...And We're Back!
with 50-year-old margarine, controversial bananas, fermented paintings, scavenged cocktail bars, ceramic Brie, and more! 🧈🍌🧀
Welcome to the latest issue of Weekly Special, a food-art newsletter by Andrea Gyorody.
Hello and happy… December?! It’s been over a year since I published an issue of Weekly Special, thanks to some very big (very worthy) projects that consumed all of my free time and brain space. I’m about to embark on a bunch of other Major Things, but in this moment of pause, I wanted nothing more than to revisit Weekly Special, which is like an old friend who lives far away and seldom visits but as soon as you’re together, it’s like no time has passed at all. Or your favorite Trader Joe’s seasonal treats, which reliably return each winter and make everything better.
Let’s dig in!
A Buffet of Food-Art Stories
Beuys Beuys Beuys at the Broad
Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature is one of the projects that took me away from pleasure-writing over the last year, so it feels only right to share it with you. Bringing together more than 400 editioned objects (called “multiples”) by the late German artist, this exhibition at the Broad museum in downtown LA, co-curated with Sarah Loyer, is simply chock full of food art. Beuys—who was the subject of my dissertation—famously made sculptures with various forms of fat (butter, tallow, margarine), investing his work with energy and entropy, and chaos and frustration for all future museum stewards of the work. He also incorporated food into dozens of his multiples, all on view at the Broad; my favorites include fat-smeared stationery, a bag of dried peas and a tub of margarine from the DDR (pictured above), a giant cistern of olive oil (also memorialized in a video modeled after Warhol’s screen tests), a bottle of Maggi seasoning paired with a volume by Kant, and a fried fish skeleton hanging in a wooden box, which I discussed at length in this issue of Weekly Special from 2021.
The show’s on view through March 23. Come check it out if you’re in LA, and if you’re not, you can still get your Beuys fix with our gorgeous two-sided exhibition catalogue, sold at the Broad, through the publisher, on Amazon, and probably at an art bookstore near you.
Helen Rosner’s A+ Holiday Gift Guide
I bought most of my holiday gifts over the Black Friday/Small Business Saturday/Cyber Monday clusterf⋆ck of weekend sales, but if you’re still looking for gifts for a special someone who loves food or food-themed stuff, look no further than Helen Rosner’s 2024 holiday gift guide. Banana boots? Pickle-flavored toothpaste? A lobster barrette? Egg cups made of bread? Sign. Me. Up. (If you’re in a giving mood, please send me these baked potato bowls, which remind me of Claes Oldenburg’s soft-sculpted spuds.)
The Banana Everyone Loves to Hate
I was shocked that my husband wasn’t up on all of the twists and turns of the latest art world controversy, which happens to be about an overpriced banana, until I realized my IG feed is an art world bubble that does not correspond with reality. So here’s the 411 (do people still say that?) for the similarly uninformed: Back in 2019, conceptual (con) artist Maurizio Cattelan (and his gallery, Perrotin) exhibited an artwork at Art Basel Miami that consisted of a bodega banana affixed to the wall with duct tape. Titled Comedian, the banana—the actual fruit but also the right to re-stage the work—commanded a price of $120,000, which set off a shitstorm of think pieces and hot-take commentary that was, unquestionably, the point of the work. (One of my favorite articles invoked the Lucile Bluth bit about not knowing the price of a banana, which I love as a Comedian origin story.) Fast forward five years, here we are on the brink of the End Times, and the banana is in the news again because the second work in the original edition of three was on the auction block at Sotheby’s in New York. A cryptobro named Justin Sun bought it for a whopping $6.2m and then, because why not, ate it for a photo-op.
Cue dozens more think pieces, none worth linking here, that, yet again, deliver Cattelan and the market the spectacle they want. I have no hot takes myself: I’m fine with this being art, even somewhat interesting art for what it says about the completely delulu relationship with value that capital hath wrought. I wish rich people would find less icky ways to spend their money, but I feel that way all the time, and the banana stunt is just slightly dumber than say, Rolexes and Rolls Royces. Anyway, I’m only deigning to draw more attention to the banana fiasco because I do want to highlight the one story worth reading—Sarah Maslin Nir’s profile of the down-and-out fruit vendor who sold Sotheby’s the banana used for the auction. Her reporting makes the disparities inherent to the story stark and real, sketching an appalling contrast between the 74-year-old vendor, Shah Alam, who lives in a basement, barely able to provide for himself, and a mega-wealthy collector who can light millions on fire for what amounts to a joke.
To wrap it all up in a nice, neat late capitalist bow, Sun (who incidentally just made the Trumps $15m richer) offered to buy 100,000 bananas from Alam, while someone else with much less money and much greater empathy set up a GoFundMe for Alam, which closed shortly after exceeding $19,000, far more than its modest $5k goal.
More Non-Banana News
Meaty Gifts: Lauren Cohen, whose hot dog sculptures I first encountered at Frieze LA this past February, is yet again putting on a holiday exhibition that promises to be delightful. Last year she created a Holiday Charcuterie Booth; this year she’s staged Lauren’s Xmas Shop at ArtX NYC, on view from December 5 to 22, with ceramic treats that include a menorah of meat skewers, wavy bacon, creepy wedges of Brie, and the cutest little cornichons. Please go and report back!
Scavenged Cocktail Bars: I love that food-artist Dieter Roth’s son and grandsons have carried on the tradition of collecting, storing, and assembling thousands of pounds of found objects to create various iterations of the Roth Bar, an installation concept the elder Roth began incorporating into his exhibitions in the late 70s. This feature in Hauser & Wirth’s magazine documents some of their best finds.
Carl Cheng’s Avocado Pits: Carl Cheng, a conceptual artist based in Santa Monica, is the subject of a major exhibition that just closed at The Contemporary Austin and will open in a few weeks at the ICA Philadelphia. Among many other works is Nature Laboratory 3.0 (1970-2022), a greenhouse filled with shelf after shelf of carved and sculpted avocado skins that look like precious artifacts discovered on an archeological dig. I can’t wait to see this show when it comes to LA — the most appropriate home for an altar to avocados — at the conclusion of its world tour.
Beet Juice Abstraction: Enjoy this video of Hayv Kahraman talking about her use of torshi, a fermented vegetable condiment, in her solo show at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. The work is an homage to her late mother and, by her own reckoning, a collaboration with the lactic acid bacteria that break down turnips, beets, and other veggies to make what functions, in Kahraman’s hands, as an intensely colored painting medium.
Coming Soon: Speaking of art made with foodstuffs… I’m super excited for this upcoming exhibition at the Hammer, which promises prints and drawings made with “blood, smoke, Kool-Aid, coffee, scrap metal, vegetable juice, pins, dryer lint, and more.” On view starting December 21!
Thank you for reading! If you want food-art content even more often, follow Weekly Special on Instagram, where I share more tidbits (on Stories) than I write about in the newsletter.
Go enjoy some art and food IRL, and see you again soon!
This is the newsletter I needed to read. 😋 Thank you for your service.
I’m so happy to see you here.