Material Horror: Art Fair Faves 2023
Papier-mâché hot dogs 🌭 portraits made of Wonder bread 🍞 mayo-jar bongs 💨 and hairy cheese 🧀 ~ seriously, what more could anyone want in this life?
Welcome to the latest issue of Weekly Special, a food-art newsletter by Andrea Gyorody.
Hello, friends old and new!
Have you ever been to an art fair? If you haven’t… don’t. They’re almost universally terrible. Especially if you go during previews, when the fairs are mobbed with collectors and art consultants, it’s impossible to see any art. This February, I made the calculated decision to go to Frieze, Felix, and Spring/Break a day after each one opened, with the hope that I could more comfortably navigate among the plebeians, after much of the art had already been sold and dealers could be a little more relaxed. 10/10 recommend.
I also highly recommend going into the fairs with an agenda, which in my limited-budget case is not about buying but about seeking out new artists (or new-to-me artists) for future exhibitions and, delightfully, for this newsletter. When you’re walking around with that lens on, the fairs feel less overwhelming and more like a giant staging ground for a very open-ended treasure hunt.
Before we get into my Top Ten Food-Art Fair Finds, a word about each of the fairs for the unacquainted: Frieze LA is very fancy, filled mostly with blue-chip galleries selling modern and contemporary art that starts in the tens of thousands and goes up steeply from there. This year they held the fair in two giant tents at the Santa Monica Airport, with special projects sharing outdoor space with lots of food options and bougie port-a-potties. Felix, perhaps my favorite of the three, was again at the historic Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Each gallery takes over a hotel room or cabana by the pool, and some of the best things, in my experience, can be found in the bathroom, hung over the toilet or propped in the shower. Spring/Break, which fashions itself as “curator-driven,” is the scrappiest of the fairs, spread throughout an airy (but manageably sized) warehouse in Culver City. After the pretension of Frieze and Felix, Spring/Break feels like a breath of fresh (Tecate-scented) air, where everyone is chatty and young artists are thrilled just to be showing there. I always leave feeling energized, even when my visit comes at the tail-end of several days of nonstop art-ing.
Now that you’ve been briefed on this very belated but worthy content, let’s dig in!
1. Taylor Lee Nicholson ⟡ YARD SALE ⟡ Spring/Break
Taylor Lee Nicholson’s YARD SALE was the very last thing I saw during Frieze Week and it honestly made my achy feet (and guilt over time away from my kid) totally worth it. This exuberant Gesamtkunstwerk of Astroturf, papier-mâché hot dogs, and bedazzled tabloid covers was a VIBE. The installation’s rural Southern flavor came into focus as I chatted with Nicholson, who plucked from the grass a deranged ceramic figure of their grandmother pictured gleefully running over lawn snakes with a riding mower. A true character, Nicholson’s grandmother also makes an appearance in their artist statement, one of the best and most evocative I’ve ever read, which deserves quoting here in full:
I was raised on garbage. I ate hot dogs, Vienna sausages, Spam (the garbage parts of the pig). I watched a lot of Jerry Springer and The Price is Right, the spectacle and noise of this programming teaching me at an early age that poverty is loud. I also read a lot of tabloids, trash magazines that speculated who killed JonBenet Ramsey, and reveled in the sordid details of Princess Diana’s bloody death. These magazines had a fetish for things falling apart. And of course the occasional alien abduction or Wolf Boy.
As I was drinking dollar store soda and listening to Barker’s contestants scream out bids on washing machines, our house was sinking into the ground. In secret, my grandmother was stacking heaps of newspaper and tabloids in the basement to absorb as much water as she could to stave off the flood. She was keeping our white trash family afloat on a mound of molded paper pulp, slimy pink with mildew and smeared with Priscilla Presley.
I’m a Garbage Person. I embrace ‘trash’ as both subject and material. I am haunted by decay, a gothic obsession with death and with things falling apart; ghost stories. Like a poltergeist, my practice is restless and hungry. I’m not really exploring supernatural horror, but rather material horror. My work aims to expose the grotesque beneath the veneer. This ‘bad,’ anti-art, like the culture that it critiques and echoes, is bingeable junk food.
If you want some of Nicholson’s magical bingeable junk food for yourself, you can still buy individual works from YARD SALE here.
2. Milena Korolczuk ⟡ Raster ⟡ Felix
I really get a kick out of artists with incredible skill applying themselves to works that are small and anti-monumental, silly even — or at least not cloyingly self-serious. Polish-born, Oakland-based artist Milena Korolczuk, who runs Raster Gallery in Poznan, has made a series of more than a dozen photographs capturing ephemeral portraits she sculpts from the squished insides of Wonder Bread. The heads are palm-sized but detailed enough to be recognizable as famous figures such as Marina Abramović (above), Andy Warhol, Jay-Z, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and they’re always shown alongside the detritus of the sculpting process, as if the artist had simply found herself a bit bored at breakfast time.
3. Kyoko Idetsu ⟡ Nonaka-Hill ⟡ Frieze
I was lucky enough to catch Kyoko Idetsu’s New York debut at Bridget Donahue last December, for which the Tokyo-based artist had paired paintings and drawings with short texts written directly on the wall. Rendered in a cartoonish (but also very painterly) style, Idetsu’s work is diaristic, recording the relatable minutiae and emotional highs and lows of domestic life with a surreal deadpan reminiscent of Haruki Murakami’s writing. (One painting in that show, of a little girl about to leap out of the frame, was accompanied by this passage: “A child in potty training was fidgeting, looking like she had to pee, when she suddenly started running.”)
In Idetsu’s solo booth at Frieze for LA gallery Nonaka-Hill (which helped organize her New York show), many of the paintings revolved around food or the act of eating. Or digesting, as in Not Assimilate, which encompasses two male figures side-by-side, their stomachs and intestinal tracts standing in for their bodies. One stomach contains a bowl of rice, a cup of soup, and a pair of chopsticks (complete with the dinnerware, as if they’d been gulped down whole), while the other harbors a hot dog, a mess of chili fries, and a ramekin of slaw. Bodily assimilation stands in for cultural assimilation, or refusal thereof. As ever, we are what we eat. Idetsu’s own narrative description for the work puts it succinctly: "A Japanese I know living in the U.S. told me that he eats rice and miso soup every morning. Stomach cannot assimilate. But they are in the same storm.”
4. Mike Chattem ⟡ Tchotchkes For The Apocalypse ⟡ Spring/Break
You might remember Mike Chattem’s “celebration of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, lobsters, and corn” from my 2022 art fair highlights. Chattem was back at Spring/Break this year with a solo booth called Tchotchkes for the Apocalypse, in which he envisions us at the end of human existence surrounded by bottles of ranch and wacky soft pretzels, sitting in a folding chair smoking a bong crafted from an exploded Costco-sized jar of mayo. Everything’s made of acrylic, foam, and resin — plastics that could probably survive a nuclear holocaust, and already look, in Chattem’s hands, like they’ve been warped by atomic blasts or invading fungi. Kindred in many ways with Taylor Lee Nicholson’s work, these objects are equal parts grim and goofy.
5. Robert Gober ⟡ Matthew Marks ⟡ Frieze
An oldie but a goodie, Robert Gober’s 1992–93 sculpture Short-Haired Cheese brought a smile to my face in Matthew Marks’ booth at Frieze. Clocking in at just 4 x 6 ¼ x 6 ½ inches, the work is so petite (and anemic in pallor) that it could easily be missed in the flashy chaos of a fair. Like many of Gober’s beeswax sculptures, Short-Haired Cheese has the sensibility of a Catholic relic tied (however dubiously) to the body of a saint, or of a miraculous object that somehow demonstrates the existence of a higher being. Of course it’s neither of those things, unless the saint is Meret Oppenheim, whose infamous furry teacup also viscerally conjoins hair and something meant to be put in (or on) the mouth. Where Oppenheim’s teacup alludes to lesbian love-making, Gober’s cheese also seems to suggest something sexy, its wedge shape and tufts of human hair nodding, perhaps, to the pubic region. (For some Gober ASMR, peep this video of Menil conservators primping another of the artist’s hairy cheeses.)
6. Jennifer Levonian ⟡ Adams and Ollman ⟡ Felix
Video art is scarce at fairs, probably because it requires patience and often doesn’t promise a ton of revenue for dealers. All the better for the videos that are there, which offer a moment of screen-comfort in the midst of so many static paintings and sculptures. I found myself enthralled by Jennifer Levonian’s cut-paper animation Cinnamon, Thunderstorm, a four-minute video that “investigates the space between cozy domesticity and unbridled wildness. After reading a magazine article titled ‘Six Tips for When You’re Dying Inside,’ a woman holed up in her apartment follows the directive to ‘create a tranquil corner’ in her home by lighting scented candles. The different smells combine and magically bestow her with the power to shoot flames out of her eyes and shapeshift into a wolf.”1 She also compulsively makes pots of red-sauced spaghetti, leaves the noodles in piles all over her kitchen, and then eventually serves them to a flock of pigeons while the caption "Do something nice for someone else" flashes on screen. Levonian's earlier animation, Buffalo Milk Yogurt, also uses food as the backdrop for a mental health episode, wherein a young man has a nervous breakdown in a gourmet grocery store, performing spells with a bottle of POM Wonderful and soaking his hair under the veggie misters.
7. Ruben Ochoa ⟡ CLASS: C ⟡ Frieze
When Ruben Ochoa was a grad student at UC Irvine in the early 2000s, he inherited a 1985 Chevy van from his parents, who had used it to deliver homemade tortillas during his childhood. Ochoa rehabbed it into a mobile gallery called CLASS: C, exhibiting the work of artists of color at lowrider shows, flea markets, and the Orange County Museum of Art’s 2004 California Biennial. For the gallery’s 20th anniversary, and after many years of non-activity, Ochoa parked it outside of the main venue at Frieze and, in a nod to its original purpose, featured his own work: stacks of bronzed tortillas commissioned through a city grant program. The tortillas were more or less life-sized, but shown in the realistically scaled-down gallery space inside Ochoa’s van, they took on monumental proportions that would rival Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures or Joseph Beuys’s massive stacks of felt. As Jori Finkel put it in the New York Times, “the tortillas [also] resemble giant coins, touching on the idea that they represent his family’s currency.”
The installation was indeed all about food-making and -selling as livelihood. Partnering with an organization called Revolution Carts, Ochoa paired CLASS: C with several vividly colored tamale carts, aiming to feed hungry fair-goers and draw attention to the plight of the city’s many street vendors, who are constantly subject to police harassment, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, and threats of displacement, not to mention hate crimes that have seen an uptick in recent years. The installation will have helped at least one tamalero/a directly: Maestro Dobel tequila, the project’s sponsor, bought one truck to gift to a vendor at the conclusion of Frieze.
8. Jake Clark ⟡ GAVLAK ⟡ Felix
Pink’s, for the uninitiated, is a hot dog stand that attracts droves of tourists in what is now a gallery district at the southwestern edge of Hollywood. It’s been many years since I had one of their dogs, but I remember it as fairly mediocre. Far more pleasing is Jake Clark’s oversized Pink’s-themed vessel, which lit up a corner of GAVLAK’s room at Felix. The jar (one of at least two made in homage to Pink’s) comes from a larger series of ceramics painted in the themes of classic American haunts, including Russ & Daughters, Canter’s, Mr. Chow, and Bay Cities Italian Deli (IYKYK), all rendered joyously in eye-popping technicolor reminiscent of the lost art of sign painting.
9. Andrew J. Greene ⟡ The Modern Institute ⟡ Frieze
By the time I arrived at Frieze, I had already seen dozens of highlights from the fair in Instagram Stories (my addiction of choice, which also dates me, tragically, as a geriatric millennial). It seemed like everyone I knew had posted a video of Andrew J. Greene’s mesmerizing fake cherry pie, set spinning atop a silver stanchion. Once I got there IRL, I was surprised to find that the work stands at 59 ½ inches tall, which, dear reader, was basically eye level for this petite viewer. The work itself has strange, disquieting proportions, with the hilariously tall stanchion occupying the vast majority of the work’s volume, its diameter not much wider than the white plate that caps it off.
Evocatively titled Timeless Symbols (Cherry Pie), the sculpture presents an odd collision of associations, from the classic Americana of Greene’s food choice (he’s made other such stanchions featuring shrimp cocktail and an olive martini) to the protection and restriction suggested by an imposing steel stanchion. Greene’s person-sized stanchions stand alone, utterly ineffective at keeping anyone from anything — though I suppose they play up what’s truly inaccessible here: the satisfaction promised by food that advertises nothing but its own plasticky self. Greene has played with these themes before, most notably in a sculpture that places a berry pie, decorated to look like the American flag, behind bars. The work, titled Study for Pie Jail 1, is a tongue-in-cheek read of American culture — one almost as pithy as the image you get when you click the CV on Greene’s website.
10. Paul McCarthy ⟡ LAND / Hauser & Wirth / The Box ⟡ Auxiliary Event
Increasingly, Frieze Week extends beyond the fairs to encompass auxiliary projects in far-flung parts of the city. This year, Hauser & Wirth partnered with Los Angeles Nomadic Division and The Box to open up Paul McCarthy’s deranged installation WS White Snow for a few precious days of viewing. I first saw this work when it debuted at the Park Avenue Armory in New York in 2013, and had no idea that its utterly massive component parts (a deconstructed full-scale house, a small forest, and more) had been sitting, ever since, in a warehouse near downtown LA.
Frankly, the work had also been living rent-free in my head for a decade. It’s hard to describe the totality of WS White Snow. Like many of McCarthy’s other projects, it takes something that feels pure and deeply connected to childhood nostalgia — the Disney classic Snow White — and renders it utterly, irredeemably filthy. The filth is actual and moral, with the main narrative centered around what happens when the titular character, renamed White Snow, finds herself alone with the seven dwarves. (You can guess where that goes… and then imagine that it goes even further, to the far reaches of depravity.) The installation that visitors navigate is actually the set that was used to film the videos projected within it; the single-family home at the core of the installation is especially haunted by the course of filming, filled to the brim with props left exactly where they were used and cast off — props that include sex dolls, costumes, and lots and lots of food.
The kitchen (seen above) gives you a sense of the improvisatory chaos that McCarthy’s filming captured, fueled by alcohol, chocolate cake, and Wonder bread sandwiches. Bottles of ketchup in the living room allude to McCarthy’s work from the 1970s, which made prodigious use of America’s beloved condiment in viscerally disturbing performances and videos that are hard to watch and even harder to forget. As M.H. Miller has written, “It would be easy to argue that no other artist has so regularly degraded himself for public consumption.” In WS White Snow, we look through peep holes, lace curtains, and dirty windows to see the remnants of that degradation on full display. Emerging back into the daylight of Los Angeles, we have to ask ourselves: why are we so eager, so willing, to dwell in the space of disgust that McCarthy creates for us? Why did I drive 45 minutes to be grossed out?
Disgust, degradation, voyeurism, moral superiority: it’s all as irresistibly American as ketchup and cherry pie.
⟣ Honorable Mentions ⟢
🍰 Walid Raad / The Atlas Group ~ photos taken by a teenaged Raad of cakes made for Beiruti warlords and politicians (also available in NFT form!) 🍒 Kathleen Ryan ~ a giant cherry Tom Collins garnish 🥧 Wayne Thiebaud ~ cherry tarts and other delectables 🍹 Max Hooper Schneider ~ a trippy mountain landscape populated by miniature bottles 🥜 Elizabeth Atterbury ~ an exquisitely carved peanut 🍊 Penny Slinger and Polly Borland ~ just click the link, ok? 🥒 Roni Shneior ~ pickle jars, ceramics, tufts of hair 🥑 Erin Wright ~ bonsai and a scattering of avocados in the dark of night 🍓 Emily Marchand ~ an extravaganza of fruit, veg, eggs, and cigarettes
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Go enjoy some art and food IRL, and see you again soon!
“Jennifer Levonian: Cinnamon, Thunderstorm,” John Michael Kohler Arts Center, https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/jennifer-levonian-cinnamon-thunderstorm/
That CHEESE
Sounds like you saw some amazing stuff!