"Food, one assumes, provides nourishment; but Americans eat it fully aware that small amounts of poison have been added to improve its appearance and delay its putrefaction." -John Cage

Gastro-Vision: The Best in Food-Art 2010

Taryn Simon, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Contraband Room, John F. Kennedy International Airport, Queens, New York, 2007. Chromogenic color print. 37 1/4 x 44 1/2 in. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles © Taryn Simon.

From cotton candy rooms to painterly cakes, meaty dresses to pork rind sculpture, pickle portraiture to animated toast, this year was chock-full of good “food-art” — food inspired by art and art inspired by or involving food. So much so, that it would have been gluttonous to write this year-in-review by myself. For this post I enlisted the help of two art writers who share my passion for all things food: Andrew Russeth of the blog 16 Miles of String, and Megan Fizell of the blog Feasting on Art. Together, we’ve come up with a list of the year’s best. You might want to grab a bib in case you start to drool.

Best Food-Art Exhibition (Non-Edible): In Focus: Tasteful Pictures, Getty Center

From 19th-century daguerreotypes to contemporary still life photography, In Focus: Tasteful Pictures contextualized the mechanical image within the genre. Paired with the recent Getty publication, Still Life in Photography, the exhibition provided a historic focus to the way art depicts our increasingly complicated relationship to food within a globalized world. With photographs by Henri-Victor Regnault, Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Martin Parr, William Eggleston, Bill Owens, and Taryn Simon, few museums could draw such a feast from their collection. (MF, NC)

Best Food-Art Exhibition (Edible): Licked Sucked Stacked Stuck, Brattelboro Museum & Art Center

Art historian Nicole Root and artist Paul Shore create sweets that are modeled on iconic contemporary artworks. They baked a brownie to reconstruct, at a miniature scale, Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room, and broke Necco wafers to form a Richard Long stone floor sculpture. Other times they opt for assisted readymades, as when they built Robert Morris’s classic mid-1960s block sculptures from sugar wafers and gum. The meticulous care that Root and Shore bring to their work suggest that they are loving tribute artists, but there is also a hint of subversion in many of the more than 70 works they have completed, which are often the “opposite of [the] serious, large-scale, large-budget works,” as Root once put it, describing a plan she and Shore hatched for a Richard Serra made of taffy. Grand and grandiose hallmarks of postwar art are shrunken down and rendered out of everyday materials, and the mystery and majesty of their source works is at least somewhat diminished. Of course, the pair’s work is no more open to the touch (or ready for the eating) than the art they transfigure. (AR)

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