G.3 Creative Food Research: Intersections in Art and Food Studies, Part 1
Fri Oct 28 / 13:30 – 15:00 / rm 163, University College
chairs /
- Amanda White, Western University
- Zoë Heyn-Jones, Western University
This panel invites presentations in any format examining the intersection of art and food studies. Questions we are interested in examining include; what are the implications of interdisciplinary art and research-creation as they address the politics of food justice and sustainable food systems? What does the nexus of food and art look like today, in the context of movements towards environmental and social justice? While food has been used as a vessel and catalyst for political conversations throughout postmodern art history, much of this work predates the academic emergence of research-creation as a formalized mode of knowledge creation and mobilization. We are especially interested in presentations that attend to interdisciplinary research, research-creation, as well as public-facing projects that offer creative solutions to these pressing global issues. How can art imagine, instigate or otherwise participate in alternative food futures?
keywords: food studies, food justice, research-creation, activism
G.3.1 Art, Food and Ecology: On the Exhibition and Acquisition of Meat in Museums
- Mélanie Boucher, Université du Québec en Outaouais
Food has been used for artistic purposes since the 1910s, with the Futurist movement, then other groups artists throughout the twentieth century (Boucher 2018). This continuous use, however, is slow to be recognized by theory. A first body of studies was produced in the mid-1990s, in the wake of relational aesthetic and the social importance that was then given to the world of cooking (Boucher 2014). At the time, few studies focused on ecological issues. The controversial case of the work Vanitas (1987), by Jana Sterbak, exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada in 1991 bears witness to this. The media and politicians who criticize the presentation of this Flesh Dress made with meat attack the sanctity of food and its “waste”, in the midst of an economic recession (Lamoureux 2001). By taking as support a certain number of works made with meat which have since this period been exhibited and collected in museums, this communication will attempt to trace the recent integration of ecological issues into the discourse on works and the museum practices in charge of their preservation. Changes in perception and ways of doing will be analyzed from an interdisciplinary approach in which the adaptability of the work and the specificity of the meat will be considered.
keywords: contemporary art, meat, ecology, exhibition, museum collections
Mélanie Boucher is full professor (museology, art history) at the Université du Québec en Outaouais. She is co-founder of the CIECO research and reflection group. In this context, she assumes the direction of the Art and Museum Team: Between Research and Creation (FRQSC 2022-2026), assumes the responsibility of the CIECO/UQO pole and the axis The Extended Collection of the Partnership New Uses of Collections in Art Museums (SSHRC 2021-2028). Her current research focuses on performative practices and their musealization. Her doctoral thesis, on the use of food in contemporary art, was published by Éditions le Sabord (2018). As curator, Mélanie Boucher co-founded Orange, a triennial on art and agri-food, of which she co-curated the first edition (2003) and directed the first publication (2005).
G.3.2 Starting Something: Making Feminisms, Food, and Art
Jennifer O’Connor, York University
Each sourdough starter is an opportunity. Commercial yeast will keep for a couple of years. But sourdough begins with flour—wild yeasts and bacteria—and water. Keep adding them, and the starter can live indefinitely.
When Alexandra Ketchum defended her dissertation, Serving Up Revolution, she served “Sourdough Chocolate Devastation Cake”, a recipe from Bloodroot, a feminist restaurant. Ketchum and others are creating a new feminist food culture. Food is very much a feminist issue. Women, often workers of colour making poverty-level wages, make up the majority of the food industry’s precarious labour force. At home, women continue to perform more than half of the cooking, cleaning, and care work. And women whose household income falls in the lowest quintile are more than twice as likely to be food insecure.
Artists critique a biopolitics in which—to quote Wendy Brown—“every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves” are transmogrified “to a specific image of the economic”. For instance, Meech Boakye is an interdisciplinary artist whose current work is focused on preparing food, foraging, and gardening to “connect making with communal care, performing labour as an expression of love to share with living things”. Other examples include Marisa Hoicka’s video Still Life, “a domestic portrayal…using food and the surreal to get at the guts of the body and the flesh of painting”, and Sharona Franklin’s Mycoplasma Altar, a cone-shaped gelatin sculpture filled with flowers, kidney beans, syringes and assorted pills placed on a silver pedestal. Despite the use of a mould inhibitor, the piece would shift and shrink during its exhibition. In this essay, I will explore how feminist artists are utilizing food to critique gender, labour, and environment, creating work that delights in the possibility of play, pleasure and protest. Each act is an opportunity, a becoming.
keywords: feminism, food, art, biopolitics
Jennifer O’Connor writes essays and poems, makes photographs and collages, and studies Social & Political Thought at York University. In her research and practice, she explores feminist theory, queer politics, ecology, health humanities, and aesthetics. Her work has been published in Esse, the Literary Review of Canada, the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, and Gastronomica, among others. She has been a resident at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and with the Feminist Art Collective. She is a graduate of Queen’s School of Policy Studies, where she wrote an MRP on the need for feminist food policy. In her spare time, she knits, gardens, sews, and cooks.
G.3.3 Edible Blackness: Imagery of Cannibalism in the Dutch Oven Cookbook
- Hilary Grant, Carleton University
There is a rich body of scholarship on the relationships between African Americans and food practices and products. This work includes powerful critiques of questionable culinary imagery, such as appropriative images or those that rest on harmful stereotypes. However, less attention has been paid to how similar problematic food imagery has been deployed in Canada. One area of recent study is fictive cannibalism, the written or visual presentation of black bodies as edible. This paper considers visual cannibalism and other racially charged sketches in the community-authored Dutch Oven Cookbook: A Cookbook of Coveted Traditional Recipes from Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Through community interviews, archival research, and visual analysis, this paper chronicles how racism was justified as traditional, folkloric practice and what happened when African Nova Scotian civil rights groups fought back.
keywords: African Nova Scotia, folk art, food studies, racism
Hilary Grant is a Ph.D. candidate in Carleton University’s Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture. She has over ten years of experience working in the heritage field, most recently with UNESCO, and has taught heritage planning at the undergraduate and graduate levels. She holds a Masters in Heritage Studies from the University of Cambridge, is Vice-President of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada, and is a Board Member of ICOMOS Canada. Her current research theorizes heritage as timescapes through studying material culture in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, from cookbooks to model boat building. Other recent scholarship can be found in the International Journal of Heritage Studies and The Historic Environment: Policy and Practice.
