How We Look at Who's Coming to Dinner:
Eat Art's Beginnings and How It Continues in Cincinnati Practices
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Kotlarczyk, Matt. XChandeliers for Art of Food, 2010. Mixed media (candy). Photo courtesy of the Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center.
Kotlarczyk, Matt. XChandeliers for Art of Food, 2010. Mixed media (candy). Photo courtesy of the Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center.
When we are introduced to food, it is presented to us as a source of sustenance and a means of survival. A unique appreciation of food emerges when it is no longer a necessity. When the preparation and presentation of food is allowed to develop as a purely sensual experience, it is more closely aligned to the practice of making art. Both can be expensive endeavors, but the gourmet, the gourmand and the culinary aesthete indulge in a unique perversion of reallocating resources for survival towards a creative, arguably frivolous line of inquiry. The research into and appreciation of gourmet cuisine and fine art are valid only insofar as the seeming frivolity of their pursuits can be considered as not frivolous, cultural mainstays even.
Still, socio-economic implications surround the two fields, more so when the crossover points in contemporary art practices find artists employing food and other organic materials as the substances in which their ideas are fabricated. In most cases, it is probably inconceivable that an artist or individual of incredibly limited means would allow edible or nutritious resources to languish as they might when the still life painter leaves them out to be rendered in oils, or else to change and decompose in some of the more radical installation art pieces that began appearing towards the end of the 20th century. There are exceptions, of course, where an artist is salvaging discarded elements of the eating experience to represent cultural remnants within larger conceptual ideas. But the representation or utilization of food materials in art will always have a suggestive decadence underscoring the larger sensuous impacts of the artworks. As such, art about food borrows a tension from food and the rituals of eating and enjoying eating. Ethics, decadence, sustainability and new types of invention are complexites onto which both cuisine and fine art that considers cuisine are built.
In looking at some parts of food-in-art's history and local projects like the Carnegie Visual and Performing Art Center's annual Art of Food, I am trying to build the beginnings of a structure with which we can examine our immediate environment and recognize the importance of artists from many backgrounds using myriad solutions to explore their own realities through art and the ritual of eating combined.
Kotlarczyk, Matt. XChandeliers for Art of Food, 2010. Mixed media (candy). Photo courtesy of the Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center.
Starting Points: Eat Art and Daniel Spoerri
Between the end of World War I and the end of the 20th Century, Modern Art expanded into experimental, radical territories that placed concept before execution and sharply questioned many aspects of the aesthetic experience that had thus far been taken for granted in Art History. America became a world superpower as it had never been before, and especially in the face of the Vietnam War, politically minded artists were compelled to question the paradigm in which they found themselves living and working. The aesthetic experience was becoming less isolated and guarded, and by the 1960s, a broad range of practitioners was testing what art could be, many of whom had very officially organized into an art movement-cum-association called Nouveau Realisme. Because its basic project was to frequently replace materials strictly considered for art-making with objects taken from everyday life, only the most general scholarship exists that has studied how these artists incorporated food ingredients as well as the mores and rituals of eating and dining into their art.
Among these artists, the most significant for the purpose of this research is the Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri. As well as being an originator of several ideas concerning the convergence point between the aesthetic and the culinary, Spoerri's influence on subsequent generations is so clear, while his own legacy seems only vaguely known by many in the art world today. As early as 1961, Spoerri began to use food products in his work. Along with several other European conceptual artists such as Joseph Beuys and Dieter Roth, Spoerri is at the core of a movement that is loosely referred to as "Eat Art," that has yet to be studied at the same depth as many of the other modes of Conceptual Art from the 1960s-1970s.
Spoerri's projects took the form of temporary restaurants, canned foods with labels by the artist added to the exterior to create a series of assemblage sculptures, and his "Snare Pictures," which are probably his most reputable contributions to art. In most of the Snare Pictures, Spoerri would prepare a meal and present it to a notable figure (Marcel Duchamp for instance). After the meal, Spoerri would carefully affix all of the remaining ephemera: dirtied plates and utensils, crumbs, crumpled napkins and other detritus to the surface of the table. For Spoerri, the meal is really a psychological site, a set of circumstances in which a real experience, a communicative exchange took place. In Spoerri's work, the culinary experience is valuable primarily because of its convention as a vehicle for human interaction. In preserving a meal's ephemera, he is also preserving the effects of an interaction.
Most recently, Spoerri has evolved these inquiries with current concerns about what we are eating and where our food is coming from. At 79-years-old, Spoerri has opened Eat Art Esslokal, a small restaurant in Austria, about 35 miles outside of Vienna. His chef there, Ibo Altun, focuses primarily on dishes prepared slowly with largely local ingredients. Considering his new restaurant venture, he explained to the New York Times, "A restaurant is like an atelier. I wanted to have a territory in which objects are manipulated unconsciously. You don't think about where you put down a spoon. I also do it because it keeps me alive."
There were many other projects happening in the 1960s that played into this new movement. Marcel Broodthaers' use of Belgium's national dish of mussels in sculptures and paintings or Joseph Beuys performances that made use of unconventional ingredients are also notable. These inquiries have continued to reinvent themselves to the present. The list of artists who have made use of these tropes is extremely lengthy. One could consider Rirkrit Tiravanija, for example, who sets up kitchens inside of museums to prepare meals that alter the social gatherings that take place within art institutions (one of which appeared in Somewhere Better Than This Place, the inaugural exhibition in the new Contemporary Arts Center that opened in March 2003). Also in 2003, the performance artist Vanessa Beecroft presented her work vb52 in Rivoly, Italy, that was a sort of feast, in which her typically lanky female models in various states of undress all sat down to a color coded meal. With each course, and various costumes corresponding to monochromatic color schemes, the all-woman presentation might also recall Leonardo's The Last Supper, but nonetheless comments upon the art world preoccupation with the social activity of eating that Spoerri called attention to. Equipped with some of the breakthroughs that Spoerri stirred into global art conversations in the 1960s onward, artists that may be considered second or third generation "Eat Art," have continued to comment—either directly or indirectly—on the different states of food trends and eating rituals that may be found in different decades, social classes or locations around the planet.
Kotlarczyk, Matt. XChandeliers for Art of Food, 2010. Mixed media (candy). Photo courtesy of the Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center.
One other non-local example I would like to describe in order to better set the stage is the recent inclusion of Spanish chef Ferran Adria in documenta 12. Documenta is a large scale exhibition of contemporary art that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. In 2007, Adria was invited to participate alongside a veritable who's who of famed contemporary artists. Adria is the chef and creative force behind the restaurant El Bulli and is credited as one of the progenitors of the wild, science-based cooking experiments that make up a growing field called "molecular gastronomy." What was interesting (and controversial for many) is that Adria was included as a chef. There was no expectation for him to tailor his practice to being an art project, and indeed, he continued much as he always does, cooking in Spain. His kitchen was not even relocated to the main site of the exhibition; rather, exclusive groups were shuttled over to Roses, Catalonia, Spain to eat at El Bulli. Much has been written about Adria and he deserves much more discussion than this, but for my purposes, I merely want to bring attention to what was, at the time, a radical curatorial move to feature a chef as an artist in his own right. This might seem obvious if one has an open-minded definition of what it means to be an artist, but I believe Ferran Adria will continue to be seen as an instigator of the profoundly new in redefining our taxonomies around the artistic potentials in the acts of cooking and eating.
A Triad of Inquiries at the Art of Food
As these concerns are manifested in the Cincinnati region, there are many artists working with performances, exhibitions and projects that continue questions raised by Eat Art. Almost as early as the movement itself, Cincinnati has been involved in its discourse. When director Jack Bolton first arrived at the Contemporary Arts Center, an exhibition entitled Eat Art presented an array of completely edible artworks. I was not there for that exhibition, but Aeqai's editor, Daniel Brown, was. He recollects the fun fusion of art and life in an earlier piece for the journal entitled "Forty Years of Looking." From his descriptions of the event, tropes and approaches to food in art that are being seen in our city even today were getting their start decades ago, simultaneously with Spoerri and the other European artists' experiments.
Nowadays, the best known is the annual Art of Food. For the past several years, the Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center in Covington, KY has facilitated this multi-sensory event that features a month-long exhibition of artists' solutions in commenting on food through art is paired with a soiree that interspersing eating stations throughout the two floors of gallery spaces. Locally renowned chefs serve up hors d'oeuvres, tapas and bite-size desserts that lean heavily into their creativity. The use of edible materials for sculptural representations is a vast discussion within the culinary field. One needs only to think about ice sculpture centerpieces or elaborate renderings of fruit or animals in fondant or marzipan to realize that while art has been brushing closer to food, the culinary arts have been flirting with visual art in their medium for quite a long time as well. Reality shows like Food Network's Ace of Cakes shows culinary artists and craftsmen always in pursuit of topping their own innovations in how to employ ingredients such as cake and icing towards monumental, sculptural presentations. The chefs at Art of Food represent our own local foray into these fanciful, edible inventions. The small dishes served at the event often take on some kind of artful representation, such as the white chocolate bird's eggs in a small nest of shredded wheat that was offered this year by the West Chester restaurant The Wise Owl with chef Dave Taylor.
The 2010 Art of Food opened at the Carnegie on Friday, March 5th to one of the largest crowds I have seen at an art event in Cincinnati in a long time. A circus-like atmosphere pervaded the many gallery spaces that evening, with sipping, munching and socializing all against a backdrop of local artists' conceptions of Eat Art. Because of the obscurity of the art history I've described above, I doubt many of the participants—artists or chefs—were aware of the precedents for what they were doing, and during the event, I even found myself wanting for more critical structure around what was taking place (this is my own need for some problematic conceptual premise with which I can engage or resist).
Kotlarczyk, Matt. XChandeliers for Art of Food, 2010. Mixed media (candy). Photo courtesy of the Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center.
The Art of Food is not really about the philosophical conundrum of relocating materials whose function is non-art and actually concerned, on some level, with survival. It is a sensory overload: a bacchanalia of playful experiments with how two spaces—the gallery and the restaurant—can overlap to unexpected effect. What Bill Seitz and the rest of the Carnegie's staff brings together for the evening is, in my observation, three sides to a conversation around the premises of Eat Art. The food offerings aim to present food in a new visual light, or else in unexpected flavor combinations (as in Julie Francis of Nectar's configuration of chocolate and pâté). The art on display is really one of two investigations. First there are artists who have reflected on the idea of food or eating rituals, and made works from conventional art materials: paint, wood, sewing, plastics, etc. On the other hand, there are artworks that are made out of food in one form or another, so that the object is a total synthesis of two spheres.
The restaurateurs offer feasts in miniature, so that "the viewer" also becomes "the taster." One tastes their way through the galleries, and at the best moments what one is eating seems to resonate with what one is looking at, so that a delirium of sensations accumulate into complex meanings that each viewer/taster seemed to construct from her own memories, pleasures and surprises. The finest example of this combination of eating and looking at the 2010 Art of Food was an installation suspended from the ceiling of the grand hall by Pam Kravetz.
Kravetz is well known locally for her fabric sculptures and panels that are dense events of appliqué, embroidery, beading and quilting. Wild and silly, Kravetz has a sly wit that recalls the punch lines of Sunday comics. For this event, the artist concocted three enormous figures that were hung like puppets on a pully system that allowed viewers to interact with the pieces and make the clownish characters do a bit of a dance. Each figure was a surface upon which stories and thoughts were stitched out. The text related to issues of over eating, love of desserts, and generally very honest, playful dissertation concerning the complicated relationships that people (and maybe specifically women from Kravetz's take) have with delicious food. Stitched notations ranged from the empowering: "She's a cupcake toting, cotton candy twirling, honky tonk playing delicious Sugar Mama," to the confessional: "So, I lost like 50 pounds and I was thinking I looked super hot and sexy. Then my friend Annie, told me I was so cute, she wanted to put me in her mouth and chew me up so she could carry me in her belly everywhere she goes. CUTE, did she say CUTE?" Kravetz used the different characters she created to convey many facets to her personal relationship to food, such as one figure called "Kitten the Trophy Wife," that, as the artist put it in an e-mail, "deals with my inability to do all things domestic-including cooking."
Kravetz, Pam. Fish Head Madonna: Interactive Marionette puppets created using a narrative quilt method: fabric, batting, floss, beads and embellishments on a wooden armature, 3x8ft. Photo courtesy of the Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center.A table set up almost beneath one of the three spritely, colorful figures was heavily laden with whimsically decorated cupcakes. The art and the food seemed of an identical aesthetic, almost as if what had been embroidered across Kravetz's figures was about the desserts sitting nearby. The feast of desserts was a labor of love from Kravetz's family and friends, especially her son, Max, who is interested in becoming a chef. This togetherness was felt in the overall installation. Although displayed in the over-sized great hall in the Carnegie, Kravetz's installation felt like a separate space full of flavor and worry.
Many artworks on display followed this approach of making conventional artworks about food. A set of sculpture students from the Art Academy of Cincinnati were among the exhibiting artists, and most of them showed works that enlarged a food item to Pop Art proportions. Giant fortune cookies, sticks of butter and rock candies lay around the upstairs galleries. One student, Andrea Baker, made a full Thanksgiving dinner out of fabric scraps. There was a remarkably humorous semantic play in her use of foam stuffing for the stuffing that filled her turkey.
But most engaging were the handful of works constructed from food-based materials. These pieces will live different life spans than artwork made from more permanent stuff. Some probably did not live in the same form throughout the month long exhibition. But perhaps because of the unpredictable circumstances in which these artworks existed, they were poignant and seemed capable of activating more of my senses to a greater degree than much else in the galleries. I felt that these artists were doing the most with the birthright passed down from the Eat Art movement, and for me, that was the most satisfying part of the event.
One work in particular was created by Art Academy student Abby Cornelius, who has used the structure and form of the tent as a device in sculptures, installations and event performances that consider this temporary shelter as a site for abstract storytelling and as a symbol for transience. Starting with a tent much like those that she has exhibited before, Cornelius spun an astounding amount of pink cotton candy that was glommed onto the exterior of the structure. The result was gorgeous and absurd: a nearly five foot tall, pink, fuzzy monument. The white paper cones on which cotton candy is typically served were littered around the edge of the sculpture, so that it also read as a kind of sacrificial pyre, with kindling at the bottom of the mound. In a simple but grand gesture, Cornelius struck upon the strangeness that compels me to Eat Art practices. The resituation of the everyday into an alternative aesthetic discourse has been in play since Duchamp's Readymades and Picasso's earliest collages, but even with those precedents, there is still a profound opportunity for surprise, even delight. My wonderment with Cornelius' piece in particular was tempered with the grotesquerie of it. I have worked with cotton candy and understand its fragile qualities that wither and shrink fairly quickly. I spoke with friends who visited the Carnegie near the end of the Art of Food exhibition, and they said that by then, the tent was fully visible, only streaked with red veins of the dyed sugar as it hardened into traces of its former massiveness.
Cornelius, Abby. Installation for Art of Food, 2010. Cotton candy, white paper cones. Photo courtesy of the Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center.
Refined Sugar Studio: Nostalgia, Temptation, Innovation
Another impressive experience at The Art of Food was a series of chandeliers created by Matt Kotlarczyk, who has worked under the project Refined Sugar Studio since 2005. Hung near Pam Kravetz's suspended puppet-people, these light fixtures were colored by replacing conventional crystals with candy and crystallized sugar elements. Tempting through their saturated color schemes and the recognition that these chandeliers were more sugar than anything else, my imagination raced back to the ruinous estate of Miss Havisham in Dickens' Great Expectations, combining her languishing wedding cake and feast with the grandeur of her dilapidated mansion. Kotlarczyk's luminaries were a highlight of my Art of Food experience, and I sought him out to discuss his associations to food and art.
Kotlarczyk's studio is at the Essex Studios complex. Right now the space is full of giant beams that are charred black. Kotlarczyk explained that they are remnants of Old St. George Church in Clifton Heights that burned in 2008. There is a noticeable lack of older work sitting around the studio. The artist goes up to New York's International Contemporary Furniture Fair annually and comes back to Cincinnati with a list of orders waiting to be filled. His business sense paired with his artwork's clever witticism is impressive.
A new set of chandelier works are underway, this time made from hundreds of cut crystals that will hang from metal clouds mounted to ceilings. Fittingly, we sat down to talk at a table sculpture Kotlarczyk made in 2006. The Eat Me Dining Table is outfitted with 1,800 small light bulbs across the top of a reclaimed claw-and-ball foot dining table. At each place setting, words like MEAT, ME, EAT, and FAT are lit in red and move around the edge of the table, with their speed determined by the volume of sound in the room. This is just one of many works out of Kotlarczyk's Refined Sugar Studio that draw imagery and ideas from a culture of food and eating.
"I've been led around by my stomach, and it comes into my artwork as well," he considered, "Food is probably the one main function of my day. What am I going to eat? When do I get to eat next? I love the communal aspect of sitting down at the end of the day after working all day, and getting to that reward. The food pieces came out of that. The first pieces were the cereal boxes."
Kotlarczyk, Matt. XChandeliers for Art of Food, 2010. Mixed media (candy). Photo courtesy of the Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center.
The Refined Cereal Box Light is one of Refined Sugar Studio's popular multiples. Cereal box covers have been scanned and printed onto thick clear acrylic that is framed in front of a light source to create an illuminated Pop artifact.
"The artwork of cereal boxes are basically these pieces of Pop Art. I grew up as a kid not being allowed to eat that shit. Our mom kept a pretty healthy household. It was only if I went to a friend's house for a sleep over, on Saturday morning we would wake up, watch cartoons and just eat a box of the stuff like junkies. The depravity and then the marketing of it, how supermarkets display this stuff at the perceived kid's eye level: there's an underhandedness that goes with marketing these things for kids. I enjoy that sort of sneakiness."
As Kotlarczyk reflects on his inspiration for various projects, it's clear that nostalgia and childhood memories play a big part in what he is attracted to, what inspires him, and how food enters his train of thought. "As a kid, my mom was always cooking. My mom's family is Italian; their side was always cooking in this character ideal of the Italian family. And my dad is Polish, so it was like both sides were from these big food-and-family environments."
It's these associations with ritual, real life, memory that connects these classy, highly designed and deeply personal projects to some of the art historical precedents described above. Spoerri and Kotlarczyk are both thinking about the power of those communal eating experiences, and like Spoerri's Snare Pictures, these works recall moments and memories in the artist's own history.
I asked him about how the chandelier came into his work. The candy chandeliers aren't his first use of the chandelier image, and actually, it is about as frequent as the references to breakfast and dessert in the Refined Sugar oeuvre.
"The first real use of a chandelier in my work as a grown up came when I was out running one morning in the neighborhood. It was garbage day and I ran past this trashcan with a beautiful chandelier. They seemed to have just dropped it into the can; there were all these layers and crystals. I took it home, I hung it on the back porch for a while. Every year we have the ArtWorks staff party at our house and that was coming up. We always do something special for the party, and usually it involves light in some way. We have this big walnut tree in the back yard. I scaled this tree and hung the chandelier from up above. The branches make this kind of contained space, and the chandelier lit up the back part of the yard." (editor's note: Kotlarczyk is married to ArtWorks Director Tamara Harkavy.)
The series of sugar chandeliers at the Carnegie may be a seminal moment when his repeated use of the chandelier was melded with the ongoing food fantasies in the work.
"There was an attraction to using candy as a building element. I've continued to work with food and the environment that goes along with food. Everybody eats, so there's an immediate association with the food and the attraction to it. Junk food, sugar stuff, these are other associations. Food is a comfort. Working with food as a building element, or the idea or environment surrounding food is a comfort I give to myself through making this work."
In talking with Kotlarczyk, it was as if I was able to speak directly to an art movement, and to locate the childhood memories, personal rationalizations and blurred senses between seeing and tasting that has propeled these lines of inquiry since their start in the 1960s. There are so many other local examples of individual artists, performers and curators who are also deeply involved with this research. My hope is that, in offering a quick overview of Eat Art's history, and then a look at a local event and a particular local artist, more of a context will exist the next time one of our readers sees food being utilized in art.
