contemporary monkey

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.