On the Intersection of Food & Art - No. 29
And dinner parties of the Judy Chicago variety.
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Food appears in virtually every aspect of my life. It’s the primary theme in my favorite books, in poetry, and art—my instagram algorithm sends me food in every form, down to a mini frog puppet cooking in a fake oven…which I’m not keen on to be honest. It kind of creeps me out. But whether it’s Patti Smith munching on her daily kippers, brown toast, and black coffee at the corner table of her favorite cafe in Just Kids, Sylvia Plath plucking the perfect juicy berries from the bush, or Cherry Bombe’s recent feature of a bubble gum balaclava made by artist Gab Bois, food is undeniably central to the arts I consume. In this week's newsletter I’ll share a fun smattering on the intersectionality of art and food. Sort of a show and tell more than anything—I will cover some of my all time favorite works I consider to be staples to the food art crossover, as well as what people are doing in New York right now with food. I hope that this week’s piece serves as inspiration to use food as subject or artistic medium in any creative project you are working on right now.
To get us started, I would be remiss not to mention Judy Chicago, who combines my three favorite things; food, art, and women, in her piece, Dinner Party. The ultimate table setting, her piece consists of a large triangular dinner table (measuring 48 feet on each side) with thirty-nine place settings dedicated to prominent women throughout history. China-painted porcelain plates with raised central motifs based on vulvar and butterfly forms are stylized to represent the individual women being honored. An additional 999 names are inscribed on the table's glazed porcelain brick base. Not only does this piece honor women who have made an impact on society, it makes a statement about conversation central to a dinner party and the historically male domination of such. In 78’ Chicago told a reporter that the idea of a dinner party as the platform to represent these women, “all jelled at an academic dinner party [she attended] where the men at the table were all professors and the women all had doctorates, too. The women, with just as much talent, sat there silent while the men held forth.” They could surely facilitate the conversation and nourish people, just as they would had it been their dinner party. So she made it so. Want to check it out in-person? If you live in New York, you’re in luck. Dinner Party is part of the permanent collection at the Brooklyn Museum.
Next are artists using food as their material–evoking unique textures, sensuality, and other strong emotions with the material to address problems non-explicitly involving food. In many of these works, food is the ideal material because of its ability and speed of degradation. Take Swiss artist Urs Fischer’s “Faules Fundament (Rotten Foundation)!” (1998), piece for example, where rot is not only inevitable — it’s the goal. Here, food is used satirically. Its brick walls rising from a base of decaying fruit illustrating labor, transformation, entropy, order, and chaos as its materials shift from stable and fresh, to crumbling and rotting.
Similarly, South Korean artist Lee Bul’s “Majestic Splendor” uses rotting fish festooned with sequins and beads in an attempt to question the concept of ornamented beauty. She begins with a raw fish, and eventually, the beauty deteriorates to such an extent that its overpowering scent at the Museum of Modern Art’s 1997 showing had to be removed early. Later in London, the artist doused the fish with potassium permanganate to neutralize the smell, which caused a small fire at a gallery as the fish decayed. Wild!
Aside from degradation, choice of food as medium is sometimes made to intensify feelings of intimacy in a piece. Think about it, food is extremely intimate. A photo of someone eating feels a lot more personal than someone doing their taxes, going for a walk, or reading a book, for example. Something is entering their body, or a relationship to something necessary for our survival is implied. Feeling vulnerable on its own, the manipulation of food can help to reveal secrets about a subject’s habits to say the least. Artist Santina Amato’s use of dough in her works is a lovely example of this. Especially in her collection Portraits of Women With Their Weight In Dough, in which, as the title suggests, Amato photographs women from diverse backgrounds to labor in the creation of, and to rest with their weight in dough over a two hour time frame. The women are selected through an open call process and asked to respond to the project by telling Amato why they want their portrait taken with their weight in dough. Intimate as a portrait may already feel, something about the texture and mass of the dough amplifies the intimacy of the weight these women carry.
Then there’s Montreal-based artist Gab Bois, who uses everyday objects to create photographs that twist reality and illustrate bizarre, yet clever, concepts. I first found Bois through Cherry Bombe’s post on her work, which highlighted a bubble gum balaclava, but when I dug further I saw that her pieces range from shrimp earrings, to a sweater woven entirely with sour strips, to a cake hat made from lipstick. Either using food as medium or other found objects to represent food, she tells Vogue, “some projects take minutes. For example, I put some Froot Loops around my ear and call it a day. Other times, it’s a matter of days or weeks to put everything together. Post-production is also highly variable in my work.”
Existing in a similar space are works like Lexie Park’s gelatin desserts, which appear for consumption as well as for art. At Chifa in LA, Park’s almond gelatin corn appears on the dessert menu, for consumption but she also showcases works like these in galleries like the LACAMA as art. Park began selling her jelly cakes through her company, Nunchi, which she started after growing tired of over a decades long career in fashion. “My mom's a fashion designer and I kind of grew up in the business and then went off and did my own thing,” she explains in an interview for Vogue, and now aims to heavily integrate food and fashion in all that she produces.
Finally, we move on to chefs who’s dinner parties are inspired by art–where food is certainly medium, and is curated for consumption. In 2015, the American artist Jen Monroe, began hosting monochromatic meals in Brooklyn under her event title Bad Taste, inspired by the all-black party in the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884 novel of debauchery, “À Rebours,” and the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1932 “The Futurist Cookbook,” in which the recipes include instructions for diners to take bites while simultaneously stroking sandpaper and being sprayed with carnation perfume. Wanting to upend restaurant conventions with food that is delicious but also disturbing, Monroe has served briny shrimp mousse in Barbie-pink, beet-stained deviled eggs, lurid yellow sushi in pillboxes and strawberries already bitten into.
The New York City-based conceptualist Laila Gohar’s work is less overtly confrontational but still deeply creative and performative. Over time, her food has veered toward the avant-garde, with diners invited to pluck marshmallows from a six-foot-tall mountain, uproot mushrooms growing in elegant white pots and snip pieces of dehydrated fruit leathers hanging in translucent sheets from towel rods. The ephemerality of her installations, which take months to research but hours for guests to destroy, pleases her.
Some final food for thought — food as medium helps to forge intimacy and relatability in a piece. Exploration of such can be fun, whimsical, and satirical. But what do we think our culture’s growing fetish with food says about a perspective of extraordinary privilege? What does it say about our society that we all not only immediately see ourselves and relate through food, but are also so secure in our food supply that we aren’t seeing food as a requirement for biological survival but as entertainment?
That’s all for this week, thanks for checking out my lil show and tell, highlighting the food art crossover. I hope that this week’s piece serves as inspiration to use food as subject or artistic medium, and for deeper thought on any creative project you are working on right now.