Gathering and Gluttony
This year I cried over thanksgiving and not because the turkey was shit.
There’s something in the air, or is it in the oven- food has been a trend all over clothes (why are we so obsessed with tomatoes, and lemons, and canned fish?) that is now bleeding into the art world. For me (and most of us) food has shaped my life. An unconventional (read: international) upbringing exposed me not only to art at a young age, but a wide variety of foods. I grew up counting down the days towards meals- Canadian Thanksgiving (immediate family, Mum’s brûléed sweet potatoes), Christmas Eve (California, Auntie Lynn’s kielbasa hors d'oeuvre), Christmas (flaming plum pudding), Easter (ham), and Mother’s Day (Les Fougeres’ house salad). It was these moments at tables that made up the year more than the holidays themselves. In so much of the art I’ve seen lately, these links have been reflected back to me. Cooking and art are labours of love, they feed us, and often don’t get the appreciation the time and effort deserve.
Food and art have always been linked. Look at the still lifes of old, with their status symbol fresh fruits and exotic games. I would wager most people reading this have drawn a fruit bowl in an art class at one point or another. In Melbourne at the moment there are three exhibitions centring on food. Donovan Christie’s Everyday’s a Birthday at Lennox St Gallery is its own blend of food and nostalgia, focusing on the iconic Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book, but this exhibition didn’t speak to my current thoughts about food and art. Though it is interesting to see quite a bit of coverage about an exhibition focusing on a cookbook that made detailed birthday cakes accessible to the masses. I personally loved my echidna cake as a kid, though it may have caused some confusion for its Canadian audience. I am instead more interested in Blindside’s Gestures of Hospitality, a group exhibition in three distinct parts, and Artemisia Gallery’s FEAST! an exhibition and prize featuring 100 works by 78 different artists. Totally different in form and presentation, the Blindside and Artemisia exhibitions pull into focus the dichotomy of gluttony and gathering that food plays in a world of mukbangs, expensive dinners, and share house dining, where a necessity of life has become more of a status symbol than ever.
Lily Walker’s Tender at Blindside
Gestures of Hospitality was a deeply intimate show that brings you into the traditions and quiet moments of life centred around food. The artworks were by Jenn Tran, Vivian Qiu, and Lily Walker. In the first room, shared by Tran and Qiu, tied strings brought you along the walls, introducing you to each part of Qiu’s Busy=Dying Heart. The work invited you to take your own string to knot while you looked, a practice that tied me further into Qiu’s practice. In the corner, Jenn Tran’s TV Dinner Altar speaks to the near universal experience of turning on the TV when conversing with your family, for whatever reason, is too big of a task. Tran’s work is one I returned to a few times during my visit, caught in the loop of art and nostalgia. Lily Walker’s Tender is the moments that meals make- the real connection that food and feasting brings when you share not only in the end product, but the making of. The entire gallery felt like finding a roll of film you’d long forgotten about: snapshots of half-eaten cakes, friends mid-sentence gathered around the table, hands reaching, knives chopping. It was all I love about art and food- the gathering, the recording, the sharing, and the love.
FEAST! at Artemisia Gallery was a different exhibition entirely. Still held together by the thread of food, it was a buffet rather than a served meal. Like a number of the submission based group shows I’ve seen recently, a certain degree of irreverence was baked into the works. I was at the exhibition just before its official opening, catching a performance of Mei Wah Chan’s Eat your H-ART out, an operatic performance put on as part of Fringe. Unsurprisingly, it was the perfect performance to take place during the exhibition. Served in courses, the performance included recipes alongside traditional pieces, all taking place over the course of a very dramatic dinner party. The exhibition reflected this. It was a potluck, and everyone brought themselves to the table. Gatho by Liv McCarten took home the top prize, a deserving win for the painting of pavlova and disco balls, all blurry and out of focus, like you’ve finally made it to dessert after a dinner where you’ve indulged just a tad too much before the final course is served. The mobiles by Zephyr, specifically A Balanced diet; or the Emergency Red, drew my eye again and again during the performance, and is what I spent a good amount of the intermission looking more closely at. If I Die Tonight, Bury Me In My Favourite Yellow Patent-Leather Shoes, Claire Tennant’s bold sculpture added to the setting as the dinner party got more and more out of hand. At first glance, I was sure my eyes were deceiving me, but it is indeed an incredible sculpture of someone enjoying a banana. Alyssa Moller’s collage, Mum’s Pea and Ham Soup was among the litany of deeply personal works. There’s nothing like a handwritten recipe of a childhood favourite. My standouts from the show go on and on: Catch of the Day by Julie Hamilton, The Friends by Imke Breayley, Seven Deadly Sins, Gluttony by Ivan Sun, Ursula’s Banquet by Sylvie Martin, and GOURMAND by Otto Palmer-Fuog.
Food and art really breaks down into two categories: food in art and food as art. Art History101 tells you that still life paintings of food were status symbols- look at the exotic fruits and vegetables I have, the game I eat, our elaborate dishware. I can afford all of this and an oil painting of it. Elaborate dishes are art in their own right. Think of intricately iced cakes and Salvador Dalì’s Surrealist Cookbook. Food as a medium intrigues me most. The work is never going to last, just look at Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian: the work is constantly being replaced. The banana is changed out, and so is the duct tape. It’s a constantly changing artwork, but the same artwork all the same.
In a time where the cost of living crisis is on everyone’s tongue, there’s something poetic about food being on our walls. Firmly in the headlines on Artshub, the ABC, and many an op-ed since the pandemic, everyone talks about how tough it is to make a career in the arts, but little seems to be happening to support artists and creatives in a time where food insecurity is on everyone's tongues. The more I look for these exhibitions, the more I seem to find. Just around the corner from me were the ads for Come Eat With Me at Arts House. Last week Bec and I had a long chat about Rirkrit Tiravanija’s 2017 Untitled (lunch box) and the ephemerality of art and a good meal. Hell, our very serious business meeting was conducted over lunch, as all serious business should be.
I’ve started and deleted this article a few times (sorry Bec). I go from not really knowing what to say, to perhaps having too much to say, to perhaps having nothing real to say, which I feel like is the way of most writing. Am I trying to do something different and be a bit more personal, writing a longer essay about the history of food and art, or food in art, or food as art? I fear I’ve lost the plot a bit. Truth be told for the first time in my life this year I forgot about Canadian Thanksgiving and that personally threw me for a loop. Thanksgiving has been this anchor point in my year. It’s the one time a year that we got the Christmas-esque meal with no extended family politics or long flights. It was usually my immediate family and sometimes our longtime friends, getting ready in your own room to eat at your own table. Later, in my first years of university, it was a dorm room, a dream, and some really truly horrendous turkey bought from Save-On-Foods. As I got older and moved out of the dorms, got a dining table and a real fridge, some good friends, and perhaps slightly more skills in the kitchen, it turned into the one night a year we were acting like real adults, even though we were thoroughly in our taxpaying years. Cooking and feasting, glass of wine in hand, living in a way that I felt adulthood would (and should) always be like. I missed it this year. I only realized it was Thanksgiving when my mum called me up, wishing me a happy thanksgiving, showing me the pecan pie my father had made and every delicious side I was missing out on by being on this side of the world. It made me look back on the exhibitions I had seen and already written about perhaps in different terms and a different light. Food and gathering have always been about connection. Sitting at a table with people you love is a bit magical and where most of my best thoughts have come from. It’s also been where I have gone on perhaps one too many diatribes about my abiding hatred of Jeff Koons.
Art and food are inextricably linked: they are labours of love, they are often thankless, and in a lot of cases they are perhaps too short-lived and ephemeral. At the end of the night, the dishes are put away, maybe the art doesn’t sell at the end of the exhibition or maybe it did, but either way we’re never seeing that same exhibition in the same place again. The meal is finished, all we can look forward to is the next one.