PLAYING WITH FOOD: FOUR FAMOUS FOOD INSTALLATIONS
Food is often at its best when served on a small scale. Intimate dinner with friends > buffet party for 900 people. Grandma’s home-cooked meal > high school cafeteria lunch. When it comes to playing with food, however, sizing it up can be a great idea. A spaghetti mustache is fine for a Tuesday night, although most laughs you’ll get for that are probably out of politeness: it’s nothing everyone hasn’t seen before. But making it big, boy, that can change things. The following artists knew that too.
WIM T. SCHIPPERS: PINDAKAASVLOER
Outside of the English-speaking world, there are few countries in which peanut butter is as popular as it is in the Netherlands — although it goes by a different name. When it was introduced there in 1948, the country had strict laws in place to stop crooks from selling margarine as butter, which was not uncommon during the post-war years of scarcity, so only true dairy butter could be sold under that name. Regardless, pindakaas, or “peanut cheese”, became a smash hit, as did other new-timey bread toppings (many of which are elsewhere known as cake decoration, such as sprinkles in all kinds of colours and flavours). Anyway, in 1962, Dutch artist Wim T. Schippers was so inspired by this new landscape of bread toppings that he created a work of art which consisted of peanut butter spread thinly onto a large stretch of floor. As a comment on the futility of life, it was meant to inspire people to just have fun with it. When the peanut butter floor was exhibited again in 1997, this is exactly what some teenagers did. As the guard left the room briefly to go to the bathroom, they emptied multiple bags of chocolate sprinkles onto the artwork, while yelling “peanut butter tastes much better with sprinkles”. The artist commented that the sprinkles had been “applied with a sense of proportion and a steady hand”, and considered telling the public “to keep it going”, if it weren’t for the fact that he felt bad for the guard. In 2010, Rotterdam museum Boijmans van Beuningen bought the artwork for a reported 100.000 euros , which sparked a months-long debate about the meaning and value of art. The museum exhibited the piece in 2011 in a version which measured four by fourteen metres and consisted of 1100 litres of peanut butter, which was repurposed as bird feed after the exhibition was cleaned up.
JOSEPH BEUYS: FETTECKE
If it’s true that modern art aims to defy interpretation, Joseph Beuys probably invented it. His work is a messy tangle of fat and felt and dead animals and it’s very strange, and we won’t pretend to understand it. But we do know this: on 28 April, 1982, Beuys took five kilos of butter, got up on a chair, and pressed and smeared it into the corner of his studio in the Dusseldorfer art academy, where he taught. This so-called “grease corner” stayed in that spot as a “constant demonstration object” for the next four-and-a-half years, until, nine months after Beuys’s death, the school’s janitor cleaned it up. That’s a pretty weird story in and of itself, but it gets even weirder. Beuys’s student Johannes Stüttgen, who discovered the remains of the artwork in a bin, claimed he had been its owner, since Beuys had dedicated it to him upon creating it. The janitor had been employed by the German state North-Rhine Westphalia, which was ordered by a judge to pay Stüttgen 40.000 D-Mark in damages. And that’s still not the end of the end of the story. Stüttgen renamed the work “remnants of a state-destroyed grease corner”, which, in 2014, was used to distil into four litres of schnaps. Tasting note: parmesan cheese. Please, let’s pray to God that this poor slab of butter might finally be left to rest in peace.
FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES: UNTITLED (PLACEBO)
Smearing peanut butter onto a floor and calling it art, or pressing a block of butter into a corner and proclaiming it great art — it’s all fun and games, and we’re here for it. For Felix Gonzalez-Torres, however, his “playing with food” had far more serious undertones and pressing urgency. Throughout his much too short life and career, he created nineteen pieces that in some way involved wrapped pieces of hard candy. Gonzalez-Torres was born in Cuba, but was working as an openly gay artist out of New York City when the AIDS epidemic hit his community in the early nineteen-eighties. When in 1991 his longtime partner Ross Laylock passed away from complications related to the disease, more of his works began to deal with concepts of deterioration, disappearance and remembrance. Food, the ephemeral medium per se, suited these themes. Perhaps the most well-known of his “candy spills” is the 1991 piece “‘Untitled’ (Placebo)”, which consists of 550 kilogrammes of silver-wrapped candies, spread out onto the museum floor like a shimmering carpet. When it is on exhibit, museum visitors are urged to take pieces with them, thus contributing to the slow disappearance of the work: a metaphor for the loss of Laylock, but certainly also for the slow deterioration of Gonzalez-Torres’s own health. In 1996, at the age of 38, he himself passed away from complications of AIDS. In a poetic way, however, a piece of him and his partner lives on in all the people that have taken a piece of silver-wrapped candy home with them.
LEE BUL: MAJESTIC SPLENDOR
Art installations can technically call on all our senses for effect, but many end up staying within the realm of visual art. For the enfant terrible of the South-Korean art world, Lee Bul, that must have seemed boring when she created her conceptual piece Majestic Splendor in 1991. The installation consists of dead fishes in transparent plastic bags, decorated with an array of gems, beads and sequins, that are arranged in a grid on the museum wall. The work plays with the juxtaposition of beauty and decay, which is very vanitas. As the fishes inevitably begin to rot, bringing with them the strong smell of death, the gems stay shiny as ever, creating a tension that, as it turned out, can be too much to handle. When Lee exhibited the piece in the New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1997, the exhibition had to be prematurely closed due to museum guards becoming physically ill because of the overwhelming smell of rotten fish. Still, some museums were brave enough to show the work. In 2018, the piece was supposed to be on show at the Hayward Gallery in London when it caught on fire. It turned out that after the 1997 debacle, Lee had begun treating the fishes with a chemical compound called potassium permanganate to mask the smell. This particular compound has many uses, such as treating fungal infections, but it’s also included in survival kits as a fire starter because of its high flammability. When the museum learned of the fire hazard, it decided to take the piece down, which is when one of the fishes exploded. Luckily, the fire could quickly be contained — but no one has burned their fingers on exhibiting Majestic Splendor since.
Text and set: Yannic Moeken
Video: Junshen Wu
