End-of-Sommer Smörgåsbord
A giant ham guillotine, cricket snack bars, and poetry's most iconic stone fruit
Welcome to the latest issue of Weekly Special, a food-art newsletter by Andrea Gyorody.
We have a few more days until summer officially ends, and even though I’m glad the weather has cooled a bit in LA, I’m hanging on to the spirit of summer for as long as possible. The strawberries, corn, and tomatoes I bought last week at the Santa Monica Farmers Market have certainly helped — the strawberries eaten out of hand by our fruitarian toddler, the corn turned into Mexican elote, and the tomatoes starring in juicy BLTs with prodigious mayo and crisp romaine on sourdough.
I have yet to find a good writing and publishing rhythm here, especially with the academic year having begun while we were still unpacking, and our toddler continuing to boycott all at-home naps, which used to provide a solid two hours of writing time on the weekends. So Weekly Special is coming to you more erratically than I’d like… but I feel pretty great about the fact that it’s survived a cross-country move, pandemic craziness, and general fatigue. Hello, Issue Number 15!
This week, I’ve got the latest Smörgåsbord for you: a round-up of food-art morsels foraged from the internet, ranging from books, articles, and podcasts to artworks, exhibitions, and events. If you want this kind of bite-sized content more regularly, follow Weekly Special on Instagram, where I post food-art news in Stories.
We’ll be back to a deep-dive format in the next issue, which is inspired by the epically gorgeous mushrooms I recently eyed at the market. Don’t want to miss it? Subscribe and tell a friend!
Now let’s dig in!
Your End-of-Sommer Smörgåsbord
Spring/Break Food-Art Show
Last week’s issue of Weekly Special featured still life paintings by recent grad Katie Butler, which were very recently on view at the Spring/Break Art Show in New York. If you’ve never been, Spring/Break is like the rowdy, slightly unhinged step-sister of the much bigger Armory Show, always taking place over the same weekend and giving fair-goers the opportunity to see work that’s more affordable and often a lot more interesting (IMO) than what’s on offer at the Armory. Spring/Break’s set-up in an office building lends itself to wacky, risky work, and what it sometimes lacks in polish it makes up for in weirdness.
This year’s show had more than a few food-art surprises, including Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw’s Slicing Ham, an enormous animatronic sculpture of a baked ham being repeatedly guillotined by a giant knife, priced at a cool 45K; Adriana Gallo’s bread sculptures, laid out like precious relics; and Ya Chin Chang’s exquisite little paintings of fruits and vegetables embroiled in a crime drama.
Newsletter Watch: Edible Bugs And Bread Books
🐞 A while back, Substack featured a conversation with Emilie Filou, the author behind Buzzing, a newsletter that “[chronicles] the growing use of insects as food and feed.” I admit I’m still squeamish about the idea of eating bugs (knowingly, anyway), but I’m also intrigued by the (really cute?) frontrunner in Filou’s snack bar taste test:
🍞 Stained Page News, which is dedicated to all things cookbook, published a guest post by Andrew Janjigian on one of the first commercially-printed photo books ever produced: The Book of Bread, published in London in 1903. Now an exceedingly rare volume, TBOB is filled with close-up cross-sections of various loaves, many of them printed at actual size. As Martin Parr has rightly pointed out, the book’s deadpan images eerily presage post-war Conceptual photography. But they’re also just great photos of bread that will leave even the gluten-sensitive among us craving some toast.
Cooking As Composition
My husband forwarded me this Twitter thread of composers making food and I felt duty-bound to share the joy of these photos and the dorky puns they inspired in the comments (“Did he scale it first?”) with all of you. Scroll through the whole thread for appearances by Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, and more.
Recently On View
Growing up in Las Vegas, we often drove past a Weinerschnitzel franchise and, to my memory, never once stopped there for a hot dog. Probably wise, but this monumental painting by Raul Guerrero, with errant squirts of yellow mustard that remind me of an Ed Ruscha, makes me want to change that.
Of Dominique Fung’s recent show at Jeffrey Deitch in New York, one critic wrote, “Staring may be rude, but her pictures render us powerless to do otherwise. What other option does one have when confronted by her mesmeric scenes, such as The Largest and Most Formal Meal of the Day, a delirious, wall-size rendering of a decadent feast in which a lobster lolls on a table’s edge near a suckling pig, which grins as a cleaver cuts into its flesh? Fung’s art rewards gawping.” It’s the scrim of sausages in the back — and that little plate of glistening, perfectly balanced boiled eggs — that do it for me, but yes, I’m gawping, and I can’t wait to do it in person.
Yasmin Falahat makes some of the internet’s cutest ceramic fruits. Most of her work is functional, but she currently has a whole market’s worth of decorative figs, oranges, mangoes, strawberries, and pomegranates on view in a show called Reflections of Care at Space Studios London. If you’re on the other side of the pond, catch it before it closes on September 30.
Don’t Mess With Perfection
…Unless you’re McSweeney’s and you’re riffing on William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just to Say”:
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the iceboxIt is
so much
easier
for meto tell you this
in a note
rather than
in person
That’s from a 2018 piece by Julie Vick, but it turns out McSweeney’s has published more than a few friendly jabs at Williams’s plums over the years, including: Sixteen Classic Poems That Will Change Your Life!'; This Is Just to Say That I’m Tired of Sharing an Apartment With William Carlos Williams; Poems William Carlos Williams Revised After Being Told By His Agent to “Do More Plums Content!”; William Carlos Williams Tries to Reach His Word Count; and Famous Lines of Poetry Revised for the Age of Coronavirus, which includes this absolute gem of a re-write:
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
Alexa, order more plums.
It’s embarrassing how relatable that is.
Menu By Michelangelo
Fall Semester Food-Art Syllabus
🍝 For a run-down of recent food-art, check out Art x Food: How Artists Use Food to Cook Up New Work, which looks at projects by Vaginal Davis, Eva Aguila, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Josh Kline, and G. William Webb.
🍰 In Let Them Eat Fakes, Ligaya Mishan chronicles the long history of trompe l’oeil cake design, from 16th-century banquets molded out of (probably inedible) sugar paste to contemporary desserts that trick the eye but still satisfy the stomach. I wish I had written this piece, which is unexpectedly rich in anthropological insight, but then I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of reading it.
🦀 I don’t remember how I stumbled on Imogen West-Knights’ essay Van Gogh’s Two Crabs Raised My Spirits When Nothing Else Could, but I am so glad I did. Written for a column at Elephant Magazine called “This Artwork Changed My Life,” the essay reminded me how powerful art can be on the most fundamental, formal level. Here’s a taste:
The reason I stopped in front of this one was because I liked the green background, and I liked the pair of crabs. I don’t think it’s more complicated than this, what this painting meant to me during the time I spent standing in front of it. It was pretty, it was a good, compact size, and it was detailed enough that it rewarded being looked at for a long time. I didn’t think about Van Gogh’s own crippling depression and ability to create beautiful things in spite of it. I didn’t think about the fact that the very lively-looking crabs were almost definitely dead. I didn’t have any meaningful thoughts about the painting at all.
🍎 Ruth Reichl is, without question, one of my all-time favorite memoirists. She brings charm and wit to everything she writes, and this brief reminiscence of her grad school art history days — ended, in a way, by her encounter with Cézanne’s apples — was no exception.
Mushroom Movie Night
If you haven’t seen Fantastic Fungi yet, you need to cancel all your plans and watch it on Netflix immediately. Consider it your assignment to have your mind fully blown by the magic of mushrooms before the next issue of Weekly Special drops. There will be a quiz.
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You’re the best. See you again soon!