Sunday Musings: A matter of Context

I saw an odd thing when taking the dogs for a walk

  and I found it oddly disturbing.
It's not like I am not used to seeing road kill, but somehow seeing a squirrel gently placed on a settee on the side of a road put it into a different context, into the unexpected. I wasn't seeing a piece of road kill anymore, I was seeing a beautiful little animal in deathly repose and felt a sadness for it.

What artists do

It reminded me how powerful it can be when the ordinary can become the extraordinary simply by virtue of context. Artists do it all the time. It can be as simple as a painting of a pear, or as bold as a dissected cow.

When I was growing up butcher shops always had posters of a cow dissected into a visual map of each cut and the name of each cut. You don't see those posters around the meat department at the supermarket. How many visualize the whole cow or what part the cut comes from? It seems we have become so removed from the actual animal that seeing a dissected cow in an art gallery is incongruous and shocking. Would it have been so shocking if we were used to seeing meat as it was once displayed in butcher shops/window displays?