Food and the Body

Alicia is not alone in exploring our food fantasies related to the body. In 1959 Meret Oppenheim served up Spring Feast to friends on a naked female body. This spring fertility rite was repeated later that year at the opening of the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris as a celebration of Eros. Chrysanne Stathacos and Hunter Reynolds restaged the event in 1992, but substituted a male body for the female one as a feminist revision.

Oldenburg's soft sculptures' large scale and materials make them suggestive of bodies in themselves and their playful, tactile rendering invites our imagining of interactive possibilities. In fact, Patty Mucha, Oldenburg's collaborator and partner in the sixties, revealed that the two of them 'christened' Soft Hamburger one night by having sex on the meat, covered by the bun. As a result, the press often claimed that they used it as a bed.(1)

Daniel Spoerri, founder of Eat Art, related food to the body in 1970 when he cooked a woman's heeled shoe with dough inside. The bread filled the shoe, oozing out as it expanded and baked, highlighting the life force of bread, which here becomes a substitute for the missing body.

As in Alicia's Hat of Galician Loaf, other artists have also exploited the plastic possibilities offered by bread in works relating to the body. Lluís Vilà, a Catalan artist influenced by Eat Art, created a series of edible footwear in 1979, including a pair made of bread, an ingredient he championed in other works as well for its role as a staple food in many cultures. In 2004 Jean Paul Gaultier paid homage to French bread culture creating dresses out of bread for an exhibition he titled Pain Couture and Doug Fitch and Mimi Oka's Breadstumes are similar creations.

Alicia's Delicatessen trousseau and chillies is unusually beautiful and unconfrontational for a work involving raw meat. Carolee Schneeman's 1964 performance, Meat Joy, in which various naked or near-naked men and women writhed about on the floor with a variety of meat products, is grotesque in its abject conflation of naked flesh and dead animals. Jana Sterbak's meat dress, displayed on a wire hanger and depicted in a photo being worn by a model, also produces revulsion, invoking the contrasting ideas of beauty and decay along with eating disorders that reduce people to hanging flesh, wasting away. In Delicatessen Trousseau, however, the sensitive lighting emphasises the beauty of the sausages' marbled pattern, neutralising, or at least softening, it's abject properties.

(1) Mucha, Patty ‘Sewing in the sixties: recounting how some classic examples of Claes Oldenburg's Pop sculpture came into existence, with cameo appearances by Dick Bellamy, Dennis Hopper and Charlie the cat' Art in America, Nov 2002, http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_11_90/ai_94079418.

<< return to Edible Hat Postcards