food can be art, but not the other way around
Helen Chadwick's "Cacao"
An abundance of milk chocolate is evident in a room before I arrive at the top floor. While I climb the stairwell of the New Art Gallery in Walsall, a foul, stale dairy scent warns me to stop walking and flee back downstairs. The odor becomes more acute and recognizable, while a popping and slurping sound soon becomes evident. Coincidentally my arrival at the top floor via the stairs has timed exactly with the lift opening in front of me, where I witness the faces of two visitors contorting from the instantaneous attack on their senses. The installation is supposed to be about food, but I was hoping for something a little more palatable. Why is it, by the way, that all art using food as a source commits itself to the rotting, diseased phase of its lifetime?
“Pot Luck: Food and Art” was on exhibition, with the entire floor flipped into a surrealist’s kitchen. Toward the rear of the room, the reverberating fountain called “Cacao” is a six feet wide pool of milk chocolate (the cheapest chocolate by the way, which no pastry chef would dare touch) pulsing and bubbling like the inside of a lava lamp. The dairy from the milk chocolate has been flowing for seven weeks now, in a not very refrigerated room. Other than the hanging salami rain storm (remarkably with no whiff of decay), the chocolate goo pool is the only live food in the building. Most of the exhibits use other media to represent food, which I suddenly realised was the best idea.
This flowing sludge was among a handful of ideas blended at the intersection of art and food. The curators, Cynthia Morrison-Bell and Anthony Key, offer the notion that food is an easy lever for making sense of contemporary art because the viewer doesn’t require subjective knowledge before “getting it”. Is that the answer to getting one’s head around contemporary art, by way of a more readily available medium? Isn’t that what television tries to do?
Art Galleries everywhere aim to lead a broader audience to the front door, and using a common language sounds fundamentally correct. Does that mean that art for blokes should include pints of beer? Do we need an installation of “Feminine Art in the 21st century: Knock-off Handbags”? Somehow this seems too easy, and probably truly insulting, to get Joe and Jane Public in for a quick lesson on contemporary art (although, if anyone would like to make the attempt to explain art to me and my friends with beer, count us in as beta testers). We should probably be made to give art a good attempt if it’s meant to be inspirational and confrontational. Galleries could always save the beer for goading us into the building in the first place. And chocolate on the way out.
May 7th, 2010 at 13:14
Wonderful insight
May 13th, 2010 at 00:13
OMG–When my husband and I were in college a LONG time ago, we were very broke. Some fool filled a display case with a month’s worth of the most expensive bread available in the grocery store and left it to rot as an “installation.” Then, in a discouraging echo, a fellow artist at a workspace fellowship was also planning a rotting bread “piece”. The only argument for such a thing is, pardon me, “freshness”—pretty stale, if you ask me. Now, your writings about art, on the other hand…
May 13th, 2010 at 09:29
Finally a smart blogger…I love how you’re thinking and writing!
May 18th, 2010 at 18:55
Thank you for another great article. Where else could anyone get that kind of information in such a perfect way of writing? I have a presentation next week, and I am on the look for such information.
May 19th, 2010 at 04:05
Thank you for the great post – I had fun reading it! I always enjoy this blog.
May 20th, 2010 at 10:14
hi it is my first reply on this web and firstly I would like to thank you for the great quality information, which I were able to find in this and all previous posts , it really helped me very much. I will definitely iclude this website on my google reader
Also, I would like to ask - don’t you mind if I will quate some information from your website since I am writing articles for the Bukisa, Ezine and other articles directories (this is my part time job)? It would really help me with some of mine articles. Of course, I will mention your website title or URL (not all articles directories allows URL’s , so I can’t 100% promise that you will get a direct backlink to your blog).
May 21st, 2010 at 01:48
Hi,Great blog dude! i am Fed up with using RSS feeds and do you use twitter?so i can follow you there:D.
PS:Have you considered putting video to the blog to keep the readers more interested?I think it works.Yours, Stephany Landero
June 1st, 2010 at 12:37
Great stuff as usual…
July 7th, 2010 at 13:27
Awesome site. I am so looking forward to seeing more!
July 14th, 2010 at 13:25
I paint for painting, not for marketing and not for approval, although sales and applause are always very gratifying and fuel the muse enormously. (Susan Holland)