I am taking a hiatus from blogging. The posts I now add will be unedited and unpolished, please forgive me. I am using this platform as a storage place for interesting things. I am currently focusing on editing wikipedia articles on contemporary art instead. I encourage you to do the same and to follow still very active blogs like hyperallergic, c-monster, bldgblog, and more. thanks you.

Food

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Dinner at The Loft Project, a London based experimental chef residency program which looks amazing.

I have thought more about food in the past two years than I have in my entire life. My friends started blogging about food,
Ladycakes and eat food more often, I lived on an organic farm with goats, chickens, and bees, I started reading about relational aesthetics and Rirkrit Tiravanija, many of my friends are craftspeople that make art to heighten food consumption to an artistic experience, and close friends started hosting magnificent soirees. Farming/gardening, health, cooking, making art, eating, and showing art seem to have become all entwined in the lifestyle of the so called artist. Just today I heard about an upcoming opening at gallery Eye Level BQE in Brooklyn around food. WHAT IS HAPPENING!? I don't get it.

I am totally on the fence about food and art. I love good food, and I love good art, but I am totally unsure about combining the two into an art piece/performance. Recalling
Crafting a Moment on Art21blog, I proposed to a friend last night that we have Bed-Stuy Soiree Night once a month, yet I called it a soiree not a performance. I hope begin to have these fantastic dinner/dress up parties, yet I am hesitant to call it an art piece and I cannot say why. Maybe I am falling into the traditional belief that art cannot serve a function... but I don't agree with that definition at all...

I hope that you, I MEAN YOU, comment thoughtfully on this tornado of art + food links, to give me thoughts on this topic.



Rirkrit Tiravanija. Untitled (Pad Thai) 1990.

11 comments:

  1. You know, I am on the fence about food and art, as well. Most food art (that I've seen, at least) is inedible, and that defeats the whole purpose, no? It's no longer food. Take the EAP, for example - you can't eat those cookies and enjoy them because they're iced with a tangy/bitter confection. Might as well cut out cardboard circles and paste white paper on top.

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  2. i think that food + art = awesome. food + art = my two favorite things.
    but food art? i just don't know. i think food can be very aesthetically pleasing, and cooking a good meal is an art form in and of itself.
    but i would never put food on display in a gallery.
    i take that back, because i just made an art project with fortune cookies.
    but generally speaking, unless the food is a means to convey another higher artistic ideal, i don't think that the food itself is a piece of what we would call 'high art.'

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  3. Curious. My friend Julie Upmeyer has been exploring the relationship between food making and art making for several years from her base of operations in Istanbul. Check out her website here; http://www.virtual-chef.net
    hope all is well in nyc

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  4. A friend of mine points to playfulness when discussing art, and playing with aesthetics is indeed an integral part of almost all art. While the gap between food and art is becoming smaller, there are still many limits when working with food. One can make a piece of art that is not immediately pleasing, but the culinary arts are interested in making foor more appealing. I think that biotic necessity of eating makes it difficult to play with the aesthetics of it.

    That said, there are a few chefs exploring this, most of them in the spirit of molecular gastronomy. MG has its foundations in science but it is helping chefs deconstruct food and play with smaller building blocks.
    An example of three of these guys can be found here, http://www.life.com/image/ugc1061222/in-gallery/42842/cutting-edge-food-with-grant-achatz

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  5. similarly, another combination to consider: photography and noise.

    http://jessica-adams.tumblr.com/

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  6. hello there!
    i was immediately intrigued by your food/art exploration. although i did not do a performance piece like the one you're talking about, i did a couple series during college you might be interested in.

    Only two of the pieces are really finished, the others are just photographic sketches, but i liked where the idea was going and wish i had continued.

    The two finished pieces are ambiguous constructed environments where (i hope) scale plays a large role in interpretation of the piece.
    It also parodies the ritualistic tradition of food preparation and presentation by "playing" with it in a way that could elude to some sort of larger commentary that may or may not be there (i don't remember). everyone during critique talked about how important it was that i'm a vegetarian doing these, and i almost fell asleep, so i stopped continuing the idea.
    However, it does indulge my fascination with meats.

    The other small sculptures are more interesting to me conceptually. Later on I was working on depicting footprints of the body through waste like dust and blood and hair and i was like "hey, where does a body start and stop? is it limited by space or time? does the apple i'm going to eat and absorb tomorrow count as part of my body now? and what about all the dust in my attic? is it still a part of me?" after i picked up the pieces of my blown mind, i started literally mashing up body waste and food, as if to say, "listen, i just took out the middle man. here is the beginning, and here is the end. we only arrange the beginning to get the end, so i'm doing it here in an artistic and highly simplified way. go ahead and think about what magical things happen in the middle and what that means to you..." so whether my thoughts were valid or not, i didn't give a shit because i got to make "people" and a couple of these images started getting pretty kickass. i did fifty of them, and i was hoping one or all of them would start talking and get jobs, but that didn't happen. i guess you need bacteria and synapses and lightning and shit to actually make people.

    as far as your project is concerned, i'm hoping that you're inspired to think about the food itself as a meaningful conceptual element, as it is the only part of such a performance piece that would have such direct and intimate connection with the body. If you changed how the food is prepared, how it is presented, what kind of person prepares it, or what it contains, you could drastically change the tone of the performance, or at least give it subtle depth.
    Also, consider food as not an end result, but really as a dynamic point in a process. the end of a life (plant or animal), the climax of an artistic creation (from seedling to crafted dish to human waste), a cameo in a continued process (one of three performances a day of human consumption), and so on. perhaps you could look at the performance in the same way. it could reflect the dynamics of the food process, maybe how important the preparation, the climax of the performance, and the denoument are to each other within your specific context.

    just some thoughts. good luck!

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  9. the last comment was from a friend not me

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  10. sounds like someone's about to stick some cauliflower to a scab.

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  11. I think that this type of thing, food art/gallery, is an expression of the realization that food is so much more than sustenance. Despite the mineral infused corn and soy mush we're subjected to daily, considerate people, like artists are trying to cultivate more intense connections via food. I wonder if this would have happened if fair trade never happened. Enunciation of a relationship evolving into creative expression.

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