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THE CREATION AND THE ERADICATION OF AN ARTWORK THROUGH FOOD IN PERFORMANCE ART

Analysis of the artwork

“Yumurtayı Soydum Başucuma Koydum, Duma Duma Dum”

Dila Yumurtacı

Sabancı University, Turkey

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I will examine my artwork through the utilization of food in

performance art. Food is everywhere; it has almost been transformed into a fetish

status among society and in certain cases can be qualified as an artwork. The act of

eating or cooking could be considered as an experience in itself, however how can we

differentiate an artwork from an ordinary everyday act? Through John Dewey’s Art

As Experience and Nicolas Bourriaud’s Theory of Relational Aesthetic, I want to

analyze the notions of experience by giving specific examples from various

performances. My main objective is not just to focus on the usage of food in an

artistic medium but also to point out the parallels between art and food. Sensory

experience is one of the key elements in this paper that I drew upon by referencing the

Futurist Cookbook. Through my video performance, which is built around food, and

particularly eggs, I aim to make people think and reflect critically about this

seemingly mundane subject matter.

Key Words: Food, Experience, Senses, Performance Art

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1. INTRODUCTION Food and eating habits are banal activities of everyday life but nevertheless we have

to eat in order to survive. They are also related to our subjectivity such as meanings

and discourses of cultural analysis and interpretation. From the birth of human

civilization to the present time, the interaction between food and human is very

obvious in every society. “No culture is without language or cooking skills.”1

Unfortunately scholars take everyday practices such as eating or cooking not all too

seriously, maybe because they are accepted as inferior compared with spiritual or

intellectual activities. Anthropology and sociology have paid a bit more attention to

the study of food. The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss has chosen food as

a subject-matter which has come from nature to nourish living beings and has then

been transformed to a product of culture. Recently food is increasingly being

considered as a medium or a subject matter for art works, which may also mark a

transformation of food from a natural product for sustenance to a fetish object within

contemporary society. It becomes a consumable commodity. Food becomes a product

through advertisements, every product has even a fashion statement along with its

packaging. Deborah Lupton argues this superior rank between taste and visual by

referring its appearance, “The appearance and presentation of food are highly related

to notions of its palatability,” leading to the consideration whether the perfection with

which food photographers and food stylists for cookbooks, magazines and blogs

present food may not also be instrumental in turning food and eating into

contemporary a fetish. They make people want to eat them. “Simulacrum of food in

which pleasure is derived from its aesthetic form and consequent evocation of

emotional states rather than its taste or texture.”2 Rosalind Coward initially used the

term ‘food pornography’ to describe aesthetically fetishized food when she says,

"Cooking food and presenting it beautifully is an act of servitude. It is a way of

expressing affection through a gift... That we should aspire to produce perfectly

finished and presented food is a symbol of a willing and enjoyable participation in

servicing others. Food pornography exactly sustains these meanings relating to the

preparation of food. The kinds of picture used always repress the process of

production of a meal. They are always beautifully lit, often touched up."3

                                                                                                               1Arppe, T., Mäkelä, J., &Väänänen, V. (2011). Living food diet and veganism, p. 9 2ibid 3Coward, R. Female desires: How they are sought, bought and packaged

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John Dewey in his book “Art As Experience” argues that art and life should have no

boundaries because the experience is a common denominator between them and art

can exist as an experience in itself. My main research is built upon the differences of

an artwork from an ordinary everyday act that comes about through the consumption

of food. How can we make a distinction between these two acts? How is it possible to

define a celebrity chef, an artist or a ordinary cook? Additionally, I will discuss the

theory of Nicolas Bourriaud called 'Relational Aesthetic' which indicates that an

artwork is defined as a process rather than a final object. The notion of experience

changes the perception of aesthetics; human interaction and social context of an

artwork become crucial and food appears one of the common subject matters. This

also resonates with Joseph Epstein who indicates that “Ten years ago I should have

said that any fuss about food was too great, but I grow older and food has become

more important to me. Judging from the space given to it in the media, the great

number of cookbooks and restaurant guides published annually, the conversations of

friends—it is very nearly topic number one. Restaurants today are talked about with

the kind of excitement that ten years ago was expended on movies. Kitchen

technology— blenders, grinders, vegetable steamers, microwave ovens, and the rest—

arouses something making to the interest once reserved for cars. The time may be

exactly right to hit the best-seller lists with a killer who disposes of his victims in a

Cuisinart”4 (Aristides 1978, pp. 157-58). Epstein is a precursor indicating fetish

status of food by virtue of today’s understanding. Everybody shares their meals on

social media, particularly through Instagram. There is also a new term known as a

foodie, commonly used in relation with this phenomenon in Instagram, describing ‘a

person who has an ardent or refined interest in food; a gourmet’5 and also regarding to

another definition “A person who takes pleasure in the preparation, presentation, and

eating of food. The term is sometimes used in a pejorative sense to describe someone

who is always searching for new, exotic taste sensations.”6 One has no longer look at

food in its primary function since we have our Food Network, Gourmet Magazine,

illustrated cookbooks, food blogs and celebrity chefs. Within a childish manner, the

word foodie makes fun of this exaggerated attitude: love everything about food.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               4J. Epstein, Aristides, Foodstuffs and Nonsense, 1978, pp. 157 – 58. 5  American Heritage Dictionnary 6 Oxford Dictionary

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I will also examine my personal art practice in relation with the social context and

theories that I mentioned above. During my performance, I used eggs to reveal the

relationship between mother and child. Enduringly, the process of eating egg gains

more depth meaning far beyond nutrition and turns into a metaphor of infancy, which

stands for mothers’ excessive love for her child.

2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK OF PERSONAL PRACTICE 2.1. A Perspective of Food

“I’m frightened of eggs, worse than frightened, they revolt me. That white round

thing without any holes … Have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg

yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid? Blood is jolly, red. But egg yolk is

yellow, revolting. I’ve never tasted it.”7

In my personal work, I want to reveal the relationship between mother and child

through an eating process. I use my body and eggs as my mediums. During my

performance, my body is stable in a squat position. After giving birth to an egg, I

replace the new egg with the previous one on my head and start to eat the previous

one with appetite. Throughout this eating process, the egg on my head keeps falling

down, and I persistently put it back up on my head.

My choice of egg as a material derives from personal reasons. My last name

Yumurtacı which means egg seller and was generally a subject of mockery since my

early ages. I really want to find out if this last name had a relation with my ancestors

lives. However, nobody in my family was curious about this matter. As I was

questioning I started to find eggs very gripping and bizarre at the same time. We eat

eggs nearly everyday and they are in fact unborn organisms. I’m not against eating

them, but I have always sensed there was something weird about it. Their oval form is

almost perfect and once you break it, it will never come together. At first, it was very

personal but later on, the relation between egg and culture is fascinated me. Every

                                                                                                               7 Alfred Hitchcock, http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/449460-i-m-frightened-of-eggs-worse-than-frightened-they-revolt-me

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culture uses eggs to point out very universal issues such as the rather than a pure and

ephemeral performance, I want to focus on the documentation of that eating process.

The early works of the study of food began in the 19th century with Garrick Mallery’s

‘Manners and Meals' (1888) and William Robertson Smith’s 'Lectures on the

Religion of The Semites' (1889). The nature of the subject is interdisciplinary, related

to anthropology, sociology, history, psychology, biology, agriculture and gastronomy

along with happening, performance art and installation art, given that food is a most

crucial subject matter for humans gaining more power everyday as resources seem to

be depleted. Claude Levi-Strauss is the main founder of the Structuralism school of

anthropology and he constructed a theory called culinary triangle in his book ‘The

Origin of Table Manners’ (1966). Levi-Strauss observed and recorded the eating

habits of North and South American tribes and categorized food in three phases: raw,

cooked and rotted. After analyzing different cooking techniques, he realized that the

difference between cooked and rotted corresponded respectively to the difference

between culture and nature. Furthermore, the dichotomy between the elaborated and

the unelaborated appears by regrouping on one side the cooked and the rotten and on

the other side, the raw. The raw side of our being is defined by nature as uncontrolled

and savage. To be able to control nature, the raw turns into edible foods by cooking.

Thus Strauss interprets culture through the consumption of food. He related the

cooked with culture because one has to make an operation with different types of

tools, and the rotted with nature because of time and decomposition. Accordingly,

food serves as a medium between nature and culture and the activity of cooking

marks the transformation to a civilized human. “Food practices exemplify these

binary oppositions, such as those between the raw and the cooked, food and non-

food." Finally, analyzing the activity of cooking gives meanings concerning the

society. “The cuisine of a society is an unconscious language in which its own

structure is figured. Food is a code whose message is the structure of a whole society

and its relation to the outside world.”8

Culinary practices have lots of common points with art practices. They both involve

an interaction with the senses whereby the chef turns into an artist. They both aim to

                                                                                                               8 Björn Quiring, The Signification of Food: Burnt Offerings according to Claude Shannon and Claude Lévi-Strauss  

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discover the sensory. “Similarly, when examining the nature of the culinary, the

creation of a meal is not only about producing a harmonic, polyphonic and

contrapuntal combination of tastes, smells and forms, as most cooking books claim.

On the contrary, whenever a chef sets himself to work with his pallet of foods it is in

the movement away from the skeletal structure that functions as an extension of the

plate or of the ground from which food emanates that the creative assembling of

elements through which a reproduction of the senses is started.”9 An artist and a chef

have a common goal: to explore the sensory. Marinetti, by saying: “The distinction of

the senses is arbitrary.”10 indicates that food is not only about tasting, other senses

such as visual, tactile, olfactory and verbal are also important distinctively. The

Futurist Cookbook might be the first book to liberate the sensory experience from the

appetite and nourishment. Futurists combine the radical use of color, shape, music and

lighting with food. They save food for art. The mouth and the tongue are not at the

center, mostly the eyes and the olfactory play a critical role in stimulating appetite.

“Eating is about sensing, about the joys of fusion. Futurist cuisine therefore

eliminated or delayed swallowing. Also, they promoted light food, banned the knife

and the fork, and preferred eating with the hands. The point was to touch the food

with the fingers and the mouth, to feel the food; and to smell it, pass it around or just

use your eyes to see what a good meal can do to you.”11 As a result, meals become

inedible spectacles and one may experience the structure, color or the sound of a

meal. In 1993, Alicia Rios made a performance called Organoleptic Deconstruction

in Three Movements, in which she mixed pink and white colored food with her hands

such as strawberries, marshmallows, meringue and cream. She also added the sound

of chewing and swallowing to the images. According to Barbara Kirshenblatt-

Gimblett, the Futurists did something similar, also using their hands to chew their

food for what they called 'prelabial tactile pleasure.'12 So the artist transformed the act

of chewing to the whole body which in return arose the sensational and tactical.

Yumurtayı Soydum Başucuma Koydum Duma Duma Dum is not a meal by itself but

an eating process. The body is not exactly in a normal eating position on a table. It is

in a squat position, which turns the eating into a savage action. “From mastication

                                                                                                               9 Dolphijn, R. An aesthetics of the mouth p. 179 10 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (Playing to the senses: Food as a performance medium, p. 2 11 Dolphijn, R. An Aesthetics of the Mouthp, p. 182 12 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. Playing to the senses: Food as a performance medium, p. 7

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and swallowing to heartburn to beyond, the corporeality of eating daily reminds us

humans of our status as animals and our subjection to the imperative dictates of the

body.”13 The body of the performer looks almost like an animal through the position

of the body and the continuous act of mastication with an appetite. In spite of all these

visual elements, the sound of eating is also augmented to reinforce the sensation of

the savageness.

2.2. The Notion of Experience: Art As Experience

In his book Art As Experience, John Dewey refuses the idea that an art activity, in its

essence is an intellectually elite exercise but rather defends that it is a cognitive

activity. He makes a shift in the understandings and characteristics of the artistic

process, arguing that in life one is always subjected to sensory information, internal

sensation and emotional moods. A lot is going on just as it is and we don’t even

realize these events that surround us, but then at some point, an experience may

captivate our attention and turn it into a discreet experience, which he calls ‘the

consummatory experience.’ He gives a mundane but a precise example, after an

excellent dinner, the expression is used ‘That was AN excellent dinner!’ In our

everyday life, we use this expression having AN experience and he points out that art

has also this very common manner of consumption.

                                                                                                               13  Ferguson, P. P. The Senses of Taste. P 374  

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In my art practice, after I realized my work, I analyzed and became aware of the

motivations behind my choice of subject. My personal properties formed my

consummatory experience. I started with searching the meaning of my last name and I

found out that egg is an emotional connotation of the relationship with my mother.

The psychoanalytical approach also provides this insight that “Emotional dimension

of food is in the context of the mother-child relationship. From a psychoanalytical

perspective, the emotions and desires associated with food are inextricably

intertwined with individuals’ relationships with their mothers.”14 Mother as a

caregiver symbolizes the power upon the child because infants are born powerless and

need a physical and emotional support from their mothers. It was AN experience for

me to use eggs because of its significance symbolizing the relationship between me

and my mother.

Dewey argues that physical manifestation, the material ‘work of art’ is no longer

important but rather the development of a work as a process that he calls ‘experience’

occupies the center stage in his philosophy of aesthetics. However, the significance of

an art object still owns its individuality. The artwork is not separate from its creator.

Yumurtayı Soydum Başucuma Koydum Duma Duma Dum is also a process containing

an experience, which is interconnected with my personal awareness.

                                                                                                               14  Lupton, D. Food, the Body and The Self. Sage, p. 44  

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Dewey defines the notion of experience in the following manner: If the material of

experience is fulfilled or consummated than it is called an experience. “A piece of

work is finished in a way that is satisfactory; a problem receives its solution; a game

is played through.”15 It is at the same time different from other experiences by its

individual characteristic. Each has its own plot and quality that infuses the whole

experience. “Such an experience is a whole and carries with its own individualizing

quality and self-sufficiency. It is an experience.”16 An experience has a unity, which

is intellectual, emotional and physical concurrently but again he puts an emphasis on

its emotional character. “In final import they are intellectual. But in their actual

occurrence they were emotional as well.”17 Rudolf Arnheim also points out: “All

perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also

invention.”18 Similarly in my art practice I’ve started with an emotional subject matter

that touches me but later I found myself dwelling on its meaning, namely how the

usage of eggs is a metaphor of my relationship with my mother reconsidering within a

psychoanalytical perspective and the performance then transformed into an

intellectual experience.

Reaching a conclusion by the mere act of thinking is very similar to the

consummation of an experience and “an experience of thinking has its own esthetic

quality.”19 That is why thinking satisfies us emotionally. It is hard to think of

aesthetics and emotion as separate entities since emotions are not static, they involve

everyday life, they are not private, they are part of on-going situations. When emotion

and aesthetics embrace, the result is unity. “The intimate nature of emotion is

manifested in the experience of one watching a play on the stage or reading a novel. It

attends the development of a plot; and a plot requires a stage, a space, wherein to

develop and time in which to unfold. Experience is emotional but there are no

separate things called emotions in it.”20

                                                                                                               15 Dewey, J. Art as Experience, p. 35 16 ibid 17 ibid, 37 18  http://www.objectlessfunction.com/img/document.pdf 19 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey-aesthetics/ 20Dewey, J. Art as Experience, p. 42

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Dewey does not isolate artistic practice from intellectual activity because the relation

between doing and undergoing determines intelligence, in other words they form the

structure of an experience. He points out that in English there are no words, which

signify the aesthetic and the artistic at the same time. We use aesthetic to designate

the whole field. According to Dewey, 'the artistic’ refers to the act of production and

‘the aesthetic’ to the perception and enjoyment of the produced artifact. However

these refer directly to doing and undergoing or production and consumption, which

are inseparable. “I refer to these obvious facts as preliminary to an attempt to show

how the conception of conscious experience as a perceived relation between doing

and undergoing enables us to understand the connection that art as production and

perception and appreciation as enjoyment sustain to each other.”21

Janine Antoni’s work, Gnow, is a three-part installation connecting doing and

undergoing. The artist made two different cubes by gnawing chocolate and lard and at

the end, she packaged them as a chocolate candy. She used her mouth as a tool

instead of hammer or chisel. The cubes are poured, chewed, spit out, melted down

and recast. Antoni explains the whole process: “I chewed on the chocolate cube for

about a month and a half. The chocolate that I spit out I melted down and recast into

heart–shaped packaging for chocolate candy.”22 Antoni’s interests lie on everyday

activities and its process, which is more important than the meaning behind material

used. It is hard to separate doing and undergoing for Gnaw, because the process

became the artwork and the artist made another connection with the content and the

title of the work, “I call the piece Gnaw because I'm interested in the bite as a kind of

primal urge. I love to look at a little baby when they put everything in their mouth in

order to know it, and through that process, they destroy it.”23 The bite is intimate and

destructive at the same time, correspondingly in my own art practice, the destruction

through food and the intimacy of mother and child are also at the center of my work.

Dewey continues by arguing that the artist has to perceive if the product is good or

not since the sensitivity of the artist directs the artwork. In other words the process of

artistic production starts with perception. By stating “The real work of an artist is to

                                                                                                               21ibid, 46 22 http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php 23 Dewey, J. Art as Experience, p. 46

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build up an experience that is coherent in perception while moving with constant

change in its development.”24 Dewey reveals that the artist has to use imagination and

observation simultaneously to form an integral experience.

Similarly, the relationship between the creator and the perceiver are interconnected.

The reception of the perceiver means full perception, a state that refers to fulfillment.

In addition to this, the aesthetic experience of art requires interaction between the

total organism and the object; and in integral experience, which Dewey uses

interchangeably with the term consummatory experience, the perceiver turns into a

creator. He also adds, “ In every integral experience there is form because there is a

dynamic organization. I call the organization dynamic because it takes time to

complete it, because it’s a growth. There is inception, development and fulfillment.”25

2.2.1. The Expressive Object: Production Process turned into an Artwork

Dewey describes ‘the expressive object’ as the encounter between the artist and the

active observer. He argues that the object should not be seen to be isolated from the

production process. The process ignores the individual contribution of the artist.

Artworks use materials that come from the world around them. Through an artist's

efforts these materials take on a new meaning, connecting the universal and the

individual. The artwork is transformed into a representative of these materials, not a

reproduction. “They have no precedents in existence or in universal beings. But,

nonetheless, their material came from the public world and so have qualities in

common with the material of other experiences, while the product awakens in other

persons new perceptions of the meanings of the common world.”26 Food as a material

commonly used in our everyday life falls into place with the work of Jana Sterback,

Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anoretic. The artist used raw meat and sewed

them to construct a dress. Sterback refers to 17th century Dutch still life paintings by

using the term Vanitas, in which rotting meat exists to signify the inevitability of

death and the spirituality of life. Then, in her work, Sterback indicates, “The

                                                                                                               24 ibid, 51 25 ibid, 55 26 ibid

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alienation humans feel from their own flesh, aging, and mortality.”27 by showing this

mortality through the union of human body and raw meat.

The meaning of an artwork can be found in the public world. Olafur Eliasson’s quote

aptly fits, “When I make something, which maybe is a work of art, I want this to be in

the world. I want it to be sincerely and honestly and responsibly in the world. I want it

to have an impact somehow.”28 John Dewey differs from others who believe that art

expresses the inner emotions of the artist. Contrarily, the objects of art themselves are

expressive, independent of their creator. The intention of the artist is not to form a

communication with others by his/her artwork, but this happens nonetheless.

2.2.2. The Common Substance of Art: The problematic of Subject Matter

“What subject-matter is appropriate for art? Are there materials inherently fit and

others unfit?”29 This chapter begins with these two questions and John Dewey

indicates that one of the functions of art is to question the limitations of the subject

matter. In fact, the universality or the originality of a work does not depend on the

subject matter but rather on the artist’s sincerity. “What ever narrows the boundaries

of the material fit to be used in art hems in also the artistic sincerity of the individual

artist. It does not give fair play and outlet to his vital interest.”30 The spirit of a work,

also called the work’s reality makes us experience the work as real, leading to a

background that Dewey calls ‘settings.’ The background can be implicit and can

include some other meanings, which may be hard to put into words. ”About every

explicit and focal object there is a recession into the implicit which is not

intellectually grasped.”31 The experience is mystical in its nature. Some art works

may give us an experience of a religious feeling that can be related to an aesthetic

intensity, which may actually be a feeling of unity. In 1969, Barbara Smith’s Ritual

Meal used the notion of food to enact with the ritual. During the performance, inviters

cooked raw food accompanied by sounds of surgery. The meaning was implicitly

given through the utilization of the artist’s body as a shaman during the performance.

                                                                                                               27 http://www.walkerart.org/collections/artworks/vanitas-flesh-dress-for-an-albino-anorectic 28 http://www.objectlessfunction.com/img/document.pdf 29 Dewey, J. (2005). Art as experience,, 187 30http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey-aesthetics/ 31 Dewey, John ibid, 194

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However, it was a standpoint concerning gender issues. In ritual feast, shamans were

males and the society was patriarchal. Nonetheless, Barbara Smith transformed the

gender roles through referencing her own body.

Another issue that Dewey points out is that every work of art has a particular medium

associated with different organs. We perceive experience through these organs. The

medium between the artist and the perceiver influences the aesthetic directly. If we

were to substitute the medium of an artwork with another, it will change the whole

idea and will look fake. The relationship between means and ends are highly

important and the artist has to be the one to turn the material into a medium.

2.3. Relational Art and Aesthetic

In his book Relational Aesthetic, art critic Nicolas Bourriaud attempts to draw a line

and distinguishes a certain type of participatory art that 'has emerged' in the 1990s and

that is 'focused upon the sphere of inter- human relations … and the invention of

models of sociability'.32 The spectator participation, theorized by Fluxus happenings

and performances, transformed into a key element of contemporary art practices. The

receiver’s field of activity is defined through a couple of terms such as interactivity

and transitivity. This notion of transitivity denies the existence of the place of art. The

artwork has to be received by the spectator - if not, it will be nothing other than a

death object. “Art is a state of encounter.”33 It is the reason why artists propose

artworks that contain moments of sociability or objects producing sociability.

Bourriaud states that encounters are more important than their composers. FOOD, an

artist-run restaurant opened up in 1971 by Gordon Matta-Clarke, will be a good

example to indicate this idea of encounter. It was active between 1971 and 1974 and

served more than 100 customers in a day. They acquired a whole innovative and

international menu and in an open kitchen, the cooking and eating process turned into

a performance. The whole event was a live piece. In a short while, the restaurant

became one of the most famous meeting places in Manhattan. Conviviality is also

another aspect of an artwork, a part of a friendship culture in relation with the

encounter between perceivers.                                                                                                                32Lima, Nario Critic of Nicolas Bourraud’s RelationalAesthetic and Altermodernism, p 1 33Bourriaud, N RelationalAesthetics p. 18

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Nicolas Bourriaud argues that modernist art intended to prepare a future world: today

it is modeling a possible universe. "The role of the artwork is no longer to form an

imaginary and utopian reality but to actually be ways of living and models of action

within the real, chosen by the artist. The statement that claims artworks cannot offer

imaginary realities is no longer problematic. Since 1990s, artists started to create

pieces that would emulate ways of living. The relations between individuals and

groups, between the artist and the world are very common to create a world outside

the field of art.’34 Artist Rikrit Tiravanija created an exhibition called Untitled (Free)

in which he turned the gallery into a kitchen, prepared and cooked curry soups and

served them to visitors. He created an atmosphere of ephemeral interactions and

connections between groups so the visitors were not just spectators of art but a part of

it.

Bourriaud asks: “What is our relationship to the physical world?”35 Artist starts to

investigate the everyday activity by being socially aware or engaged but again one

might ask if “Any artwork might thus be defined as a relational object.”36 His

argument is possibly true because the artist is no longer in the leading role but

functions as a catalyst.

                                                                                                               34ibid 35ibid, 28 36ibid, 26

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In Yumurtayı Soydum Başucuma Koydum Duma Duma Dum  I prefer to realize the

process of eating eggs by  myself, all alone. The camera exists as a medium to make

the documentation of this process. The camera is stable and the plan-sequence proves

the neutral point of view in front of this eating process. I eat the eggs with appetite in

a studio that boasts a neutral atmosphere except the background color. I chose pink

for background to reveal the motherhood and femininity. I perform alone but if I

performed it with a group of people it would definitely produce different

consequences and would have changed the artwork. “Art is an activity consisting in

producing relationships with the world with the help of signs, forms, actions, and

objects.”37

3. MAIN FOCUS “Taste, arguably, is the most singular of all the senses, tasting makes the most private

of connections to the material world. The tasting subject requires heightened intimacy

with a taste object defined by corporality and ephemerality.”38 Performance art and

food have this common characteristic of being ephemeral. Performance is an art form,

which uses different mediums to express an idea, an emotion or an act. This short

definition is not enough to understand what performance art means and how we can

separate it from performance in art in general terms. Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett

posits three crossroads at which food and performance meet: to do, to behave and to

show.39 To perform means to do or to achieve. It can be ordinary activities, for

example we can say ‘I perform my job very well this afternoon.’ or it can be a

musical or a theatrical act, ‘Tonight our band will perform at 9 pm.’ or again, ‘I

perform Antigone.’ The utilization of the verb ‘to perform’ expresses mostly ordinary

activities but not art. There is a huge confusion about the terminology in this case. If

we talk about performance as an art form, we have to indicate ‘art’ every time after

the word ‘performance’.

Performance art is a new art form compared to other art disciplines. In the middle of

the 20th century, there were big political and social shifts that had huge effects on the

art world. 1968 is a crucial year and The United States is the main country where

                                                                                                               37 ibid, 30 38  Ferguson, P. P. (2011). The Senses of Taste. P 371 39Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. Playing to the senses: Food as a performance medium, p. 1-2

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many of these changes came about: The ongoing Vietnam war had a major effect

upon the young generation who wanted to break free from the old bourgeois mentality

that persisted to operate within a set of old and strict rules. This new generation

wanted freedom in everyway, freedom of expression and freedom of gender are one

of the major themes. It is therefore not so surprising that they also wanted freedom in

art. The conventional was not accepted any longer since the young generation of the

late 1960s and early 1970s felt that they had no limitations when it came to creative

activities.

Rejecting the traditional approach that praises meaning, integrity and aesthetic beauty

in an artwork. The first name to come to mind is Allan Kaprow who is one of the

early leaders of performance art. Kaprow aimed to create a way of dealing with the

real world through a framed standpoint. “Kaprow sees most art as a convention – or a

set of conventions – by which the meanings of experience are framed, intensified and

interpreted, he attends as an artist to the meanings of experience instead of the

meanings of art (or “art experience”) because the meaning of life interests him more

than the meanings of art.”40 Considering art as a participatory experience rather than

an art object, he created interactive installations that he called ‘environments’

Besides, Allan Kaprow was very influenced by John Dewey and his book, Art As

Experience. Kaprow turned his early environments into performance events with his

collaborator John Cage. These performances were called happenings and the artist is

mainly known through this term which he defines as“ an artistic event of all-at-

onceness in which there is no storyline.”41 Audience participation, deformation of

time and space and unconventional use of materials are commonly observed in his

works.. However, his works don’t require any aesthetic attitude. On the contrary, his

works are much more close to the non-art actions that reveal the ordinary in everyday

life.

The questions that then arise are: What is art and what is non-art? How can it be

possible to make a distinction between artist and non-artist? Artists allow a freedom

of interpretation to their artworks through a denial of an object-based interest.

However, the public may have difficulties understanding the meaning or even the

                                                                                                               40 Bruno de Almeira, p 10 41 ibid

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value of these kinds of works. If technical ability and artistic virtuosity is no longer

accepted, how can it be possible to distinguish a regular person from an artist? They

may not require merely aesthetic activity but mainly a philosophical quest. Besides,

they give more importance to the process rather than the work of art. Furthermore the

process turns into an artwork. Kaprow applied the ideas that Dewey mentioned in the

chapter of Expressive Objects and Kaprow adds, “Our attention is thereby shifted

away from the production of a work onto a life in the art project- a life that is not

primarily a productive process, that is not tailored to developing a product, that is not

result-oriented.”42 The art- object is no longer important, rather than a result the

process covers the central stage. The challenge to perceive an artwork creates another

effect on art. “The audience is no longer confronted with an artwork but with the

documentation of life in the art-project.”43 Teching Hsieh, Taiwanese performance

artist, realizes one-year performances and commonly known as an early seminal

figure in the evolution of durational performance art. Hsieh made punch an alarm

clock every hour for a year to capture mug shots. The subject is himself with

deprivation of sleep and he questioned the nature of time by observing the passing

time within a long process. The work is called, Time Clock Piece and recalls “The

labours of Sisyphus, who, in Greek mythology, was forced to roll a rock repeatedly up

a mountain, only to watch it to fall down.”44 He is interested in the universal

circumstances of human life. Between 1986 and 1999, he took a decision,13-year

plan, during the time he created art but did not show it. Accordingly, Hsieh’s works

are documentation of life in the art-project.

3.1.Theorising Mother-Child Relations

The physicality of mother and child relationship depends on the corporal elements

such as passion and sensuality. The love between them is highly intimate. Regarding

psychoanalytical explanations Sigmund Freud did not mention mother-child

relationships in his writings related with child’s psychosexual development. He put on

emphasis on Father figure, however mother has an important effect on children during

the attachment and detachment process. Melanie Klein, a second wave of

                                                                                                               42 ibid, 15 43ibid 44 http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/australia-culture-blog/2014/apr/30/tehching-hsieh-the-man-who-didnt-go-to-bed-for-a-year

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psychoanalyst, extended Freud’s work. “Klein observed that in the pre-Oedipal stage

of their development, children desired not simply the mother, but part objects of the

mother, such as her breasts.”45 The mother symbolizes comfort for the child besides

safety and pleasure. The pre-Oedipal phase of Children’s development is the focus of

the object relation theory. Nancy Chodorow argues that ‘Women continue to mother

because this activity returns them unconsciously to blissful state of infancy when their

own mothers nurtured them.’46 This attachment between mother and daughter

structures the self-construction of the child. Furthermore, looking at psychoanalytical

feminism, ‘The young child’s mind produces in fantasy a mother who is more

powerful than in reality.’(Featherstone, 1997)47

In my artwork, I want to focus on the physicality of the mother-child relationship

which is not merely about body-mind dualism but points out the psychic motivation

of mother’s desire. Particularly, the depiction of mothers’ love and how they

repeatedly love their children ‘to bits’, the irresistable feeling of ‘wanting to eat them

up’ which is excessively passionate and I refer it to cannibalism, the act of human

eating the flesh of other human beings.

                                                                                                               45 Bruno de Almeira, p. 400 46 ibid, 401 47 ibid

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Various different forms of cannibalism exist such as exocannibalism,

erotophonophilia, vorarephilia, gynophagia, sexual autophagy. In the 20th century, the

cannibalism occurred because of nutritional reasons in Soviet during the Soviet

famine and in China during the Great Leap Forward. It occurs also because of ritual

reasons but no matter what, eating another person is not against the law, which is very

mind-boggling. Chinese performing artist, Zhu Yu arises questions about moral issues

with human body and his famous work, Eating People is about cooking and eating a

human fetus. He stated that, “No religion forbids cannibalism. Nor can I find any law,

which prevents us from eating people. I took advantage of the space between morality

and the law and based my work on it"48 This phenomenon is called placentophagy and

commonly animals eat their own placenta after giving birth. In human beings, The

Korawai tribe of Pappau New Guinea is the last known group of cannibals but still

there are some cases where human eating happens. Relating to separation anxiety

from the mother and resulting oral aggression may be the causes of this abnormal act.

My art practice constitutes the challenges the maternal love into a passion. When

mothers say they love their children to bits, wanting to eat them up because the feel

utterly passionate towards their children. As Coward states, “Something about loving

                                                                                                               48 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2624797.stm

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reminds us of food.”49 Using the metaphor of cannibalism enable me to rebuild the

mother-child relationship by a process of eating egg.

                                                                                                               49  Gabb, J. ‘I Could Eat My Baby to Bits’; passion and desire in lesbian mother–children love, p. 408  

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CONCLUSION

Considering food as a mundane subject is no longer an issue, it occupies

every part of our lives. It turns into a fetish status, not only in our everyday life

but also in art production. I mainly questioned the circumstances in which the

utilization of food is turned into an art object. Obviously, I could not find an

answer between what is art or not. However, food leads young generation to a

new direction where they did not just consume food but they identify their

lifestyles through the consummation and the creation of food. Life and art are

getting more and more closer as Dewey said so. I am interested in food

because I constantly observe this challenge of life and art through food, and it

captivates me. I wonder if is it possible to reinforce more the boundaries of

food? I suppose it is, because I believe that food make people think more to

turn an ordinary thing into an extraordinary, which is about imagination and

where art appears.

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BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Aristed. (1978). Life and Letters: Food stuff and Nonsense. The American Scholar, 157-163.

Arppe, T., Mäkelä, J., &Väänänen, V. (2011). Living food diet and veganism Individual vs collective boundaries of the forbidden. Social Science Information, 50(2), 275-297.

Balt, C. (2009). " A darkrevolt of being": abjection, sacrifice and the real in performance art, with reference to the works of Peter van Heerden and Steven Cohen (Doctoral dissertation, RhodesUniversity). Bishop, C. (2006). Antagonism and relational aesthetics. Bourriaud, N., Pleasance, S., Woods, F., & Copeland, M. (2002). Relational aesthetics (pp. 7-40). Paris: Les presses du reel. Coward, R. (1985). Female desires: How they are sought, bought and packaged (pp. 13-14). New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Dewey, J. (2005). Art as experience. Penguin. Dezeuze, A., Bishop, C., Brett, G., González, J. A., Graham, B., Jones, A., ... &Wood, C. (2010). The" Do-it-yourself" Artwork: Articipation From Fluxus to New Media. Manchester UniversityPress. Dolphijn, R. (2006). An aesthetics of the mouth: Creativity between the culinary and the arts. Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 11(1), 179-188. Ferguson, P. P. (2011). The Senses of Taste. The American historical review, 116(2), 371-384. Gabb, J. (2004). ‘I Could Eat My Baby to Bits’; passion and desire in lesbian mother–children love. Gender, Place & Culture, 11(3), 399-415. Hollingworth, H. L., &Poffenberger, A. T. (1917). The sense of taste. Moffat, Yard. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (1999). Playing to the senses: Food as a performance medium. Performance Research, 4(1), 1-30. Lupton, D. (1996). Food, the Body andthe Self. Sage. Lawson, J. (2011). Food legacies: Playing the culinary feminine. Women& Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 21(3), 337-366. Martin, S. (2007). Critique of relational aesthetics. Third Text, 21(4), 369-386. Mintz, S. W., &DuBois, C. M. (2002). The anthropology of food and eating. Annual review of anthropology, 99-119. Siewicz, A. (2011). Anthropology as an inspiration to food studies: building theory and practice.

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ONLINE RESSOURCES http://www.alicia-rios.com/en/food/performances/organoleptic.html http://www.businessinsider.com/10-things-you-always-wondered-about-cannibalism-2012-5?op=1 http://www.cca.qc.ca/en/study-centre/1838-the-story-of-food http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/dale-bolinger-guilty-what-is-sexual-cannibalism-9619716.html http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=82028 http://www.walkerart.org/collections/artworks/vanitas-flesh-dress-for-an-albino-anorectic http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/australia-culture-blog/2014/apr/30/tehching-hsieh-the-man-who-didnt-go-to-bed-for-a-year