Small Bites
A few little somethings to chew on, ranging from a soy sauce-producing art-machine to a documentary about competitive table-setting
Welcome to the latest issue of Weekly Special, a food-art newsletter by Andrea Gyorody.
When I first batted around the idea of writing this newsletter, at least one friend asked, is there really that much food-art out there? Like, enough to sustain a long-term project? YES, I said. There’s a lot already, and it just keeps coming.
Ten months later, I’m glad to confirm that my confidence wasn’t misplaced. It really is remarkable just how many artists working today are using food as fodder, in ways silly and whimsical, challenging and dead serious.
I’ve seen so many fabulous food-art exhibitions in recent months that I’ve had to divide them over two issues of Weekly Special — and by the time that second issue lands in your inbox, there will undoubtedly be more shows on the horizon. I feel like I’m playing a losing game of food-art whack-a-mole. And I couldn’t be more delighted.
This week, I’ve got a handful of bite-sized reviews for you, of three LA exhibitions that all link food to cultural history and memory, and seek to give form to stories and traditions that are often invisible to anyone who isn’t living them. At the end, I’ve got a palate cleanser, something charmingly bizarre that you can enjoy from the comfort of home.
Small Bites, Round One
Haena Yoo @ Murmurs
Last December I stopped by Murmurs, a queer-owned café, shop, gathering space, and gallery in downtown LA, to see Haena Yoo’s Oriental Sauce Factory, a complex installation that plays, in myriad ways, with fermented soybeans.
Yoo uses soybeans — in conjunction with a dizzying list of ingredients straight from Chinese medicine — to create sculptural works and stage alchemical processes, carried out over the course of the show by several “machines.” The installation alludes to anti-Asian violence, in part through newspaper headlines that peek out from the wall-mounted soybean blocks, and to capitalism-fueled Orientalism, spoofed in a video that plays from a monitor encased by cardboard boxes.
As Yoo told X-TRA, “I see myself as making a kind of operating system with found materials, and all of this organic material and machinery, messiness and accumulation are reflective of society.” The Oriental Sauce Factory left me visually (and conceptually) overwhelmed, twitching my nose at the faint hints of fermentation and decay I couldn’t totally identify — a sensation resonant with the conditions of contemporary existence in this messy, overstimulating, can’t-extricate-ourselves-from-all-things-bad world.
Blondell Cummings @ Art + Practice
If I thought I was overwhelmed by Haena Yoo’s work, I was not prepared for the video extravaganza that was Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures, organized by the Getty Research Institute as part of their African American Art History Initiative. Cummings, who died in 2015, was a groundbreaking modern dancer and choreographer. A founding member of Meredith Monk’s company The House, Cummings bridged Black dance traditions and the (overwhelmingly white) avant-garde dance scene in New York. Her scores translate rituals and gestures of the everyday into the language of dance to create space for representation of and reflection on quotidian conditions, from the demands of keeping a home to the tribulations of menopause.
The exhibition at Art + Practice was a barrage of images, reflecting Cummings’ notion of dance as “moving pictures” and her dedication to the interdisciplinary art of capturing dance on film. The show made manifest the incredible breadth of her contributions, and though I had qualms with the sheer quantity of video (so. many. screens!) and the less-than-ideal audio situation, that didn’t dampen my enjoyment of the grainy documentation of Cummings’ best known dance, called Chicken Soup.
Set to a melancholic soundtrack by Monk, Brian Eno, and Colin Walcott, with a voiceover that includes poetry by Pat Steir, a short story by Grace Paley, and a recipe from The Settlement Cook Book (a landmark in Jewish cookery), Chicken Soup sees Cummings moving through the exaggerated motions of preparing and serving soup cooked in a heavy cast-iron pan that she swings around with verve. The speed and repetition of Cummings’ gestures create a stop-action effect (which you can see in this excerpt online), subtly conjuring the feel of an old silent film. Every movement in Chicken Soup conjures that sense of something coming to us from the past in sputtering fits and starts — not unlike family history, or a memory, passed down, of how one’s great-grandmother used to make a bowl of soul-filling soup that would heal any ailment.
Narsiso Martinez @ Charlie James Gallery
Living in California means I have year-round access to beautiful produce, but much of it comes at a cost that’s hard to contend with. In the United States, at least half of all so-called “crop hands” — the people who pick our strawberries and heads of broccoli — are undocumented migrant laborers, operating in work environments plagued by unethical conditions and abuse. The problems with this fraught system came to the fore in a new and urgent way during the pandemic, as such laborers were designated “essential workers,” a status that acknowledged their critical importance but gave no guarantees against the constant threat of deportation.
Narsiso Martinez’s second solo show with Charlie James Gallery, Tender Leaves, honors the labor of immigrant farmworkers with carefully rendered portraits on produce boxes, a simple (maybe even obvious) conjunction that I found touching and powerful.
Martinez, who was born in Oaxaca and came to the US at age 20, worked nine seasons in the fields of Eastern Washington to fund his own BFA and MFA degrees. His closeness to his subjects comes through in their piercing gazes, some of which project anxiety while others warmly invite us in. Martinez deftly situates himself in art history, nodding to precedents steeped in political activism (Mexican muralism, Social Realism) but also to Pop and its ambivalent approach to objects and scenes of the everyday. (I couldn’t help but see Warhol’s banana in the work on the right below, yet the two could not be more divergent in their politics.)
Many of Martinez’s cardboard boxes bear the names of recognizable brands, from Dole to Trader Joe’s, that I’d bet most of us have bought and consumed without nary a thought about how the produce got from the field to the box to the store to our kitchen tables. The tenderness of Martinez’s portraits belies their pointedness; the gazes of his subjects ensnare us, much as we are ensnared in an industrial agricultural system of convenience that does not incentivize ethical treatment and offers few ways out.
For Further Viewing
It feels unkind to share a bunch of exhibitions, now closed, that most of my readers didn’t get to see, so here’s something anyone can enjoy: a sweet, funny, occasionally offensive feature-length documentary on competitive tablescaping.
Filmed largely in the suburbs of southern California, Set! follows a handful of tablescapers as they prepare for battle at the Orange County Fair — a battle that consists of arranging a table for an imaginary meal, where the meal is basically irrelevant because there’s barely enough room for plates and silverware with all of the handmade, themed decor crowding the table. Like other documentaries on niche hobbies that attract obsessive aficionados who barely tolerate one another, Set! is rife with insults, back-handed compliments, and snarky commentary, in this case about such deeply important topics as the placement of wine glasses and soup spoons.
Mere minutes into Set!, I found myself googling the dates of the next county fair so I could fulfill my fried butter fantasies and then, before passing out on a haystack, experience some of these zany tablescapes IRL. Where else could I hope to encounter nostalgic farmhouse decor just a few feet away from a table dripping in ammunition and bloody taxidermied animals, as a valiant (if extremely misguided) critique of poaching in Africa?
Now that I’ve hyped you up, note that Set! is exclusively on Discovery+, but you can sign up for a free trial. (I had trouble getting the app to work on my Apple TV, so I instead signed up for a trial on Amazon Prime, which was annoying but worth the effort to watch this bananas documentary.) My only regret is that I didn’t have chili dogs to accompany my viewing — you’ll know why when you watch.
Thank you for reading!
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