Turning dead cats into dead dogs pisses people off

When we talked to Dutch artist Tinkebell a couple years ago about her “Save the Males” campaign, a project that involved throwing baby chicks through a woodchipper at a flea market, that piece garnered a lot of angry comments by anonymous blog commenters. So imagine the shitstorm of hate mail she received when she made a handbag out of her cat and posted a how-to manual about it online. After that flood of hate mail, she teamed with Coralie Vogelaar and looked up as much personal information about those people they could possibly find. Together they made a book out of it. A lot of people who thought they sent anonymous hate mails lost their anonymity that day…

Vice: Coralie, you've made art books before but you’ve never received a single piece of hate mail in your entire life. Weren't you afraid that teaming up with “Tinkebell the cat killer” would change that?
Coralie: Well, I used to, but that was before I looked up who the people are who send those mails. They're mostly teens and bored-to-death soccer moms.

Tinkebell, why did you kill your cat?
Tinkebell: I killed my cat because she was depressed and hated to be home alone. By turning her into a purse I could bring her everywhere with me.

And people hated you for that.
Tinkebell: Yeah. I got so much hate mail because of that manual that I just scanned my inbox for hate mails after a while and dragged them to a special folder. When I did that, I noticed the extreme lack of variety in the mails. The senders weren't very original. That's when I decided I wanted to make a book with them. So I approached Coralie.

Coralie: Yeah, I had just then finished Masters of Rietveld, a book that showed how little creativity there is in general in the world of art. Together we decided to search for the information about the writers of these hate mails.

Why?
Tinkebell: Hate mails are a real trend. A lot of public figures who speak their mind without qualms receive mail like that. It's weird that we take that fact for granted, even though we don't personally know anyone who would send hate mail like that. It's an abstract fact for most of us. So Coralie and a couple of other people spent half a year researching and looking up all the data they could find about the people who send mails like that, so we could take those senders of hate mails out of their anonymity and show other people who they are. The goal of this book is to publish the names and as much of the private data of the people who sent me hate mail, in full color. In this way, I take it back to the people who sent hate mail, while also showing something about those mails.

Coralie: Most of them look exactly the same, by the way. They're so unoriginal. That's why we could put all the hate mails into different categories like “A BAG OUT OF YOUR SKIN,” “I’LL GET YOU!,” and “YOU MUST DIE.”

Why do you think people are so remarkably unoriginal when sending hate mail?
Tinkebell: Again, the people sending it are mostly teenagers and bored-to-death soccer moms. They send off e-mail so impulsively that they don’t think about its content very long.

A wise man once said that hate is a good emotion, but some of the mails you receive are pretty far out. Here's one: "Undearest: I hope that you both become DISEMBOWELED, with your innards hanging in your laps as you slowly regain consciousness, knees and arms twitching, voiceboxes screaming helplessly AND airlessly as you slowly bleed to death. You are one SICK MOTHERFUCKING MOTHERFUCKER." What do you like about your favorite hate mail?

Tinkebell: I like the preciseness of it, and the way it's written. Here's someone who really cares about what he writes. It’s like poetry.

Don’t you get scared?
When you receive one hate mail, you're scared. When you receive thousands, it becomes abstract. Now I just don't care anymore. I'm not interested in the people who write me this mail.

Besides making a bag out of your cat, you've done other projects. You've threatened to throw male chicks into a wood shredder, you've put a stuffed dog on green wheels, you've turned a dead cat into a toy that could be zipped open and turned inside out to reveal a dead dog, and you've just cut up a dead dog to paste parts of his skin onto wooden cubes to make a cube dog. Which project inspired most hate mail?
Definitely the cat. About 80 percent of the hate mails in Dear Tinkebell, was sent because of my project “My Dearest Cat Pinkeltje.”

Who's the lady on the cover?
Coralie: The woman on the cover of the book is a 46-year-old American woman who's into acting, singing, and dancing. Unfortunately, her career hasn't really taken off so she's a dental assistant. She's put a huge amount of pictures and weird movies of herself online.

So how do you think people will react to this book?
Tinkebell: We've hired a lawyer in case we get any claims, but we'll see. We're not sure if this book will be for sale for a very long time. It's exciting.

Why should people buy it?
Coralie: It shows how carelessly people put their personal information online. Look at the pictures of this guy with his throbbing erection. We found that online very easily. Or this woman, who is a mother of two and uses Prozac. They're not aware of the consequences that stuff like this is online and available for everyone.

Was revenge a motivation for publishing this?
Tinkebell: No. I'm an artist and this is my work. It's what I always do with my work actually: put phenomena that interest me into another perspective. I saw mails as art. When I started receiving them, I used to answer them with the standard message, "Thank you for your fanmail! TINKEBELL reserves the right to publish fanmail.”

That must've pissed off those people even more. What did they send you back?
Usually more angry ranting, but then I'd just send them the same message. They'd all quit after that.

Do you ever receive fan mail as well?
Yeah, loads. Someone even proposed to me.

It's nice that your work is the cause of so much emotion.
It is. A lot of artists are really happy when their work is exposed in some small-time gallery, but mine garners a lot of media attention and a lot of extreme emotions. If everybody loves your work, it’s not that interesting. When everybody hates it, it's bad. If it's extremely mixed, it could be brilliant.

It could be?
Well, it might be.

(photo Sophie Van Der Perre)