Catfish As Ancestral Spirits
Deeply moving weavings by Diedrick Brackens, plus quick bites to go, with everything from plastic Japanese food to an academic volume on experimental dining
Welcome to the latest issue of Weekly Special, a food-art newsletter by Andrea Gyorody.
Often I write the intro to this newsletter in a place very different (literally and figuratively) from wherever I wrote the rest of the issue. Case in point: I’m writing these words from a hotel room in New York, where I’m attending the annual art museum curator conference and running around trying to see and eat ALL.THE.THINGS. (Standouts so far: the gorgeously designed Basquiat show organized by his family and the sizzling lamb belly at Đi Ăn Đi.) The rest of the newsletter, by contrast, was written mostly in LA from my favorite table at Go Get ‘Em Tiger, the coffee shop I frequent every Sunday morning to squeeze in some writing before the farmers market. I sit outside with a plate of soft-scrambled eggs and avocado and peck at my keyboard while I watch a steady stream of millennials amble past with squirmy babies and bags of organic produce.
I like my routines, but I also really like mixing it up, and that’s exactly what I’m doing with Weekly Special, starting with this issue. I’m experimenting with different ways of organizing content and sharing more of the food-art morsels I’ve been collecting. My goal is to be able to publish more often so I don’t have to rename this newsletter “Monthly Special,” which doesn’t have quite the same ring.
Anyway, I hope you like what I’ve plated up! If you have feedback, I’d love to hear it. You can write it in a comment or hit reply to send it to me directly.
Before we dig in, a quick heads-up that the first section of this issue, on weavings by Diedrick Brackens, contains mentions of drowning and police violence. Skip to the next section (“The Sampler”) if that’s not something you want to read right now.
This Week’s Special: Diedrick Brackens @ Craft Contemporary
Diedrick Brackens’ current solo show, heaven is a muddy riverbed, is a slow-burning revelation. Tucked into a low-ceilinged gallery at Craft Contemporary, the exhibition features a series of Brackens’ weavings and several of his poems, all revolving around the image of the catfish. When you enter, the first work you encounter is all caught up and flow (2018), a small weaving of a catfish curled on a dinner plate, fork and knife set and ready. Teal, lilac, navy, and electric yellow dominate, suggesting murky water and moss-covered stones, linking the catfish on the plate to the river where it once swam.
As the wall text and poems make explicit, Brackens’ catfish series alludes to the drowning of three young Black men — Steven Booker, Carl Baker, and Anthony Freeman — in Lake Mexia, Texas, in 1981. In the middle of Mexia’s legendary annual Juneteenth celebration, the three men had been taken into police custody for marijuana possession and loaded, in the dark of night, onto a boat that couldn’t hold their weight. When the boat capsized, all three officers made it to safety while Booker, Baker, and Freeman (two of whom were excellent swimmers) did not.
A court of inquiry was opened, with conflicting testimony about whether the men had been handcuffed when they boarded the boat. The lawyer leading the inquest determined that the officers had behaved with “rampant incompetence” and “gross negligence” but lacked racist intent. A jury later found the officers not guilty of criminal negligence and all walked free, an outcome that traumatized the entire community all over again.
Brackens was born in Mexia eight years later. His weavings function as a memorial to Booker, Baker, and Freeman — the only memorial, that is, as nothing has ever been erected for them in Mexia, though the town’s 2021 Juneteenth celebration (much diminished from its former glory) honored their memory.
This memorial is a fitting one, quiet in some places and bold in others, rendered in textile — a medium far more precarious than bronze or marble. Brackens represents human and fish forms in stark black silhouettes reminiscent of Matisse’s dancers, giving them an allegorical charge. That charge grows stronger and more pointed when one considers the work is primarily made of hand-dyed cotton, a material inextricably bound to the history of slavery and Jim Crow in the American South.
Brackens’ poems underscore the meditative and spiritual quality of his weavings. In “they have grown gills,” a poem dedicated to Booker, Baker, and Freeman, the narrator lies down in the dried bed of a lake. “the fish return to me first,” they say, and soon, “the catfish, sacred here, multiply in lake me. / the whiskered faithful sing in a one word language. / water, womb, god, gather, breathe, brother, / hunt and heartbeat are all the same.” The lake bears the memory of the past, offering it up to anyone willing to sit in silence long enough for the spirits to speak. The poem ends with these lines, which aptly describe the world Brackens conjures in his textiles:
sometimes, i dream of boys. they fall and flap, breaking open my glassy eye. they dance down, deep into my belly where i can’t cry them out. i try and fill their chests with, "breathe! god! brother!" i don’t know the words for save or swim. my catfish wreathe them—suits of clouds.
In the catalogue that accompanies the show, TK Smith writes, “The catfish as chosen symbol opens the imaginative space to conceive of an ancient relational kinship between Black people and the catfish. As Black people migrate and are displaced across the world, they can maintain the relationship to their ancestors simply by casting a line.”
Casting a line is ultimately a way of catching a meal, one indelibly associated with Black life in the American South. What does it mean to ingest, to bring into one’s body, the flesh of a creature that functions as a symbol of diasporic kinship and, in the case of Brackens’ poems, also as an avatar for the restless spirits of the dead? Consuming something is a form of intimacy and closeness; it becomes a part of you, inextricable. There are deep religious connections here — Holy Communion, for one, which Catholics believe becomes the literal body and blood of Christ. Other religions involve similar forms of communing through consuming: Kamaleeh Janan Rasheed has written, for example, about the practice of drinking the ink used to write verses from the Qur’an, while many other traditions rely on the ingestion of potions and elixirs to produce states of awareness, enlightenment, or possession.
Possession is indeed what Brackens describes in both his poems and his weavings. His catfish dance deep into the bellies of his human subjects, possessing them in ways that console and unsettle.
heaven is a muddy riverbed was on view at Craft Contemporary (5814 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles) from Jan. 30 – May 8, 2022.
The Sampler
This new section of the newsletter is like a mini-version of past Smörgåsbord issues: a little bit of everything, perfect for nibbling (or half-awake scrolling).
A digital humanities project I can get behind: a Twitter account run by a bot that puts out images from the pomological watercolor collection in the USDA’s agricultural library. (h/t the Good Food newsletter, source of so many good things indeed)
In more fruit news, artist Sam Van Aken has embarked on an ambitious crowd-funded project to create a public orchard on Governors Island comprised of 102 hybrid fruit trees. According to Governors Island Arts, “The Open Orchard will act as a living archive for antique and heirloom fruit varieties that were grown in and around New York City in the past 400 years but have mostly disappeared due to climate change and the industrialization of agriculture.” For a very charming, very New Yorker take, enjoy this profile of Van Aken, complete with outfit descriptions and light-hearted sarcasm.
When I first visited Japan in 2006, I was super excited to make a stop on Tokyo’s Kappabashi Dogugai Street, where numerous shops sell Sampuru, the plastic food nearly ubiquitous in restaurant displays all over Tokyo and beyond. I bought just a few modest creations — a tamago magnet and an ikura keychain, if memory serves — but spent hours examining elaborate lifelike recreations of ramen, curry, and unagi over rice, not to mention every imaginable variation on the ice cream sundae. If a trip to Japan is not on the horizon, you can get your fill of Sampuru courtesy of the New York Times, with text by Tejal Rao and sumptuous photos by Kyoko Hamada.
Speaking of fakery as high art… If you haven’t already blazed through the Netflix reality competition show Is It Cake?, I don’t know what you’ve been doing with your life. (More important things, you say? Pssshh.) The show is everyone’s favorite TikTok / Instagram Reels phenom stretched into eight episodes of trompe l’oeil jaw-droppers, some more convincing than others. Turns out there’s very little that fondant, edible spray paint, and stage lighting can’t mimic, which is both awesome and terrifying.
😜 SCHOLAR PAUL GEARY ON EXPERIMENTAL DINING
Theatricality is in the air, apparently, because no sooner had I finished Is it Cake? than my phone announced the arrival of the latest New Books in Art podcast: a conversation with performance scholar Paul Geary, author of the new book Experimental Dining: Performance, Experience and Ideology in Contemporary Creative Restaurants. It’s as heady as it sounds, but — having eaten some mind-blowing avant-garde meals myself — I found Geary’s analysis of the techniques and presentation of today’s haute cuisine to be quite insightful. Also: major props to anyone who builds a book project around once-in-a-lifetime meals. Just look at this gorgeousness from Alinea:
Just One More Bite…
My cooking escapades of late have been rather boring, so I’m leaving you with a tasty preview of the next issue, which will be a quick-and-dirty rundown of all the food-art I saw (and some of the food I ate) on my recent whirlwind trip to New York.
Despite having spent many weeks and months in New York over the past two decades, I had never been to the Noguchi Museum and finally took a free hour to correct that unbelievable wrong.
After ogling loads of gorgeous carved stone sculptures and taking an embarrassing number of selfies in the garden, I ambled into the museum shop and found, amidst shelves of beautiful light fixtures I can’t afford, a little display of marzipan fruit, hand-crafted at Fortunato Brothers in Brooklyn.
The display was accompanied by a series of notes nodding to Noguchi’s interest in an expanded notion of sculpture, and to the origins of marzipan as a trompe l’oeil gambit expertly played by a group of nuns. Marzipan as sculpture also reminded me of Daniel Giordano’s marzipan workshops… but I’ll save my lovely meet-up with Daniel for the next issue. For now, feast your eyes on these sweet strawberries I haven’t yet had the heart to eat.
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Go enjoy some art and food IRL, and see you again soon!