Eating Local Art
calypso bean becoming
One of my former students, Jena Duncan, has a new blog chronicling her art efforts around eating locally. “Jena Performing Local” began a week or so ago, as she embarked on a 100-mile diet. She’s recording her food purchases, yearnings, frustrations, and the like, as well as the questions and problems that this new diet, begun mid-winter, inevitably brings to the fore.
In her opening post, she says that she had not “done a ton of practical research” before starting, so that her own search for food would be part of the experience. I kinda love that—partly for the spunkiness of it, and partly because it makes eating primal again.
I’m really interested in what happens when well-fed, economically safe folk are able to realize that eating is primal. When we go from abstractly knowing it to deeply knowing it, for such an understanding is potentially life changing. In the U.S., about 50 million people are considered “food insecure,” many of them children. For we lucky folks who are not hungry, learning this primalness in adulthood can change us not only in culinary ways, but also spiritually, politically, environmentally. It may prompt us to change jobs, grow vegetables, volunteer more.
I’m also interested in the whole art/life blur. Jena identifies her foray into local eating as art. (She says in that initial post that in addition to walking her talk, she “wants to translate the experience into aesthetic objects.” But it’s clear from the title and posts that the performance of eating locally is itself equally part of her artwork.) Quite a lot of people have embarked on similar local diet challenges, without calling them art. And many people eat a local diet (and have for millennia) without thinking about these concerns at all. What is it that makes Jena’s efforts art and the others not?
There was a brief and shining moment during the last century in which the answer to that was simply “it’s art because I [the artist] say it’s art.” (I kinda love the spunkiness of that, too, at least sometimes). And while plenty of people actually do still say it, that claim doesn’t have the apparent legitimacy it did thirty or forty years ago. In an era when the unified self has long since been dissolved, assigning that kind of authority to the “I” seems either wildly retrograde or naïve (or, perhaps, super radical. I’m willing to try to go there…).
So what’s left? Often, folks point to context—almost invariably reaching back to cite Duchamp’s Fountain from 1917 as the work that re-directed us from object to context as the locus for art meaning. But what in the physical context lets us see Jena’s “Jena Performing Local” blog as different from that of Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon, the pioneers of the current 100-mile diet? Both appear on my laptop framed by the same wallpaper, nudging against the same dashboard icons. Both are temporarily called forth from cyberspace, that apotheosis of the postmodern context-of-no-context.
So, if we’ve nixed something innate, the artist’s intention, and context, is anything left? I suppose I’m left. Am I making it art because I know Jena is thinking of it as art? Would you, had you stumbled upon it, think of it as art? Maybe yes, maybe no. But even if you would, that’s not adequate, either, because it just makes your subjectivity the decisive one, rather than Jena’s. Plus, what about all those folks who arrive at her site and think of it as a how-to guide for local eating?
I have no idea where this project will take Jena, but for me the possibilities that come from this counterpointing and complicating of eating and art excite.
In: Text · Tagged with: art, food, local
Subscribe to this blog (RSS)