Food for Thought
Sep. 18th, 2010 10:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tartysuzAs you may have noticed, my interest in Lady Gaga went from about 2 to 10 this past week. It's all because of the meat dress. It cemented my suspicion that Gaga is more rewarding when consumed (ha ha) as a performance artist rather than as a pop star, which is merely just a subset of her larger performance project (see footnote, below).
It also occurred to me that I'd been thinking about food and performance subconsciously because of the preview notices I'd received about Visualeyez, the annual performance art festival (now in its 15th year) that takes place this weekend. The theme this year: food!
During the opening night gala on Thursday, several performances were in progress, and of course, they were participatory, so here I am, technically taking part in a performance:
Photo 1: Adina Bier and me, snapped by Cindy Baker.
If I look nervous in the picture, that's because I was. Adina was freaking me out. Here's this nude-looking woman with a banana stuffed in her mouth, one that she could not eat until total strangers ate 364 of them. She implored total strangers with nothing but her eyes and her stance, to help her out by eating the bananas and stuffing them in her stockings. Eating the banana was a cinch. But depositing the peel was squicky. The entire thing was uncomfortably sexual, given the phallic shape of the bananas, Adina's effectively gagged, red, O-mouth, her generally nude-looking appearance and her receptive positioning. Plus, it was like stuffing garbage into another person's body. So I avoided all the erogenous zones because it just seemed too rude, and tucked my peel in the region of her back. I did it gingerly and at a bit of a distance, and I was glad to get the heck out of there!
(The festival animator, Cindy Baker, blogged much more comprehensively about Adina's project and what it was like to participate in it.)
Photo 2: Fetal vegetables by Kelly Andres and Alison Reiko Loader
Photo 3: Vinegar mother and other edible growth by Kelly Andres and Alison Reiko Loader
I connected better (or really, more comfortably with) work by Kelly Andres and Alison Reiko Loader, two artists without science or agriculture backgrounds, who became fascinated with plant life and human intervention. (They had a studio next to a roof-top community garden at Concordia University in Montreal.)
Kelly explained that Alison is a 3D animator. Photo 2 shows 3D prints she made of fetus and baby halves. She then put the halves together and vacuum-sealed them to make plastic molds. Alison and Kelly grew tomatoes and squashes in these molds. However, insects could not penetrate it, so the artists had to lean how to hand-pollinate the plants. The resulting produce were edible and fetal. Ewww! That squick reaction got me thinking about how I feel about eating things from my garden. I'm not a gardener at all, so as far as I'm concerned, the apples on our tree are totally found food, but we haven't even been diligent about using them. When a friend suggested we make homemade apple pie, I picked some, but was nervous about eating them. We haven't sprayed and there have been no insect infestations, so I knew the apples are okay to eat (deliciously sweet with a tart kick, it turns out), but I was still reticent -- I guess because they hadn't been inspected by the Canada food agency, and they didn't come with a bar code sticker, and they weren't from Safeway. This made me realize how much I've been brainwashed into thinking that corporate approval makes things safe, while wild, unregulated growth in my own yard is suspect. (That said, there is no way I'm trying any of the mushrooms that have proliferated in our lawn this rainy summer.)
Photo 3 shows the site of my second participation. The big glass holds apple cider and awaits dregs of opening night reception wine. It will ferment together into a compound that is used to create vinegar; hence, this substance is called a vinegar mother. By the end of evening, the remains of my malbec came to rest there.
Photo 4: Sodium...made with salt! by Randy Lee Cutler
Whenever I see salt on the floor, especially if it marks out an arcane pattern, I think of Supernatural, in which salt is used to repel (or trap) ghosts and demons. I just went with that since I didn't get a chance to speak with Randy. As I prepared to take this photo, a volunteer setting up a catering table stepped on one of the salt lines. I had to call him on it. He was messing with the symbol for sodium, drawn with salt! We were well protected from evil in that corner, and I wasn't going to risk anything.
Photo 5: Hourglass by Chun Hua Catherine Dong
I was only able to chat with Catherine very briefly, but Cindy and I had a good discussion about this piece. It looks like an installation in this photo; the actual performance happens when Catherine sits down to paint a grain of white rice black. Her goal is to fill the other bowl up to the halfway mark, to balance the black and the white. There's another chair, so participants are encouraged to help her out. Like Adina's piece, there's an aspect of labour, and reliance on others to reach a fairly abstract goal using food, which lives (and dies) in the physical world. Maybe it's the Marxist in me, but when I saw the bowls, I thought, "She's got a LOT of work to do." I guess others who have sat down to paint have said it was a zen experience -- overlooking the fact that Catherine totally Tom Saywered them into helping out with a back-breaking, eye-straining, sweat-shop task. Those black streaks in the near-empty bowl? They're angry!
==
Footnote: To my delight, through a brilliant essay by Ann Powers in the LA Times, I discovered that I'm on the wrong side of Camille Paglia on the subject of Lady Gaga -- which is just as well, since I didn't agree with Paglia's Madonna-worship in the 80s. Powers linked to a piece that shows Paglia to be hung up on the authenticity discourse. She writes derisively: "Lady Gaga is a manufactured personality, and a recent one at that" -- which probably sound like badges of accomplishments to Gaga. Gaga is not shy about presenting her raw material (still punning after all these days!) and letting people bite off what they think they can chew.
Paglia continues to fangirl Madonna, complaining that Gaga is not sexy, and accuses her fans of "emotional poverty." Er, did Paglia not hear Madonna's mostly surface-skimming output? In retrospect, Paglia championed Madonna's perceived ability to represent essential archetypes, but Lady Gaga embraces fakery, inauthenticity, derivativeness and constructions. Madonna took up personae and seemed to really believe in them, whereas Gaga is clearly wearing her get-ups lightly, while at the same time allowing fans in on the joke through her mastery of what Hal Niedzviecki calls the "peep" media, outlets like Twitter and Facebook, that invite people to not only expose themselves but "peep" into other private lives. Madonna was clearly a pop star -- and still is, swanning around like royalty, admired for being generally unavailable to the masses, while Lady Gaga is both a pop star and a peep star, inviting fans on her ride, being geekily enthusiastic about fame, being her own biggest cheerleader.
Madonna is an example of the type of untouchable idol that we construct out of a need for larger-than-life figures -- be they celebrities, comic book characters, action heroes, our parents, etc. -- though which to realize desires that either seem or are literally impossibleto achieve. Meanwhile, Lady Gaga is the type of figure who is "one of us" (to borrow the famous phrase from the 1932 movie Freaks, which fits right into Gaga's "little monsters" idea), which is, quite apparently, what a lot of people need right now: someone to whom self-identified misfits can relate, someone who is seemingly obliterating barriers, leaving cultural gatekeepers in her dust, all the while inviting and allowing people to participate in her performance.
It also occurred to me that I'd been thinking about food and performance subconsciously because of the preview notices I'd received about Visualeyez, the annual performance art festival (now in its 15th year) that takes place this weekend. The theme this year: food!
During the opening night gala on Thursday, several performances were in progress, and of course, they were participatory, so here I am, technically taking part in a performance:
Photo 1: Adina Bier and me, snapped by Cindy Baker.
If I look nervous in the picture, that's because I was. Adina was freaking me out. Here's this nude-looking woman with a banana stuffed in her mouth, one that she could not eat until total strangers ate 364 of them. She implored total strangers with nothing but her eyes and her stance, to help her out by eating the bananas and stuffing them in her stockings. Eating the banana was a cinch. But depositing the peel was squicky. The entire thing was uncomfortably sexual, given the phallic shape of the bananas, Adina's effectively gagged, red, O-mouth, her generally nude-looking appearance and her receptive positioning. Plus, it was like stuffing garbage into another person's body. So I avoided all the erogenous zones because it just seemed too rude, and tucked my peel in the region of her back. I did it gingerly and at a bit of a distance, and I was glad to get the heck out of there!
(The festival animator, Cindy Baker, blogged much more comprehensively about Adina's project and what it was like to participate in it.)
Photo 2: Fetal vegetables by Kelly Andres and Alison Reiko Loader
Photo 3: Vinegar mother and other edible growth by Kelly Andres and Alison Reiko Loader
I connected better (or really, more comfortably with) work by Kelly Andres and Alison Reiko Loader, two artists without science or agriculture backgrounds, who became fascinated with plant life and human intervention. (They had a studio next to a roof-top community garden at Concordia University in Montreal.)
Kelly explained that Alison is a 3D animator. Photo 2 shows 3D prints she made of fetus and baby halves. She then put the halves together and vacuum-sealed them to make plastic molds. Alison and Kelly grew tomatoes and squashes in these molds. However, insects could not penetrate it, so the artists had to lean how to hand-pollinate the plants. The resulting produce were edible and fetal. Ewww! That squick reaction got me thinking about how I feel about eating things from my garden. I'm not a gardener at all, so as far as I'm concerned, the apples on our tree are totally found food, but we haven't even been diligent about using them. When a friend suggested we make homemade apple pie, I picked some, but was nervous about eating them. We haven't sprayed and there have been no insect infestations, so I knew the apples are okay to eat (deliciously sweet with a tart kick, it turns out), but I was still reticent -- I guess because they hadn't been inspected by the Canada food agency, and they didn't come with a bar code sticker, and they weren't from Safeway. This made me realize how much I've been brainwashed into thinking that corporate approval makes things safe, while wild, unregulated growth in my own yard is suspect. (That said, there is no way I'm trying any of the mushrooms that have proliferated in our lawn this rainy summer.)
Photo 3 shows the site of my second participation. The big glass holds apple cider and awaits dregs of opening night reception wine. It will ferment together into a compound that is used to create vinegar; hence, this substance is called a vinegar mother. By the end of evening, the remains of my malbec came to rest there.
Photo 4: Sodium...made with salt! by Randy Lee Cutler
Whenever I see salt on the floor, especially if it marks out an arcane pattern, I think of Supernatural, in which salt is used to repel (or trap) ghosts and demons. I just went with that since I didn't get a chance to speak with Randy. As I prepared to take this photo, a volunteer setting up a catering table stepped on one of the salt lines. I had to call him on it. He was messing with the symbol for sodium, drawn with salt! We were well protected from evil in that corner, and I wasn't going to risk anything.
ETA, 18 September 2010
I have since discovered that there is a Japanese tradition of putting salt outside the door to ward off ghosts, spirits, ill luck, depending on who you speak to:
Photos of salt cones in Japan: http://www.flickr.com/photos/superlocal/349740497/
A story about salted doors in Japan (the interview is about Halloween in China, but he spoke about a supernatural experience he had in Japan:
http://www.radio86.co.uk/explore-learn/lifestyle-in-china/dial-beijing/12318/dial-beijing-ghosts-and-ghoulies-in-chinese-tradition
ETA, 19 September 2010
Cindy blogged about Randy's salt project.
Photo 5: Hourglass by Chun Hua Catherine Dong
I was only able to chat with Catherine very briefly, but Cindy and I had a good discussion about this piece. It looks like an installation in this photo; the actual performance happens when Catherine sits down to paint a grain of white rice black. Her goal is to fill the other bowl up to the halfway mark, to balance the black and the white. There's another chair, so participants are encouraged to help her out. Like Adina's piece, there's an aspect of labour, and reliance on others to reach a fairly abstract goal using food, which lives (and dies) in the physical world. Maybe it's the Marxist in me, but when I saw the bowls, I thought, "She's got a LOT of work to do." I guess others who have sat down to paint have said it was a zen experience -- overlooking the fact that Catherine totally Tom Saywered them into helping out with a back-breaking, eye-straining, sweat-shop task. Those black streaks in the near-empty bowl? They're angry!
ETA, 18 September 2010
Cindy gave some more context to this piece and to Catherine's work on the Visualeyez blog. Naturally, this made me think some more! I added this comment to Cindy's blog:I love your backgrounders and further contextualizing on this blog!
I may not get a chance to sit down to do the painting task, so but I keep imaging myself doing it. Would I also feel zen about it? I imagine two possibilities:
1) It becomes like a knitting club situation, where we are two women doing a repetitive task, but taking the opportunity to socialize. We don't know each other, so we would be getting to know each other. But if we had known each other for years, and we get together to carry out this chore, would our discussion be as repetitive as the task?
2) We become no different than the workers who manually assemble electronic parts, as featured in Manufacturing Landscapes, the movie about Edward Burtynsky's work on industrializing China. As you say, rice is a heavily controlled commodity, with countries like Japan placing strict trading rules around it, and spikes in the global market causing localized famines that affect millions of people. Painting the grains would be just another enterprise to customize a resource commodity, like oil or copper or anything else that is "wasted" on unsustainable activities.
Reading that over, I realize that my two immediate reactions were based on some superficial commonalities I see between the artist and me: our shared ethnicity and gender.
This piece has given me a lot to think about, so thanks for speaking to me about it, Cindy. And, to Chun Hua Catherine, thank you for bringing it to Visualeyez!
==
Footnote: To my delight, through a brilliant essay by Ann Powers in the LA Times, I discovered that I'm on the wrong side of Camille Paglia on the subject of Lady Gaga -- which is just as well, since I didn't agree with Paglia's Madonna-worship in the 80s. Powers linked to a piece that shows Paglia to be hung up on the authenticity discourse. She writes derisively: "Lady Gaga is a manufactured personality, and a recent one at that" -- which probably sound like badges of accomplishments to Gaga. Gaga is not shy about presenting her raw material (still punning after all these days!) and letting people bite off what they think they can chew.
Paglia continues to fangirl Madonna, complaining that Gaga is not sexy, and accuses her fans of "emotional poverty." Er, did Paglia not hear Madonna's mostly surface-skimming output? In retrospect, Paglia championed Madonna's perceived ability to represent essential archetypes, but Lady Gaga embraces fakery, inauthenticity, derivativeness and constructions. Madonna took up personae and seemed to really believe in them, whereas Gaga is clearly wearing her get-ups lightly, while at the same time allowing fans in on the joke through her mastery of what Hal Niedzviecki calls the "peep" media, outlets like Twitter and Facebook, that invite people to not only expose themselves but "peep" into other private lives. Madonna was clearly a pop star -- and still is, swanning around like royalty, admired for being generally unavailable to the masses, while Lady Gaga is both a pop star and a peep star, inviting fans on her ride, being geekily enthusiastic about fame, being her own biggest cheerleader.
Madonna is an example of the type of untouchable idol that we construct out of a need for larger-than-life figures -- be they celebrities, comic book characters, action heroes, our parents, etc. -- though which to realize desires that either seem or are literally impossibleto achieve. Meanwhile, Lady Gaga is the type of figure who is "one of us" (to borrow the famous phrase from the 1932 movie Freaks, which fits right into Gaga's "little monsters" idea), which is, quite apparently, what a lot of people need right now: someone to whom self-identified misfits can relate, someone who is seemingly obliterating barriers, leaving cultural gatekeepers in her dust, all the while inviting and allowing people to participate in her performance.
