The next few posts will be exciting. I've been wanting to write for awhile now about the intermingling of my two major obsessions, art and food. As the two themes of this blog, I've kept my writing on them fairly separate. I'm not sure why. These two ideas shouldn't be banished to two separate corners of the room; they should be seated side by side at the kitchen table.
There are so many ways these two fields intersect. I'm sure we've all had meals that looked like a work of art, almost too beautiful to eat. I've seen vegetables that looked so exquisite I thought of them as mini- sculptures, and i've wished for a way to preserve and display them in their natural glory. Example: A few years ago I took an entire days worth of tip-money and bought every type of mushroom my grocery sold, placed them in a huge bowl on my kitchen counter, and drooled over their prettiness until they all shriveled away.
Lou, Liza. Kitchen. 1991-95. Glass beads. 168-square-foot installation.
On the flip side, there is so much art-and I mean art with a capital A-about food. I'm always attracted to this subject matter, whether literally about food itself, cooking, either embracing or rebelling from domesticity, feminine identity, and the connection between food and the body. In the next couple of posts, I'd like to give a few examples of some of my favorite art that falls under this theme.
To begin, I give you Liza Lou's Kitchen. I first learned of Lou from Episode 30 of my beloved This American Life. The episode is about obsession, and I think it is the obsessive-quality that immediately draws me to Lou's work. As I've said before, I'm enamored with obsessive, repetitive, process-oriented work, and Kitchen most definitely fits the bill. The 168 square-foot instillation-not to mention the surfaces of all objects housed within it-is covered with millions of hand-glued, itty-bitty glass beads.
Can you even imagine? She applied every single bead individually, with tweezers! She completed the instillation single handedly over a five year span of sometimes 18 hour-a-day labor. The intense discipline, the intricacy, the detail, the colors, the quirkiness...I want to bow at this woman's feet! I look at these photos and I wonder what it would look like in person with a bright light source shining down upon it. All the glass beads reflecting light back at you, flickering and sparkling like millions of tiny gemstones.
Her work goes beyond simply being incredible eye candy. Besides embodying obsessive tendencies (though I don't think of her obsession as a compulsion, the lady knows what she's doing) and the power of human focus and endurance, Lou's work can be viewed under so many other scopes. She's speaking about the imitation of reality. She's nodding to traditional women's work, both the act of a woman cooking in the kitchen and the history of beading and crafts. She's elevating "craft" into high art. With touches like this sandwich, she's glorifying the mundane into something holy...and she's just being funny.
While Kitchen was Lou's first major work, the lady has been incredibly busy ever since. You can read more about her concepts, style, and method, as well as view several newer pieces at The White Cube. There is also excellent information about Lou in this article from W Magazine.
Recent Comments