Fall Smörgåsbord, 2022 Edition
Sexy oysters, food exhibitions in NYC, AI-generated food-art, and pawpaw ice cream 🍦
Welcome to the latest issue of Weekly Special, a food-art newsletter by Andrea Gyorody.
Hello! It’s been a minute. Since I last landed in your inbox, I’ve survived a big exhibition install, our first sort-of-post-pandemic family vacation, a heat wave sans central air, a stomach bug, an opening that we quasi-self-catered, an East Coast work trip, and the High Holy Days. And I still woke up today excited to finally wrap up this Fall Smörgåsbord to share with you!
I debuted the Smörgåsbord last year after I had accumulated so many fun tidbits that I’d never be able to write about in depth but didn’t want to see languish in my Notes app. I’m fond of this quick-and-dirty format, which I’ve started to incorporate into other editions of Weekly Special under the header “The Sampler.” The Smörgåsbord is an amped-up “Sampler,” more like a back-to-school snack pack from Costco (fun-sized Cheetos are life) than a shared appetizer. I hope at least one of these items will send you down a rabbit hole of internet delight… from which you will emerge and forward this to all of your besties. TIA!
Let’s dig in, friends.
Fall Smörgåsbord, 2022 Edition!
🍝 Binging “The Bear”
I devoured all of “The Bear” — about a young chef called home to his family’s gritty sandwich shop in Chicago after his brother’s suicide — in two sittings. The show has inspired a very loud chorus of critical praise and I honestly don’t have anything smart to add to reviews that highlight the show’s depiction of toxic masculinity in restaurant culture, or its raw treatment of grief and addiction. All I can say is that I hope we see more of Marcus, played by Lionel Boyce, in season two; his fermentation experiments and quest for the perfect donut offer comic relief and a needed break from the pressure-cooker of The Bear’s otherwise violently chaotic kitchen, and I desperately want to know what flavor that winning donut was.
Next on my watch list: the recently remastered feminist classic “Daisies,” which features an epic food fight.
👌 Sexy Oysters
Fawn Rogers makes sexy paintings of oysters. Her show at Wilding Cran Gallery featured extreme closeups of fingers prying open these luscious bivalves in a way that emphasizes their fleshiness. Pearls abound, layering on the innuendo. The lewdness of her paintings reminds of me Stephanie Sarley’s very NSFW IG, wherein she posts videos of naughty things she’s done with (and to) fruit. Both Rogers and Sarley make work that radicalizes pleasure and upends our expectations about pornography and obscenity — and I dare you to look the same way at an oyster or a peach again.
🥗 Conserving Food-Art (and Other Biological Materials)
The physical, ethical, and philosophical challenges of conserving contemporary art made with non-traditional, often organic materials, has been a subject of increasing interest among curators, conservators, and art historians. (That includes me; I’ve written about such issues in the work of Hannah Wilke here.) For my fellow art nerds (and even for some of you brave civilians!), I highly recommend the Getty’s recently released digital publication Living Matter, which contains, among other delights, these essays:
Can We Use the Concept of Programmed Obsolescence to Identify and Resolve Conservation Issues on Eat Art Installations? by Claudia María Coronado García
The Eternal Metabolic Network: Fluxus, Food, and Ecofeminism by my lovely colleague Natilee Harren, whose writing appears in the first issue of Weekly Special!
The Life-Death Movement of Fruits, Tubers, and Vegetables in Nydia Negromonte’s POSTA by Magali Melleu Sehn
Killing with Kindness? The Challenges of Conservation and Access for Living Matter by Marcia Reed
A Crumb(ling) Display: Conserving Bread in the Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb by Mirta Pavić, Jasna Jablan, Ivana Bačić, and Harald Fitzek
Murmelte Instrumente: The Body, Like a Hand to an Instrument — all about work made with and about breast milk — by my dear artist friend Kelly Kleinschrodt
🌭 Two Exhibitions of Food-Art on View in New York
Nafas @ The Invisible Dog Center, Brooklyn, NY — closing Oct 15
Curated by Invisible Dog director Lucien Zayan, this exhibition brings together 36 artists who work with food AND stages a five-week-long festival of events. There are still three events to go, including a dinner celebrating the cookbook Leaked Recipes (which I wrote about here) and a concert called Fruit Scores, by Marisa Tornello.
Food in New York: Bigger Than the Plate @ Museum of the City of New York, NY — on view through September 30, 2023
This exhibition, which debuted at the V&A in London, is “anchored around issues of sustainability, labor justice, and equitable access to food, [exploring] the ways in which artists and designers are developing solutions to global and local challenges.” The spectacular centerpiece of the show is Mary Mattingly’s Biosphere, which explores the promise of saline agriculture. I love that the show has such an extended run, allowing for Mattingly’s biosphere to truly grow into fruition, rather than function merely as the gallery-bound extension of an idea being tested elsewhere.
PLUS: On the other side of the country, there’s a charming show up in Portland, Oregon, on view through December 3, celebrating food in the collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his family foundation, with lots of kid-friendly programs.
💻 The Gift That Keeps On Giving
A while back, I subscribed to emails from Atlas Obscura and their food-based subsidiary Gastro Obscura, and I always find something weird and worthwhile in their digests. Here are a few of my favorite finds:
🍮 When Computers Make Food-Art
Not long after the premiere of AI software DALL-E, I started seeing images of food that the software had generated — almost always of a terrifying variety (see above) — and couldn’t help but be intrigued.
For the uninitiated, DALL-E (now operating in an updated version called DALL-E 2) is a form of artificial intelligence that can create images based on descriptions entered in natural language. The idea is to imagine something very specific that doesn’t already exist as an image, and ask DALL-E to make it for you. There are all sorts of legal and ethical complications raised by software like this, from fair use questions to the much more concerning potential for very sophisticated deepfakes… but artists with less insidious motives are having fun with all the weird, wacky, and magical images DALL-E is capable of producing.
One of the most interesting qualities of the software, in fact, is that DALL-E doesn’t just give you one image in response to your text input — it spits out multiple images, all different AI responses that can then be tweaked further. If you visit the DALL-E 2 website right now, you can see examples of the process in action by toggling between various descriptors that demonstrate how different inputs can generate radically diverse images, even given the same base idea, in this case a humble and potentially very boring bowl of soup.
Many more folks are experimenting with DALL-E, including W. David Marx and Roni Xu, who used DALL-E to generate imagery of the absurd cuisine from F. T. Marinetti’s 1932 Futurist Cookbook; and artist Meech Boakye, who participated in DALL-E’s “Artist Onboarding Program” earlier this year, and talked to MOLD about how the software was strangely better at generating “paintings” than “photographic images” of food.
Importantly: there weren’t any scare quotes around those terms in the story.
Now, I’m not a Luddite by any means, but this is where I say a big YIKES. I told myself I was gonna focus on the fun of DALL-E in this post, but the MOLD story left me disturbed. As a curator and art historian, I’m not ready for a universe in which I might see, on Instagram or elsewhere, what I assume to be a digital photograph of a real painting, only to learn that it’s actually an AI-generated image meant to mimic the aesthetics of painting with no relation to any physical object. (Unsavvy collectors WILL be burned by this in the not-too-distant future, if they haven’t been already.) Working with undergrads who are digital natives through and through, it’s already a struggle to get them to think critically about what they see on the internet, and to exercise due diligence to make sure that what they’re seeing hasn’t been manipulated in ways that are deceitful. In the MOLD story, Boakye also makes the well-supported argument that AI-generated images tend to reinforce racial and gender biases — yet another way in which such technology will pose challenges in teaching and more broadly. (Soon available in video!)
The quality of many of the DALL-E images I’ve seen is spectacular, and it’s not a question of if but how often people will be fooled as such images circulate in greater numbers. We are going to need a new language, and robust education around it, to tease the real from the simulated, for as long as that distinction still matters.
Just One More Bite…
One of my humble food dreams came true last weekend when I finally got a taste of pawpaw, a fruit native to the U.S. that grows wildly, has a very short season in early fall, and, magically for something native to a place like Ohio, tastes tropical. I learned about pawpaws a few years ago when I was living in Cleveland, but Covid got in the way of trying them before we moved back to LA. So I was beyond jazzed to realize that I’d be visiting NE Ohio during pawpaw season, and asked friends there to keep an eye out. Thanks to Lindsay Fullerton, I got to enjoy some pawpaw in ice cream form at my favorite spot, Mason’s Creamery, where near-frozen toes (I’m a wimp after a year in SoCal) were a small price to pay for an afternoon of wish fulfillment.
If you’re in pawpaw country — which extends from the Great Lakes all the way down to the Florida panhandle — don’t sleep on them!
Thank you for reading! Take a second to “like” this post if you enjoyed it, and a few more seconds to forward this email to a friend. If you want food-art content even more often, follow Weekly Special on Instagram, where I share many more tidbits than I write about in the newsletter.
Go enjoy some art and food IRL, and see you again soon!
I was just at the invisible dog show and was telling someone about your newsletter 💓