Wedding meal, 1971 Alicia has described her wedding meal as her first work of food art. For the event she and her late husband, Francisco Garcia de Paredes, designed a savoury Francisco and a sweet Alicia to scale. The woman's breasts were pies, her belt a rectangular tart, and the skirt an arrangement of flowers, fruits and sweets of all types. The sculptures were admired and then eaten. First Francisco disappeared and then Alicia. Kirshenblatt Gimblett points out that food often serves a role of creating union in ceremonies of incorporation, such as weddings, by bringing people together to eat. She also notes how Alicia's wedding meal took this theme of union through food even further by effecting the symbolic union of Francisco and Alicia within the bodies of all the guests.(1) Through this act of anthropophagy, the guests thus both celebrated and contributed to the union of the newlyweds. (1) Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara ‘Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium' in Performance Research 4(1), 1999, pp. 1-30, p. 23. |