Wait and See (What's for Dinner?)
Curated by Kate Fowle, this show comprises historical and contemporary art and objects under the endearingly ambitious remit of exploring food and its relationship to religion, sex, culture, history, manners, ritual, identity and art.
Its many sections include a slightly cap-doffing history of the local Sainsbury's (the show's sponsors), an artist's intervention, and a display of kitchen utensils used by the distinguished food writer Elizabeth David (1913-1992) who used to live locally. Her frying pan - here genteelly called a skillet - is given the status of a venerable holy relic on its own conservation plinth. In the tableau, The Art of The Restaurant, distinctions between curating and art are nicely emulsified. The menus, place settings, ketchup bottles and origami serviettes of a miscellany of Eastbourne restaurants are displayed with the accompaniment of their preferred choice of taped music, all to pleasantly insane effect.
The group of historical artworks exhibited includes a George Smith painting, Still Life with Joint of Beef on a Pewter Dish (c. 1750-60). The flesh has the authentic greys of death, having been painted prior to the current practice of dying meat a ruddy live colour. In this sense, the traditional pondering of mortality is more disturbing than much contemporary flesh art. Here we can reflect on biology's sad equation - chewing the arse off grey mortality itself, inside the deep hole in the front of our face. In a nearby Helen Chadwick work, Meat Abstract no. 6 (1989), the artist has introduced cutlery into her photoworks of flesh in a studied contrasting of the indelicacies of raw, spinal offal and the genteel silver tools of status dining. This is very Quo Vadis and nourishing. Around the corner is an unloving but brilliantly, amphetaminely acute Lucien Freud painting,
Bananas (1952), from which the artist, for his own purposes, has systematically and necessarily stripped any of the comic value usually given to this fruit.
Intentional contrasts are made in the show, such as hanging, for example, a painting of fruit by Hendricksz van Beyeren, Still Life: Banquet Piece (c. 1650-70), beside the trompe l'oeil wax peaches of Still Life: Game Fruit (1997) by Sarah Hardy. These peaches, in their glass bell jar, bring to mind the mini wax tableaux made by Victorian women as a domestic accomplishment and decoration. Each of Hardy's soft, downy peaches, however, has had introduced into it an authentically individuated vagina, a comment, possibly, on sexual stasis and non-consummation versus desire.
Other works exhibited include Matthew Parr's fearless photo-studies of British mass catering and its queasy peripherals: horrible macro-images of the artificially sheer colours and vitaminless sugars, fats and fallen dandruffs of cheap catering - the food equivalent of looking at the venereal diseases section in a dermatology textbook. Chinese artist Anthony Key showed a silver foil takeaway receptacle, Stir Fry with the Sound of its Own Making (1997), from which escapes the recorded sounds of its title. This is an old idea, here parodied, which is successful because of the ludicrous minimalist beauty of the container and the assumption that the work authentically reflects the artist's life experiences. Also successful is Key's McDonalds Napkin (1997) which is made in fine, white Chinese silk, modestly but faithfully reproducing the hamburger giant's name and logo with delicate handstitching.
The work Artist's Installation (1997) by Jo Addison and Lucy Newman, made in the extant Victorian kitchen of the gallery, is unashamedly giggly-girly and silly-billy. The work includes a photo of the artists posing cheekily while dressed up as two of the original female kitchen staff, one of whom holds a cat. The artists ignore any opportunities for a critical analysis of the toiling labour status and abused gender roles of the original kitchen workers. Solid, mock steam spouts from kettles, a saucepan has been painted to look as if it has boiled over, dumb Plasticine peas have been created, and a model cat is suspended in a flying leap across the kitchen. Were they still around to see it, the workers might have derived greater pleasure from this approach than from any grave, worthy analysis. But then again, possibly not.
The best thing about the work is the cat's arsehole, which sits vivid red on its black fur, drawing our attention to the silently passed omission of the show: the inevitable, final consequence of any kind of food or liquid consumption. There seems to be a hole in the market for an intelligently considered show on this subject. Perhaps starting with Duchamp's urinal (although it could start anywhere earlier) the show could gather many relevant works, including those by Piero Manzoni, Richard Hamilton, Gilbert and George, Sarah Lucas, Noble and Webster, Chris Ofili, Helen Chadwick and many others, through to the recent self-portrait bust modelled by Marc Quinn, made from the artist's own merde.
