In the world of cultural institutions, we sometimes need to make comparisons. Comparing say, a library to a museum offers interesting insights into how each serves their respective publics. I’ve even thought myself that great restaurants are like museums in some ways, where each moving piece – the food, the diners, the staff – are all working within a choreographed ritual, much like people move through a museum (albeit perhaps with less haste).
However, there is one comparison that I do not generally entertain, and that is as to whether or not food can be art. To me, this idea seems somewhat redundant; why does food have to be anything else, other than food? I can appreciate that there are aesthetic pleasures that derive from seeing and eating food, but I just don’t see the reason why we need to put it on such a high pedestal. This is coming from someone who absolutely loves food.
I’m not trying to completely deny the possibility that food can act as a vessel for art. There are many artists working today who use food as an expressive material. Perhaps most famously, Rirkrit Tiravanija chose to forgo traditional mediums of art entirely, deciding instead to serve food to his guests as an artistic act. Therefore, it is evident that food can serve art.
In fact, I am beginning to think that there may even be a way for art to serve food.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, lets deal with the issue at hand. Carolyn Korsmeyer, who is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Buffalo, has claimed that we should not ask the same questions of food as we do of art, as food exists as a distinct material object. In her words:
“Food does not last but spoils [and] because it not only nourishes but poisons, food is a small exercise in mortality.”
Now, I wouldn’t say that I necessarily agree with that final point. However, I do believe that there is some truth contained within her reasoning when it comes to the distinct material qualities of food. Furthermore, I would argue that food is bound much more to its sensory qualities than art, and although we all have our own preferences, it is not often that art coan literally make one physically sick.
In any case, the debate over food as art may not be the most pressing issue at hand. In some ways, I think that the dialogue between food and art is what matters most. This brings us back to the potential for art to serve food, and the other way around.
Recently, I was lucky enough to pick up the most recent issue of frieze magazine. This particular issue focuses on the intersections between contemporary art and food. I’ve gained so much information from all of the articles contained within the magazine, but there is one that has truly caught my eye in the past week or so. I won’t go too far into the specifics of the article, as it mentions a number of important projects and endeavours. However, there is one element that I would like to highlight, and this is the story of Fritz Haeg and Salmon Creek Farm.
Originally established as a commune in the 1960s, Salmon Creek Farm grew out of a general distaste for the industrial-military complex that dominated the North American landscape. In 2014, the farm was purchased by American artist Fritz Haeg, who has transformed it into a space for artists, archivists, and a myriad of other professions. The website describes all of its attendees as “artist-hyphenates”, which includes: “archivists, activists, astronomers, bakers, bodyworkers, carpenters, cooks, designers, dancers, gardeners, filmmakers, knitters, farmers, fermenters, foragers, foresters, herbalists, musicians, performers, permaculturists, poets, potters, publishers, teachers, weavers, welders, woodworkers, writers, etc.” Most importantly, Salmon Creek Farm asks individuals to "surrender to the land, [to] take care of ourselves and each other, to give more than [they] take, and to leave things better than [they] found them." From this expansive list of "artist-hyphenates", we can see that Haeg clearly see's this farm as existing within a vast series of relationships and exchanges.
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| Fritz Haeg (Source) |
By asking recipients of these garlic cloves to cultivate them at home, Haeg acknowledged that food isn’t just about what we eat, but a vast system of relationships that has no real beginning or end. He is forcing us to conceive of food within a larger sphere of production and consumption by sending these plants out into the world, . This, I think, is how art can come to serve food.
Art asks us to think relationally about the world and forces us to confront questions that are outside the realm of immediate possibility. For better or for worse, art forces us into systems thinking, rather than conceiving of the world as binary structures of thought. Haeg himself believes that food is not what we find in gardens or in markets; rather, food should be defined by the relationships that exist between these things, and between the natural world at large, from air to sea to streams to oceans to trash dumps. This is put directly into practice at Salmon Creek Farm, which is meant to be a place for food in its fullest sense. They even use human waste - dubbed "humanure" - to fertilize the soils on the farm.
While, I do not necessarily believe that food has to be anything else other than food, I do believe that artistic modes of thought can serve food in challenging typical conceptions of meaning and definition. Food does not need to be art. Instead, we should try to use artistic modes of thinking to reshape our understanding of food into a vast series of networks and relationships, each forming a link in the chain.
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