OFF: Making Trepanation look tame!

[Martyn White]

           UK News
           Wednesday August 14 1996                          Issue 450


Festival to see first show of art and grafts
 By Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent


   THE Edinburgh Festival, the launch pad of many acts, may
   claim another first of questionable taste next week when
   three "surgically altered" actors stage unannounced
   street performances.

   The actors have been having secret cosmetic surgery in
   America for the past year. Two have had pieces of coral
   grafted on to their bones to give them devil's horns, a
   tail and porcupine quills. A third has had a spiked
   metal plate implanted in his head, giving him,
   effectively, a metallic Mohican Indian haircut.

   Jim Rose, the American circus freak show producer, who
   commissioned the operations, said yesterday it was the
   first time that coral grafts, used in conventional
   surgery to strengthen bone, had been carried out in the
   name of art.

   Bone grows slowly around the coral implants. Mr Rose
   said that the actors' "tails", "devil's horns" and
  "quills" were now growing at the rate of
   an-inch-and-a-half a year. "I think it's for others, not
   me, to do the worrying about the ethics of it," said Mr
   Rose. "They are volunteers who all come from families
   with money and they don't need to look for normal kinds
   of employment. Any kind of new art should always be
   shown first in Edinburgh."