Did Rent-A-Body Sell Out?
by Mark Ostrowski
G21 Europe Contributing Writer
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No one ever rented Cao in order to use his dreams or childhood memories. This is understandable, though, since with Rent-A-Body, as with any other commodity, you got what you paid for. Clients had to shell out for deluxe service --- one hundred and fifty dollars --- if they wanted the rental body to perform any of its more complex mental functions.
Although Cao's rental days are over, salvation still awaits all those who did not splurge for the Rent-A-Body's "total mind function": there's a book --- and maybe a movie --- on the way that will tell us everything we wanted to know about his body-as-commodity experience but were too cheap to pay for.
Cao would later re-enact and subvert these experiences in the name of art. In the beginning, he staged masochistic exercises in his native Asturias, Spain, smothering his naked body in cow dung, bathing it in gallons of pig's blood.
But self-inflicted punishment wasn't bringing him any closer to the audience he so desperately wanted to involve; excrement and blood were making people sick instead of getting them to participate. (Vomiting on the body would indeed constitute a valid form of participation, but doing so en masse would compromise not so much the artist's dignity as his ability to breathe.)
Which is exactly what he was aiming at. The photo was used to advertise Fleisch von Paco Cao, an art exhibit that was supposedly on display at the NIE Galerie in Germany. In cahoots with the Munich-based gallery, one of Cao's friends sent a press release to Spain, detailing Cao's "body for rent" performance. Soon afterward Paco Cao's Flesh was featured in the cultural section of Cao's hometown newspaper, La Nueva Espana. Cao had duped the local press, fiction prevailed over fact, and the Rent-A-Body idea was born.
Cao could now take his act out of galleries and into the street, since he was going to ostensibly run his Rent-A-Body agency like any other company. But the real world wasn't ready for such a crossover, and Cao would go on to wrinkle the brow of more than one civil servant. As the Spanish IRS didn't have a tax bracket to place him in, they finally decided he could drive a truck or process data, or else find work on the strength of his Ph.D. in Art History. The rest of the Rent-A-Body business was likened to prostitution.
Unarguably, Cao is one in a long list of people who have used their bodies to advance their careers. But let no one confuse him with Monica Lewinsky, or anyone of her ilk, for the 5-foot-5, 121-pound Cao did everything imaginable to downplay what little sex appeal he may of had. As the Rent-A-Body guidelines clearly stated, the rented body "has no contractual obligation to engage in active carnal knowledge. Under no circumstances will the client be allowed access to the orifices of the rental body, either with foreign objects or his or her own anatomy."
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If it is true that Cao's project did not reveal anything new about American capitalist society or the media circus that runs amok therein, then it is equally true that it did make some provocative forays into the nature of performance art and artistic production in general. From Pastor David Anglada who rented Cao to pose as Christ on the cross at Trinity Lutheran Church in Brooklyn to the teacher who hired him to lecture at Garden City High School, the world is full of performing artists. But what set Cao apart was his fierce desire to be regarded not as an artist, but as an object of art.
His thirst for self-objectification was unquenchable: he was auctioned off at New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art; he arranged to have himself shipped as merchandise from Spain to New York. Although the latter project never materialized, the idea was for Cao to be sent on loan from a Spanish art museum to an American one. The Rent-A-Body packing slip listed its contents as, in addition to mineral salts and blood, "carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, magnesium, iron and calcium."
With his virtually non-existent, fresh-off-the-plane English, Cao was articulate enough to gain the backing of Creative Time, a not-for-profit organization based in New York. Creative Time agreed to pay up to $3,500 for producing the Rent-A-Body brochure and $1,500 in the form of bulk mailing costs.
Potential clients and job seekers took the bait almost immediately. A few entrepreneurial types inquired about franchise opportunities. (These were never taken seriously; Cao just strung them along for the purposes of documenting his project.) Then in July 1996 Cao sold the rights to his story to Eo Productions International (EOPI), a California production company. Cao's contract stipulates that he'll receive $40,000 for a 2-hour television or cable movie and $75,000 for a feature film.
According to then-president of production Wendy Wilmowski, none of the scriptwriters she worked with at the time was able to capture the essence of the Rent-A-Body story. At the end of her three-year contract with EOPI, Wilmowski left to form a new company, Wayfarer Entertainment. (Wayfarer picked up the rights for Cao's story when EOPI decided not to renew their option.)
It was script guru Steve Colberg who finally came up with what Wilmowski was looking for: a romantic comedy for the 90's, something along the lines of Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail. Paco, the tentative title given to Colberg's script, is Wayfayer's first feature film project, one that Wilmowski has been nurturing for the last four years, and one that she plans to oversee to the very end, right down to the choosing of the cast and director. Who would Wilmowski have play the canny Cao? At this stage, it is easier to say who she doesn't want associated with her feel good production: Robert Downey Jr., Mr. Damaged Goods himself, whose name was discarded almost immediately.
Despite her being no stranger to the fickle ways of the Hollywood hit machine, she refuses to be anything less than optimistic. "It took Forrest Gump nine years to get made into a film," Wilmowski said, in a telephone interview earlier this month.
Cao's rental days, along with his proverbial 15 minutes of fame, are over. Or are they? Should the Rent-A-Body story ever make it to the big screen, he'll be at the premier --- unless he rents someone to take his place, that is.
| DAY ONE THURSDAY | DAY ONE WEDNESDAY | The PREVIOUS DAY ONE | THE NEXT DAY ONE | | HOME | THE MAIN EVENT | FAX NIKITA © 1999, GENERATOR 21.Paco Cao was a hot commodity --- literally and figuratively --- in New York for the better part of 1996, when his Rent-A-Body agency had clients ranging from Christie's to the Body Worship S&M boutique. From posing as Christ on the cross to strutting down a fashion runway in cow-print pajamas, Cao did it all --- almost.
Confessions of a Feces-Eater
Cao's childhood is full of the stuff that goes into college psychology textbooks: sticking a piece of tubing into a ruptured sewer line and siphoning fecal matter into his mouth; being breastfed back to health by a matron in the mountains of northern Spain; watching his father wolf down paella in the buff.
Then in 1991 there was a breakthrough. Cao hung himself from a gambrel in an abandoned slaughterhouse and had it photographed. Cast in shadow, head slung back and out of view, Cao looked like a side of beef.
Pleasures of the Flesh, Spanish Style
Cao's Rent-A-Body project required him to abandon the whips-and-chains mentality that guided his earlier work. Along with this mental shift, there was also a physical one: his body --- formerly naked and besieged --- was outfitted with a spiffy suit and designer eyewear.
Out of Sight, out of Mind
By July 1996 Cao had been the subject of no less than 20 newspaper and magazine articles. He had made a half-dozen television appearances and participated in as many radio shows. Most hosts couldn't resist asking Cao how he felt about renting himself, if only to illicit his seemingly just-short-of-revolutionary, headline-making theory that "all of us are rented in a sense." If Cao's shtick was not new, why was it treated as such? WABC talk show host Curtis Sliwa --- who waxes aphoristic better than anybody --- was on the right track: "out of sight, out of mind." The converse of this little gem is also true.
Far from new, the body-as-commodity approach can be traced back to Karl Marx's "Wage Labor and Capital," which appeared in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1849. But as Cao knows all too well, the media feed on live bodies and not dead ones. Give the low- and high-tech fruit pickers of the world a freak, someone they can gawk at, someone they can either make fun of or loathe. It should therefore come as no surprise that the media were one of Cao's most important clients.
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Cao's story reads like something out of the pages of Horatio Alger. But Cao is no Ragged Dick, even though putting on a natty new suit marked the turning point in both of their careers. Whereas Alger's hero sought to improve his lot in life, Cao wanted to add rigor to performance art and get closer to the audience. True, Rent-A-Body was conceived as an artistic enterprise rather than a money-making scheme, but that doesn't mean Cao won't get ahead financially.
Mark Ostrowski is a freelance writer living in Asturias, Spain. This is his second DAY ONE article for the G21. Mr. Ostrowski most recently wrote about the challenge of the EU to force new alliances in South America, thus nullifying United States hegemony on that continent.
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