Do you know what lores I have had to learn while you play in everything they protect?… Do you understand that when you write the kangaroo the wallaby the bilby the bandicoot the cockatoo the blacksnake the waterlily the brush the bush the sapling the ghost gum that you are puppeting your hands through my ancestors?
When art meets food, their offspring are often surreal. One need only look back to the ubiquitous presence in kitchens world-wide of reproductions of Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s fruity portraits or René Magritte’s iconic green apple to find triggers for this impulse.
The relationship between food and art has long dominated the world of painting, photography, literature and cinema in an often-noxious pairing of gratuitous ingestion and aesthetics, most notably in Marco Ferreri’s The Grande Bouffe (1975) and Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, The Wife and His Lover (1989).
In conversation with Sabrina Baker
In recent years, I have worked alongside Jason Phu on a number of projects, notably My Parents Met at the Fish Market commissioned for West Space in 2017. This professional relationship became a friendship, with Jason often staying with my partner and chef Nagesh Seethiah and I on his frequent trips to Melbourne. Almost every visit would become a conversation over dinner about life, politics, family, careers, love and of course food. These are also recurring topics in Jason’s art practice.
In 1906 Alfred Henry Lewis famously stated in Cosmopolitan that “there are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” Food has the capacity to bring us together. It is familiar, relational and cultural. But in times of conflict and scarcity, food also can be the trigger for chaos and social disruption. In a world with increasing and unprecedented ecological degradation and economic inequality in the distribution of resources, future food security is a global concern and a food fight to avoid. We are distracted, choking and bloated on choice and misinformation when it comes to food and health (our own and that of the planet).
