John Beagles and Graham Ramsay are artists who play with the concept of human exceptionality. They also add a new flavour to the old saying “Art is always a matter of personal taste.”

For two decades, the artists and performers have been making, cooking and sometimes eating black puddings made from their own blood. Ramsay says:

“There is a tang. And it is quite salty too.”

The pair have been collaborating since 1996 and making their “cannibal” sausages since 2004. They call their performance and exhibition a “black pudding self-portrait” or Sanguis Gratia Artis.

They are staging the show again this year. Their meat products are on display in a fridge at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and they will be cooking them for a live audience on February 13.

Ramsay, who says he likes a good black pudding, stresses: “We do not usually eat them ourselves, but we have tried them.” He adds that his partner will not be sampling them:

“One of us has quite recently become a vegetarian, and it is not me.”

There are no plans to eat the sausages in Edinburgh. Previous performances have involved some harmless light cannibalism and have attracted some bizarre audiences.

In London back in 2007, Ramsay says, word got out that they would be eating the puddings.

“The performance got a bit of attention in advance; people knew it was happening. So there was a queue of quite gothic people — vampiric characters — outside the gallery and it was a bit weird. There was a kind of feeding frenzy then. As part of the performance, we put slices of the puddings on a silver platter and paraded them through the audience, just to show them, but people started grabbing them. The performance involves us in costume, in the gallery, and we’re basically chopping and frying the pudding, with audience watching.”

The sausages are made with a pint of blood from each man, combined to symbolise nearly thirty years of collaboration.

The process of getting the blood is not easy. They have had to convince nurses to extract small quantities — no more than a syringe at a time — over a long period, and then freeze it. The kind of equipment used by blood transfusion services is tightly controlled, so the artists have to endure sometimes painful extractions, over and over again.

Why do it? Beagles and Ramsay are both respected art academics, teaching at Edinburgh University and Glasgow Art School respectively. Heavily influenced by feminist criticism, they are challenging the old idea of the artist, especially the male artist, as a lone genius separate from the world. They are playing with the idea of self in self-portrait. Their mixed blood represents their joint work.

“We fuse ourselves, but we also use a daft form to present ourselves in. It’s not heroic. We have picked a mundane modest foodstuff to represent us.”

The performance feels different now than it did when they first had their blood extracted. Both men are in their fifties now, and aware of their mortality. “Age starts to creep up on you, waistlines expand, and you become more aware of death and people’s health around you,” Ramsay says.

The artists may not see themselves as heroes, but there is an edginess to their idea, even legally. They debuted their sausages in New York in 2004. Back then there was a lot of angst in America about meat products, mad cow disease and foot and mouth. They had to send their puddings in the post with fake customs descriptions, one batch wrongly labelled as second-hand books.

One the night of their big performance, officials became antsy about health and safety, and security was brought in to stop punters eating the human sausages. Beagles and Ramsay, in a diary of their escapades, called them “anti-cannibalism guards”.

Will they have to find a way to keep their puddings safe from the Edinburgh audience? Perhaps. People are fascinated by cannibalism, even as they claim to be repelled. A few months ago, we reported on a vegan writer and photographer who finally gave in to the demands of his relatives to eat animal products by making meringues from his own blood.

He was not unique in this – remember Gwen van der Zwan, who made blood sausages out of her own blood a few years back. She commented,

“Why is my idea considered disgusting, but doing the same thing with pigs’ blood isn’t?”

Great question, Gwen. Disgusting or not, at least no one died for Van der Zwan’s or Beagles and Ramsay’s sausages.