We are sausage-less, and bereft.

Artists Peter Fischli (left) and David Weiss (right).

Conceptual artist David Weiss, of Swiss duo Fischli/Weiss, has passed away, two months shy of his 66th birthday.

 R.I.P.

The film, Der Lauf Der Dinge (The Way Things Are), tends to be cited as their representative work — but me, I love their early series, The Sausage Photographs, from 1979 (below).

No more Würste.

Fashion Show, from The Sausage Photographs (1979).

In the Mountains, from The Sausage Photographs (1979).

The Accident, from The Sausage Photographs (1979).

In the Carpet Shop, from The Sausage Photographs (1979).

Fire of Ulster, from The Sausage Photographs (1979).

Let them eat (bruise) cake.

Artwork of the day: NY-based culinary artist Victoria Yee-Howe‘s bruise cakes (above).

Created during the artist’s stint in residence at Seattle’s Arabica Lounge, these er, ecchymosis-inspired confections were created, according to a write-up on Edible Geography, by “photo transfers (images printed on rice paper with edible ink) of bruises caused by six past lovers, mining her photographic archive to share her skin’s ephemeral records of damage in equally fleeting form.”

Indeed. The slippage here between the abused female body (as a result of voluntary sexual shenanigans or otherwise), and the undeniably sexual, possessive act of oral consumption (what could be more .. irreversible an act of ownership ?), is too salient to be missed.

A piece on the Art21 blog mentions that Yee-Howe is also the founder of the Chinatown Cake Club (CCC), a private dessert club based out of an apartment in Manhattan’s C-Town, where one can “eat and socialize, watch screened movies, read the paper, or “simply sit in the corner and eat cake until you puke.” Under the auspices of the CCC, Yee-Howe has also created what she calls the Artist Tribute Series, a range of special, dedicated cakes, one of the more striking of which (below) featured David Wojnarowicz’s Untitled (Face in Dirt) of 1990. A guest, who runs the Obsessive Sweets blog, described it as “a devil’s food cake filled with homemade citrus curd, chocolate mousse and covered in vanilla bean frosting.”

YUM.

Unless otherwise stated, all images in this post from the artist’s personal site.

Image courtesy of Obsessive Sweets.

[Review] “Let’s Chat”, Amanda Heng

Ok, I was planning on writing a thorough review of the Amanda Heng show at 8Q – which closed yesterday – but it was going nowhere. I started off just penning a critique of her Let’s Chat piece, and, three pages later, still wasn’t done.

Oy.

This will have to be it.

Heng is a local pioneer, one of the first female artists, beginning in the late ’80s, to brave the then little-charted waters of conceptual and performance art in Singapore. (So we aren’t New York.) While they’re considered seminal figures by the local arts community, folks like her and Tang Da Wu and Cheo Chai Hiang and The Artists Village crowd remain, even today, on the peripheries of official approbation and wider recognition, a historical footnote to the supposed trailblazing artistic experiments of the Nanyang School painters – as if visual art hereabouts hasn’t progressed since then ..

So anyways, giving her the Cultural Medallion last year was a bold gesture, the upshot of which is the present exhibition, Amanda Heng: Speak to Me, Walk With Me, her biggest solo show yet.

This has to be said though: some artists just aren’t very museum-friendly.

Spotted at the 8Q show was the latest enactment of Let’s Chat (above). Set around the dim, cavernous gallery were a number of tables, and sitting on each was a small pile of beansprouts – or towgay in the local lingo – along with several chairs. On the walls were pictures of previous stagings of the work, showing visitors enjoying a light-hearted moment or two over the shared experience of towgay-plucking. Refreshments were even provided; a small pantry with cups, tea bags and hot water stood in one corner of the room.

If the set-up – or the photographs on the walls – didn’t immediately suggest how the piece should be approached, then the label made no bones about it:

The work recreates the familiar experience of preparing bean sprouts for a meal, a customary practice in Asian households. This traditional chore is one that many homemakers and children would recall, as conversations are exchanged during the course of this domestic task. By bringing this activity to the public domain in locations like galleries or shopping arcades, Heng encourages audiences to participate and recall the communal spirit of sharing and conversing, which may have been forgotten, due to the fast pace of contemporary life.

Let’s Chat is both an installation and a social space facilitated by the artist for engaging audiences in the public discussion on issues related to the art and everyday life.

Fair enough. It’s all here: the tables and chairs; a ready supply of sprouts; drinks; even photographic documentation of how the work allows its audience to “participate and recall the communal spirit of sharing and conversing.”

Well, except for the most essential ingredient really: an audience willing to participate.

I visited the exhibition twice. On neither occasion was I alone in the gallery for any significant amount of time: there were always a handful of other individuals milling about, and not once did I witness anyone sitting down at the table and going at it, or availing themselves of the refreshments.

Actually interacting with the work, in other words.

To be fair, we’re talking weekday afternoons here, and perhaps the situation is different with the weekend crowd; nonetheless, Let’s Chat, in the present instance, simply comes across as being more form than function. In my case at least, the reason for the reticence was clear: despite the wall text and the pictures, I wasn’t aware that audience participation was allowed, or in any sense encouraged. Who would, in this context ? – The darkened, silent space, almost forbiddingly reverent in its evocation of the sacred, not unlike a sanctum sanctorum where one comes to worship (the gods of Asian food preparation perhaps?); the neat little piles of produce positioned exactly in the centre of each tabletop, sans any of the necessary, makeshift apparatus one would need for the task of plucking towgay; the literally untouched cups sitting upturned on their individual saucers, looking for all the world like they were there to contribute to a sense of verisimilitude, rather than being actually utilitarian in purpose. To transgress that wall of ordered, self-contained aloofness without explicit permission seemed pretty unthinkable.

Growing up, I’ve had a fair share of beansprouts pass through my fingers, so it’s from a position of authoritative experience that I say: no one plucks towgay like this. If it doesn’t happen in a public area – say, a void deck, or at a kopitiam over a cuppa with friends, as some housewives prefer to do – then it takes place in a kitchen, surrounded by the smells and the bustle of cooking in progress, while some bossy female relative higher up on the familial hierarchy inevitably tells you to speed it up – or “Kin lah!” The tweaked-off ends generally go into a plastic bag or onto a spread-out sheet of newspaper placed within easy reach, all the better to simply transfer into the bin with a single scoop and toss after one is done; it doesn’t happen on pristine surfaces like the ones at 8Q, with the sprouts arranged to maximum aesthetic effect, the pile in the centre of the table and a token few strands, already plucked, laid down next to it, calling to mind perhaps the (sometimes contrived) Japanese sense of mono no aware. The entire process of towgay preparation – like so much of Chinese cooking – is a smorgasbord of sensory assaults and gestural reiterations, from the tender crispness of the sprouts in one’s hands, to the repeated act of pressing down with the thumb on the index finger to separate tip from sprout, to the buzz and hum of dinnertime kitchen activity in the background, to the heat and fumes and aroma of food being fried up in the wok, teasing the palate with the promise of gustatory gratification in the very, very near future … Nothing could be further from that memory of multi-sensorial engagement than the empty, spotless tables of detached-looking produce, sitting around seemingly untouched in the gloomy hush of the gallery, lacking the usual accompaniments – like plastic bags and newspaper and the stray end or two that escaped those receptacles – that signal the mess and the embodied physicality of the process.

It was all so tidy, and unfamiliar.

Cultural anthropologist Allen Feldman relates the following anecdote about his participation in a conference on violence in 1992. A Croatian academic had also been invited to speak:

… the local ethnologists and historians attending the meeting [the conference was held in Sweden] had difficulty conceptualizing political violence as a routinized element of everyday life; a concept without which it is impossible to grasp what has been happening in Northern Ireland for the last two decades, and more recently in ex-Yugoslavia. In discussion it became clear that for most of the scholars violence, like the geographies it had disordered, occupied the verges of civilizational process and European modernity ……

This tacit ghettoization was momentarily shaken as the Croatian folklorist delivered a paper punctuated, in the white space between her words, by barely concealed emotional disorder approaching public mourning. This was not her after-shock from living in a war zone, nor the catharsis of having momentarily exited. Rather her distress exposed the frustration, risk and uncertainty of communicating local terror to an audience at a historical and experiential remove. I was thrown back to the enforced spaces of silent fear I had encountered, doing fieldwork in Belfast, among those who were intimate with the regularity of random violence and who could not trust me with this intimacy of which, at that time, I had no bodily experience. How does one transport the experience of everyday terror that is almost inexpressible outside the sensory encompassment of violence ? The Croatian did not speak explicitly of the sensory alterity she had made tangible in that conference room, rather it was borne in her body and voice. Incarnate sensory difference was the gulf where explicit theoretical communication hesitated. The Croatian’s tensions was about speaking, without guarantee of perceptual connection, to an audience who inhaled different cultural givens, touched different material realities, and who did not have to sniff out imminent death from once familiar surrounds.

(“On Cultural Anaesthesia”, Allen Feldman, in C. Nadia Seremetakis, ed., The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity.)

The point of the rather lengthy anecdote is this: speaking across sensorial and material differentials is a tricky business. While war, violence and death are far more, shall we say, pressing issues than food preparation, the unexpected cognitive shock registered by Feldman as a result of his fellow speaker’s very personal, very visceral, very vivid disruption of the mediated matrices structuring the intellectualized atmosphere of the conference underscores in this instance just what is missing from the deracinated re-enactment of Heng’s work at 8Q – save in reverse. As Feldman relates it, the gut reaction from the Croatian scholar, erupting into the “white space” gridding her speech, made all too manifest the sort of “incarnate sensory difference” otherwise banished from the realm of abstract intellection and its languages, an articulation of inarticulate, instinctual reactions. Let’s Chat, as a sort of antinomian counterpoint, presupposes its own stated aims of communal participation and bodily engagement, but, as it took shape in this particular incarnation (I use that word purposively), seemed for all the world to be performing an act of self-negation, a nullification of its own artistic gestures, by pre-empting precisely those sorts of responses. The work may invite the viewer’s participation, but by decontextualizing and defamiliarizing the process it purportedly performs, it remains simply inert, inactivated by the crucial element of user interaction, a hollow gesture.

Elsewhere, art historian Douglas Crimp adduces Adorno as a jumping-off point for his dissection of the mummificatory consequences of museology: “The German word museal [museumlike] has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying. They owe their preservation more to historical respect than to the needs of the present. Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. Museums are the family sepulchers of works of art.” (Italics mine; see Crimp, “On The Museum’s Ruins” in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture.) Indeed. And it is precisely the loss of that vital relationship that is at stake here - encapsulating the often problematic transposition of everyday praxis, with its largely untranslatable sensorial, corporeal nuances, into the realm of Art. The explicitly stated aims of participation and communality and “social space” place Heng’s piece firmly in the school of what has been termed relational aesthetics. The relational paradigm was the defining ‘-ism’ of the ‘90s, so well-worn now that it probably doesn’t bear explication at too much length, but just as a brief précis: with relational art, certain forms of interpersonal engagement have become the desired ends; Bourriaud, who coined the term, uses terms like “sociability” and “conviviality” in his book. “In our post-industrial societies, the most pressing thing is no longer the emancipation of individuals, but the freeing-up of inter-human communications, the dimensional emancipation of existence.”* Unlike the scripted nature of a Happening, the generation of a “community effect” is the point: “The aura of art no longer lies in the hinter-world represented by the work, nor in form itself, but in front of it, within the temporary collective form that it produces by being put on show.”* In other words, it is the staging of a forum wherein relations between viewers  – rather than simply a relation between the audience and the artwork – which is held out as the chief site of interest, the instituting of an arena or an open system under the auspices of art enabling the sort of communality that Bourriaud envisioned.

(In fact, there’s an entire essay on the relational aspect of Amanda Heng’s work in the exhibition catalogue, which looks like a well-conceived tome. I haven’t gotten round to most of it yet, save an essay or two – but it’ll happen. Soon.)

The museum as mausoleum – embalming, entombing, asphyxiating. The work as living, breathing entity, necessitating forms of engagement beyond the mere spectatorial to activate it as experience - contemporary, intelligible, communal.

The two did not sit well together here.

Wayne Thiebaud: “What Happiness Feels Like”

Pie Slice (1991), Wayne Thiebaud. Private collection (?).

I love Wayne Thiebaud’s work.

Who doesn’t ?

For want of a less tired description, there’s something simply magical about his paintings of cakes and pies and sugary treats and vertiginous streetscapes: the way they seem to suggest a world of childhood wonders, or a child’s-eye view of the world, as it slowly shades into lengthening shadows and a sense of melancholy and – inexplicably – loss …

Or, as Mike Kimmelman puts it: “It slowly registers in our minds as the gap between what actually was — between those cloying Boston cream pies that we really ate and the gum-ball machines that ate our pennies — and the world as we wished it to be. He gives us not real cheese but Platonic cheese. And this gap between reality and desire ushers in sadness after the first leaping rush of pleasure. Mr. Thiebaud’s work is not about a perfect world. It is about the fact that the world never was and still isn’t perfect, except perhaps one little part of it, to which we can briefly retreat via these paintings and glimpse the way all things ought to be.”

(Kimmelman’s NYT review of the Thiebaud retrospective at the Whitney in 2001 reproduced in full below. Or read the original here.)

I think ol’ Mikey hit the nail on the head there.

This one’s for N., who seems to be having a pretty rough time of it lately. Here’s hoping he derives as much joy from Thiebaud’s work as I do.

Pie Counter (1963), Wayne Thiebaud. In the collection of the Whitney Museum.

Apartment View (1993), Wayne Thiebaud. Private collection.

Three Machines (1963), Wayne Thiebaud. In the collection of the de Young Museum.

Three Strawberry Shakes (1964), Wayne Thiebaud. Private collection.

French Pastries (1963), Wayne Thiebaud. In the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum.

Hill Street (Day City) (1981), Wayne Thiebaud. Private colletion.

Cheese Slices (1986), Wayne Thiebaud. Private collection.

Apartment Hill (1980), Wayne Thiebaud. In the collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Bakery Case (1996), Wayne Thiebaud. Thiebaud Family collection.

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WISTFUL JOY IN SODA-FOUNTAIN DREAMS

By Michael Kimmelman. Published: June 29, 2001.

If the world were a perfect place, the Wayne Thiebaud retrospective that has just opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art would be nailed to the walls for good and we would be free to stop by whenever we needed to remind ourselves what happiness feels like. The world not being perfect, the show is around through the summer, so consider yourself forewarned. At the Whitney, as in life, happiness is fleeting.

Meanwhile, you are free to bask in these pumpkin pies, meat and cheese deli counters, lipsticks, hot dogs and gum-ball machines, which, as Mr. Thiebaud has painted them for the last 40 years, have the aura of loves lost and too fondly recalled. Objects of conflicted nostalgia, rimmed in blue halos, they appear suspended in weightless isolation and glow with a brilliance so peculiar and unreal that it looks as if it must be from either the light of heaven or the glare of an operating theater.

By this I mean to say that after a while Mr. Thiebaud’s pictures prompt something more complicated than plain joy and closer to the nature of memory, which is always a tricky affair. It slowly registers in our minds as the gap between what actually was — between those cloying Boston cream pies that we really ate and the gum-ball machines that ate our pennies — and the world as we wished it to be. He gives us not real cheese but Platonic cheese. And this gap between reality and desire ushers in sadness after the first leaping rush of pleasure.

Mr. Thiebaud’s work is not about a perfect world. It is about the fact that the world never was and still isn’t perfect, except perhaps one little part of it, to which we can briefly retreat via these paintings and glimpse the way all things ought to be.

This experience is akin to what we feel before the works of certain painters to whom Mr. Thiebaud owes longstanding, explicit debts: Giorgio Morandi, the turn-of-the-century Spanish virtuoso Joaquín Sorolla, his fellow Californian Richard Diebenkorn and especially Chardin. What Proust wrote about Chardin’s views of brown crockery and dead rabbits applies also to Mr. Thiebaud’s hot dogs:

”You have already experienced it subconsciously, this pleasure one gets from the sight of everyday scenes and inanimate objects, otherwise it would not have risen in your heart when Chardin summoned it in his ringing commanding accents. But your consciousness was too sluggish to reach down to it. It had to wait for Chardin to come and lay hold on it and hoist it to the level of your conscious mind.”

Joy yielding to melancholy yields to the less jolting but more durable satisfaction of being in the presence of pictures so lovingly made. Mr. Thiebaud’s Americanness has as much to do with this devotion to craft as it does with the objects of Americana that he depicts.

Craft and, I might add, an American brand of wit. Melancholy and wit not being mutually exclusive, these pictures belong, as writers have pointed out about Mr. Thiebaud, to the tradition of Chaplin, Keaton and other memorable comics who have captured the American ethos. Whether it is with a row of cakes in a store window or spaghetti entanglements of highways or cartoonish visions of San Francisco wherein the streets shoot straight up like raised drawbridges, Mr. Thiebaud demonstrates the fine art of telling a dry joke.

”This sandwich, and then this sandwich again, and then the same damn sandwich again” is how the writer Adam Gopnik puts it in one of the show’s catalog essays. Right. We smile at the hot dogs and lipsticks solemnly arranged like so many receding headstones at a cemetery not just because of the solemnity but also because of the repetition. People talk about Mr. Thiebaud’s work as representing American abundance (all that food and all that land), but the pictures, which include big empty spaces and isolated shapes, don’t connote abundance so much as they approximate the movie routine of the guy who leaves his house and drives around only to end up where he started, so he tries another direction and ends up in the same place. And on and on, the gag being the deadpan sight of the house, on which the camera dotes as Mr. Thiebaud does on his pies and cakes.

Simultaneously, we can’t fail to note that there are variations, subtle differences between one slice of cream pie and the next, which betray an expressive hand, and which separate Mr. Thiebaud from Pop. They are the same pies, but not painted quite the same way.

The quality of paint handling is, again, the key: if it’s sometimes hard to pinpoint whether the psychological tone is ironic or affectionate or detached, it is obvious that the works are about geometry and pigment, and they are the opposite of mechanical.

This applies even to the human figures that Mr. Thiebaud began to paint in the early 1960′s, when like Philip Pearlstein, Alfred Leslie and Alex Katz he evolved an unsentimental way of depicting people. The effect, he once explained, is meant to be ”like seeing a stranger in some place like an air terminal for the first time: you look at him, you notice his shoes, his suit, the pin in his lapel but you don’t have any particular feelings about him.”

At the Whitney, a room is devoted to these blank-faced zombies, endearing like the pies and equally presented as if they were soldiers at attention. The usual comparison is to Edward Hopper, but psychologically speaking these figures are less like Hopper’s lonely souls than like Vermeer’s women or the subjects of early Northern Renaissance portraits, which is to say, they are minutely described but affectless.

We can therefore read what we want into them. Here is Mr. Thiebaud’s Willy Loman, in ill-fitting business suit hunched over a paperback. There is Twiggy’s look-alike in yellow dress and groovy white boots, her slim face framed by a severely cropped bob and giving nothing away, the payoff of the image being the jog of her skinny elbow outlined in blue, which breaks the vertical plane of back and chair, a formal flourish.

And then there are the twin majorettes, beaming in the sunlight, batons held high, an image with the sentimental whiff of a faded photograph. They may conjure up people we knew or feelings we had, the way the gum-ball machines can conjure up a row of gunslingers — the Earps ready for a showdown in the slanting light of late afternoon — if that’s how we choose to see them.

I have delayed mentioning an obvious source, namely cartoons. People writing about Mr. Thiebaud typically describe his stint as a Disney animator, movie poster illustrator and comic strip writer, and it is a pity that the retrospective doesn’t include any of that work.

But it’s useful to recall, and less frequently noted, that Mr. Thiebaud spent time as a boy on his grandfather’s farm in Southern California, then on a big family ranch in Southern Utah, milking cows, shooting deer for meat, plowing wheat and planting alfalfa. For a while he even thought about becoming a farmer.

And along with the cakes and cheese, he has painted incandescent, slightly antic landscapes, too, the views turned into complex, almost abstract grids of irregular patterns, seen from a bird’s-eye perspective. They are different pictures from the other works. The art-historical sources include Chinese painting, Monet and Cubism, as in ”River and Farms,” for instance, a dizzy jigsaw-puzzle design in which flattened fields under hazy skies turn from deep blue to pink, and a solitary poplar, a slender cone, casts a blue-green shadow against a patch of mustard.

The affection and eccentricity of these landscapes, which are partly inspired by views of the deltas in the Sacramento Valley, provide obvious signs of firsthand experience. Mr. Thiebaud (his maternal grandmother was one of the Mormon pioneers who settled in Utah in the mid-1800′s) is as much an artist of the American West — of Western light, Western space, Western silences, Western attitudes — as he is an heir to Krazy Kat or Mickey Mouse.

Organized by Steven A. Nash for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where it was first shown, and installed at the Whitney by Marla Prather, who has added drawings as well as paintings from local collections, the exhibition concludes with these landscapes. Some aren’t great. Mr. Thiebaud occasionally employs a childlike mode of painting, uncharacteristically fey, and a few images (cityscapes included) are too coy, like fairy-tale illustrations — although resistance to these works may partly stem from short-circuited expectations: seeing something different from an artist who in general has been so constant over the decades.

Detractors will say constancy is a fault, not a virtue, and fail to smile at the gentle in-jokes whereby a drawer of neckties becomes a mock Morris Louis, a bathtub brings to mind Donald Judd, and scattered crayons suggest Richard Serra.

I say, thank goodness somebody around here has a sense of humor, especially somebody who paints and draws so gorgeously. (Check out Mr. Thiebaud’s drop-dead lifelike rabbit if you are wondering what happened to good old verisimilitude in art.) Humor deflates pretense, which Mr. Thiebaud entirely lacks. In the end, his pictures provoke happiness if for no other reason than that they are content to be what they are, which is enough. This is the same message they convey, by extension, about the modest objects and people they depict.

See the cakes on their spindle-legged platforms. Notice how the vertical stripes of the lemon cake in the back balance the horizontal layers of cream inside the chocolate cake in the front, while the hollow circle made by the empty center of the angel-food bundt cake to the side complements the yellow circle of the meringue pie near the center, and how the number of cakes adds up to seven, with three on either end of the one with the heart drawn in red icing on top.

Delicious.

—————

Street and Shadow (1982), Wayne Thiebaud. In the collection of the Crocker Art Museum.

[Food & Feasting] Potatoes

The Guide to Imagery series put out by the Getty Museum is an unassumingly conceived, sumptuously illustrated, and concisely written set of books. As the title of the collection suggests, they are intended as introductory guides to certain broad, iconographic themes in the history of art: death; eroticism; astrology; biblical figures; food. The GtI books are an unpretentious antidote to the tedious, overburdened narratives that make art history textbooks such a chore to read sometimes – among the chief offenders of which must surely number Thames & Hudson’s World of Art series. The latter books are just about the most poorly thought-out texts imaginable, often trying to encompass too large a topical scope within too slim a volume, in many cases attempting a chronologico-geographical survey that zigzags across both time and space, resulting in little but bewilderment for the uninitiated reader.

(Moral of the story? Either go with a suitably hefty tome which looks like it can do thorough justice to a subject, or stick to a succinct introduction. Anything in between is more likely a miss than a hit.)

I recently purchased a copy of Food and Feasting in Art (above), which is awesome. It’s the perfect book for randomly dipping into, pun intended. A large section is given over to individual treatments of a smorgasbord of foodstuffs, from porridge to artichokes to mollusks to olive oil to coffee. Each item is explicated in a short one-page write-up, with accompanying images as well as brief summaries on textual ‘sources’, ‘meaning’, and ‘iconography’, all in point form, rendering the necessary information in as few words as possible. While this will probably strike art historians as being a gross oversimplification, I think it works out marvellously well for the intended audience – students and lay readers. Let’s admit it: unless one is fully committed to mastery of a certain topic, expending too much mental energy is pretty needless.

In any case, the short entries seem perfect for reproducing on the pages of this blog (with all due respect for copyright). The text is given in full, along with peripheral notes and the images the author chose as illustration. First entry? Potatoes. No particular reason, except that I remember seeing Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters (below) at a MoMA show a couple of years back, and being really taken with it. The unlit, unabashed lowliness of the figures – their features, dress, surroundings – and the warm glow in which the simple dish of diced potatoes and small cups of coffee are bathed make for a very affecting contrast …

—————

(From Food and Feasting in Art [Guide to Imagery series], Silvia Malaguzzi, pp. 214-5.)

Still Life with Potatoes (1888), Vincent van Gogh. Otterlo, Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller.

Potatoes originated in Peru, Bolivia, and Mexico, where they were grown from the time of the Aztecs and Incas. They were brought to Europe via Spain and Portugal by the great explorers of the second half of the 16th century but at first were used solely as cattle food. The Discalced Carmelites introduced potatoes into Italy, explaining how one eats the tuber and not the fruits or leaves, which are poisonous. Mistakes about this led to a great many poisonings at first, and despite the efforts of botanists to expand potato consumption, potatoes failed to take hold and were considered a source of disease. It was the Germans who introduced the potato to the Western diet, as the famine that followed the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century overcome diffidence toward them. The chemist Antoine Parmentier, who was a prisoner of the Prussians during the Seven Years’ War, came to appreciate their taste and good qualities; when he returned to the court of Louis XVI in France, he encouraged the cooks to use them. It was thus that potatoes entered French gastronomy in the early 18th century. Others around this time tried to persuade the Italians of potatoes’ good qualities, but it was only in the mid-19th century that their use became widespread. Dumas offered a number of recipes based on potatoes, praising them as healthy, nutritious, easy to cook, and economical, and hence excellent for the working classes. According to Dumas, their success stemmed from a revolutionary decree of 1793 when the Paris Commune requisitioned all luxury gardens for growing potatoes.

Sources: Antoine Augustine Parmentier, Examen Chimique de la pomme de terre (1773); Alexandre Dumas, Grand Dictionaire de cuisine (1873)

Meaning: Poverty

Iconography: Mostly found in 19th century genre scenes and still lifes with a humble setting

The Potato Eaters (1885), Vincent van Gogh. Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum.

[Notes on the painting]

Potatoes played a large part in the diet of the poor. Once initial suspicions were overcome, many northern countries adopted their use in the 19th country.

In the 18th century coffee had been the drink of the aristocracy, but now in the 19th its use was becoming widespread.

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‘Foodscape’, Erró

Painting of the day: Foodscape (1964), by Icelandic Pop artist Erró, currently in the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. It’s a monumental piece, measuring some 302 by 201 cm – as the picture below clearly demonstrates.

Image from this online Slavic portal.