Gastro-Vision: Feeding Suburbia

Fritz Haeg, Edible Estates Regional Prototype Garden #6 (installation view), 2008. Commissioned by Contemporary Museum Baltimore. Courtesy the artist and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Photo: Leslie Furlong.

"Gastro-Vision" is my monthly food-art column on the Art21 blog. Here's an excerpt from this month's post:

In the early 1970s, Bill Owens began to document the suburban boom in the California Bay Area. Every Saturday for a year, he photographed middle-class Americans in and around their homes, posed in modern kitchens, barbequing in the backyard, seated around the dinner table, and hosting Tupperware parties. Food figures prominently into the artist’s portraits of suburban life. In Untitled (Joy of Cooking) (1971), currently on view in the Getty Center exhibition In Focus: Tasteful Pictures, Owens has captured a kitchen pantry stocked with canned and packaged foodstuffs. Such an abundance of imitation foods was, at that time, a sign of prosperity. The tables have certainly turned. That same pantry today would suggest poverty, obesity, and poor health.

The hidden costs of living the American Dream — embodied in part by the “convenience” foods pictured in Untitled (Joy of Cooking) — has led to a rethinking of the suburbs and the current push to return to food ways of earlier generations. Enter the work of Los Angeles-based artist Fritz Haeg.

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Eye Candy: New Blood

Jordan Eagles, URTS (detail), 2008.
Blood, copper preserved on plexiglass, UV resin, 36 x 36 x 3 in.

In Jordan Eagles's New Blood series he suspends, encases, and permanently preserves animal blood (salvaged from slaughterhouses) in plexiglass and UV resin. This technique retains the blood’s natural colors and textures. Gallery lighting reveals the medium's many layers and is almost as important as the piece itself. "The materials and luminosity," says the artist, "relate to themes of corporeality, mortality, spirituality, and science—regenerating the blood as sublime."

The group exhibition Coincidental Opposites at Causey Contemporary in Brooklyn will include work from the New Blood series. Runs July 16 - August 23.