The Food Paintings

The Only Two Arts Are Painting
And Ornamental Pastry (1)

What structures this body of work is the use of food as a material with which to paint. Across their billowy and crackled surfaces The Food Paintings exhibit a pleasure taken in the basic manual procedures of cooking, aligning them to the procedures of artistic production. Method, then, becomes about the possibilities of reworking in food the properties intrinsic to the materiality of painting. The preparatory processes associated with transforming these foodstuffs into painterly surfaces and structures lends to an idea of careful crafting and labour, while cooking adds an oppositional element of chance. The works that result provide a way of reinventing abstract painting and its conceptual and material conditions. Home-made Anzac biscuits, white bread and dough are the organic materials employed for the construction of these seemingly abstract paintings.

Artworks that make food their central subject, particularly food, as it is experienced and valued in the everyday, have mattered over the time of thinking about and making this body of work. This varied collection includes the Xenia(2) of antiquity, the still life paintings of Luis Meléndez and Wayne Thiebaud and the food based installations of Daniel Spoerri, Dieter Roth, Sonja Alhäuser and Rirkrit Tiravanija. On the home front, the paintings of Robert MacPherson and Barry Humphries have been relevant. However concrete and creatural food may be, in these artworks it gathers meaning by virtue of symbolic value as its preparation and consumption becomes ritualized and supra-rational. Food becomes important for reasons other than nutrition or pleasure.

In the Xenia and the work of Daniel Spoerri, symbolic value is in the power of food to act as a civilizing custom in the workings of social interaction. This is food as a gesture of hospitality and friendship; food as fundamentally tied to a social act, to the sharing of meals and the generation of conversation. These machinations also assure the successful outcome of the ‘happenings’ of Rirkrit Tiravanija. His serving of curry within the gallery orchestrates a participatory situation in which artist, staff and viewer comprise the social exchanges and relations that lead to the success of the ‘happening’. As a marker of identity, food can be a statement and celebration of one’s allegiance to a particular nation or region.(3) How foodways proclaim identity is a theme that runs through the paintings of Meléndez, Thiebaud, Humphries and Macpherson. Food in its prosaicness and fragility presents as innately humorous in Roth’s crumbling entities. For Alhäuser food becomes about making art. In realizing an immaterial concept of artwork their food works challenge the rules of our engagement with art, how we balance what a work requires with what we have learned about the historical or aesthetic value of art. The meanings assigned to food in these works, notions of hospitality, place, humour and fragility all lend to the poetic nature of food as it is transformed in the making of The Food Paintings.

In Biscuit Painting No 1 multitudes of biscuits gather in a collaged, rectangular wall painting. The biscuit is an Anzac biscuit though a mutating version, in hues of caramel brown from burnt to barely cooked. The biscuits are cut to form the sharp edged physical parameter that separates the space of the painting from that of its architectural location. The Anzac biscuit is a simple proclamation of identity with an ‘Australian’ foodstuff. The smell and taste undoubtedly provoke an attachment to a food habit of a rural childhood and to the smokos at which they were eaten.(4) Crunchy on the outside and chewy in the middle its eating was a kind of daily dose of bush nationalism; the biscuit revered for its association to the bloody path of antipodean adulthood that the name Anzac commemorates. Like Barry Humphries’ use of the lamington in his Cakescapes, and the Speed-Balls and Burdekin Duck of Robert Macpherson’s RedRaddle(5), Biscuit Painting No 1 is an expression and celebration of locality, and speaks of the resonance of Australian tradition and history.

Biscuit Painting No 2 aspires to a richness in colour, the biscuits stained with toxic levels of food colouring. This painting is a kind of reward for making so many ‘brown paintings’. The need for colour here - as if brown is not one - a carry over of its prevalent feature in non-representational painting. From the shrill and pure reds, greens and yellows that slowly submerged the subject in Fauvism, through colour’s essentialist requirements in abstract formalism, to the critiques of pure abstraction contained in the Day-Glo paintings of Peter Halley, colour is germane to the requirements here for re-presenting abstract painting. The even distribution of colours and compositional interest across the surface is borrowed from abstract expressionism’s ‘allover’ solution to the problem of organizing a painting. The distributive and compositional decisions are made during the almost performative experience of installing the work. The coloured painting crawls around two walls of the gallery here in order to claim its space as modernist canvas.

The Baked Paintings are, as their title suggests, cooked canvases. A thick layer of raw biscuit mixture is layered over the front and sides of the primed canvas. The entire structure, the wooden stretcher, the canvas and the biscuit dough is then placed in the oven. Each of the paintings is cooked at the same temperature but for successively longer periods of time. These times are included in the titles so that each paintings’ tone is measured and named by the minutes of their baking. In the process of cooking the dough has a tendency to ooze and crack away from the confines of the rectangular stretcher, adding accident to the careful attention of their making. From the escaping ‘paint’ of the Baked Paintings to the fleshy folds of the Day Old Bread loaves, humour filters through The Food Paintings by virtue of the questionable incongruity of foodstuff as a material for painting.

The Day Old Bread Painting is a conglomeration of multiple, slightly skew-whiff and very old loaves of bread. Like the other Food Paintings, Day Old plays out various modernist, op and minimalist cues; the grid, the sharp edge, an all over composition and repetition of the structural motif. Each motif or loaf is a deep-sided traditional wood and canvas painting stretcher covered in a layer of bread dough and placed in the oven for various lengths of time. As an atomic constituent, each loaf exists in imitation of a painterly gesture; not necessarily of gestural immediacy, rather more a deliberate kind of daub, an over-sized down stroke. With their tonal and textural variations each daub solidifies to make the painting whole.

The loaves of Day Old could hardly be described as delectable. While each loaf is immediately familiar as bread they do slowly become something strange. Exploding and withering, what was once fresh and soft, now hardened. Perhaps they are moderately disturbing in their disintegration and evocation of the sensation of food turning into flesh, reminding us that if consumed, such a substance will in turn take its place as part of your cellular make up.

Historically, bread has long been synonymous with nourishment, both physical and spiritual. The significance of bread here is not sacramental but derives from its related thematics of commensality. Commensality results in a psychological repletion that transcends the savours of the meal. Bread as a persistent food staple belongs to the culture of the table, and therefore to the poignancy of social relations grounded in its companionship.

The supports of the Plinth Paintings are smothered in a tenacious layer of dough - one biscuit, and the other bread. The work remains uncooked as if to exploit food as chance and infirm material. These paintings look to borrow something of the nebulous air of intention evident in the working methods of Dieter Roth and Daniel Spoerri, whose happenstance arrangements portray an art form that relays the tenets of accident and the collaboration of time. As in the progressions of Roth these works will not remain static. As the dough succumbs to time, it will perhaps melt, mould and decay. Positioning these paintings on plinths allows a degree of support for their inevitable accidents of dripping, as if to continue the painting down the faces of the plinth.

While the paintings assume technical innovation, they adhere to the conventions of painterly support - the wall and the wooden stretcher. This is by way of limiting the mobile nature of contemporary painting, and thereby providing an opportunity for painting to “reconsider its own structure.”(6) From the thickly collaged surfaces of The Biscuit Paintings to the deep sides of the stretchers of Day Old Bread, painting is structured around the possibility not of differentiating the two-dimensional from the three-dimensional, but rather as voluminous objects and surfaces that conflate these possibilities.(7)

Although The Food Paintings do not have all of the elements normally expected in the medium of painting, there is an intention to attend in some ways to its various conventions. The paintings are indebted to an essentially abstract format that is formal and exact. That walls of biscuits and bread ‘loaves’ can be interpreted as painting, is ascribed to the recent practices of abstraction and their tendency to collapse into other forms. Abstraction here is provisional, infused with referential motifs linked to objects that pragmatically function in the world. For example, the generically repeated white and orange linoleum stripes in Daniel Buren’s To Your Feet construct a floor that replaces a floor. In Untitled (FS), John Armleder adopts well-worn Formica kitchen and wood-panelled school tables, bringing the utilitarian material of used furniture to the frontal surface of an abstract format. As hybrid forms of image and object, painting and sculpture, such painting practices are no longer bound by the categories of figuration or abstraction, and neither by the conventional definition of the medium as paint on canvas. These are the conditions in which The Food Paintings experiment with the use of cooking as technique, and as a way of intersecting notions of abstraction, aesthetics and social meaning.

As much as they revel in the experiments of their material, these paintings hold onto the familiar physicality of food, its smell, and imagined flavours. That The Food Paintings continue to signify edibility assists them to remain engaged with the social significance of food. This is the example of the magnificent cake paintings of Wayne Thiebaud in which he balances his enthusiasm for the dazzling contents of the bakery counter with his disciplined and painterly approach to its representation.

Within The Food Paintings we see food, and the activities of its eating, as consumed with significance beyond either the sense-pleasure it results in, or the nutritional sustenance it provides. The paintings extend from a valuing of the domestic routines of cooking and the gathering role this food plays in the events of everyday shared eating. In the Day Old Bread Painting we are reminded that bread as a food staple belongs to the culture of the table and to the ‘fraternity of the shared meal’.(8) The Anzac biscuit is tied to the tea and coffee routines of our smokos that so gratefully break up our days. What The Food Paintings represent is an attempt to uphold the potential for social exchange provided by our foodways, foodways as inelaborate as the sharing of a cup of tea and biscuits or the sharing of a meal.

Pip Haydon