseau made a knife with his HOG^TM that he used to stab his lover, the concierge of his lover's apartment building and a bull mastiff named Mrs. Fluffy. He then melted the knife down and used the plastic to create a miniature Venus de Milo with arms. Fine arts journal Hinter-Texte enthusiastically called it "a tour de force of esthetic revisionism and bad taste."

• Canadian Matt Frewfrew used his HOG^TM to create a rifle that he shot random strangers with from the roof of the OCAD building. Then, he incorporated the rifle and other materials into a six foot sculpture of a bottle of maple syrup. At his trial, Frewfrew said, "I was making an ironic comment on Canada's perpetual national identity crisis." Despite an approving editorial in Today's Art Weekly, Frewfrew was given a life sentence, presumably for the murders and not for his art.

• After he used his HOG^TM to create a gun with which he shot his local borscht supplier and several hogs that just happened to be passing by the shop, Ukrainian Yevgeny Vlasch used the gun and several other weapons he had made to create a complex abstract sculpture that had many jutting angles and hints of human faces in agony. In the artist's statement accompanying his trial, he called this sculpture "Hegemon's Flight of Fancy XVII." Vlasch was sentenced to death, presumably for his art and not for the murder.

"This puts us in a ticklish position," allowed Ned Feeblish, Vice President for Artistic Interventions and Seismic Declensions for MultiNatCorp - "We do innovative technological - without the slightest legal liability for the consequences of our products - stuff" - the corporate owner of Krapp's Last Industries, the creators of the Home Object Generator^TM. "On the one hand, we do not want to be seen to condone murderous behaviour. Certainly not publicly - if we learned nothing from our experience in the Seychelles, we learned that.* On the other hand, we don't want to stifle anybody's creative urges, especially when they belong to a burgeoning new art form. I think I'm going to have to go no comment on this one."

You would have thought the National Rifle Association (whose motto "A handgun in every pot" only made sense if you were on pot, but nevertheless appeared on 100,000 bumper stickers every year) would be happy at the increasing availability of firearms. As it happens, though, the NRA's biggest benefactors, arms manufacturers, were up in...well, they weren't very happy about this challenge to their industry.

"Art made out of weapons...naah," said NRA spokesman Charlton Heston by Ouija board.

President Schmidt Bobney stated that his administration would have zero tolerance for deadly works of art: "And, to show you how serious we are, we will haul into court as accomplices the makers of any 3-D printers implicated in any violent crime." When Feeblish pointed out all of the legitimate uses people have been putting HOG^TMs to, President Bobney responded, "Okay. Right. Well, to show you how serious my administration is, we will shut down any Web sites that provide people with schematics for weapons they can build using their HOG^TMs." When the Internet pointed out that making it illegal to supply people with plans to make weapons was absurd when they could legally buy completed weapons online, President Bobney responded, "Okay. Good point. To show you how seriously my administration takes this, we will be studying ways to stop it. In the meantime, we'll be setting up a new department of art criticism in the FBI in order to - what? This has always been our policy, and I've never said otherwise!"

As the technology for 3-D printers becomes more sophisticated, artists are incorporating a wider variety of materials in their esthetic weapons, including: fur from cats and dogs (except for Saint Bernards), unused napkins and tissues, previously loved pixels, spark plugs from Chevys produced after 1978, low-grade uranium, recycled chicken noodle soup, obsolete CDs and DVDs, NRA bumper stickers, high-grade diesel fuel, recalled tainted beef, Elgin marble (for those who can afford it) and a baby's arm holding an apple.

"Artists are always looking for new materials to incorporate into their work," concluded the Hinter-Texte article. "It will be interesting to see what mayhem they come up with next!"

* For more on this, see GINRACHMANJINJa-VITUS, GIDEON, "She Sells Seychelles by the Sea Shore," Alternate Reality News Service, three years, six months, two weeks and a day ago.