food porn

While aimlessly flicking through yet another food blog I was reminded of a performance I went to a while back that I really enjoyed. It was a one man show at Hares & Hyenas on Johnston Street by Matt Fennell....



The songs were hilarious.....it was a tribute to all things food.....dinner parties, menus, the cult of the celebrity chef, childhood memories, recipe books, magazines and the way that sex and nourishment intermingle....
There were odes to Maggie Beer, Julia Childs, verjuice, afternoon tea, Nigella Lawson....and Sara Lee.
I'm reminded of some collages I made while in Italy in 08, an amazing place for food imagery and consumption....












"Food rules and moves the world. Food is necessity, pleasure and power."

For a vast majority of women in the First World, food is a fetishized matter. From a young age, girls are taught via media and advertising that they should crave and desire food, as they should crave sex, but that they should ultimately deny themselves the pleasure of both. Chocolate bar commercials show women sneaking away to consume a chocolate bar in secret, much in the way one would meet for a sexual liaison. Ice-cream commercials show women sensually buried in Magnum ice-creams, (should I consume the woman as well as the ice-cream?) And in many magazines, sumptuously photographed food is featured alongside size six fashion models. Many women, to some level of extremity have a complex or uncomfortable relationship with food.

While I have moved away from this as a sole concern in my artwork, I have been very interested in the way advertising imagery and social attitudes fetishize female relationships with food. Desire, denial, guilt and secrecy seem to often play a role, with the ultimate goal to be thin and desirable whilst feigning an insatiable, desirous attitude....


At any rate, Matt Fennell will be performing in Melbourne next week. I will certainly try to make it again for a glass o wine and some serious laughs...

Downstairs At Alma's (The Alma Sports Club), VIC

8.00pm, Fri 05 Aug, 2011

on photography : susan sontag

Just finished reading this book. I'd always read excerpts from it but never the whole thing.



It was interesting for me in that Sontag discussed to a lot of the photographers that I idolized when I began taking photographs as a teenager, such as Edward Weston and Bill Brandt. I remember I really enjoyed the physhical qualities of photography, printing, developing film, getting the exposure right, making images that were beautiful, and profound...but still spontaneous. Situating myself as some sort of heroic capturer of images. It's like there was this moment that I was chasing, in order to get some sort of romantic essence of a person. I guess emulating the masters of a medium is a way that artists often learn....

"Only with effort can the camera be forced to lie: basically it is an honest medium: so the photographer is much more likely to approach nature in a spirit of inquiry, of communion, instead of with the saucy swagger of self-dubbed 'artists.' And contemporary vision, the new life, is based on honest approach to all problems, be they morals or art." -Edward Weston

Not many would consider the camera to be 'honest' any more. The camera idealizes, reduces, fetishizes, as Sontag says, "photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing- which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art- It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power."
The photograph has the ability to make even very recent events nostalgic and of the past though. The present in a matter of hours becomes something perused on facebook as an event of the past. I looked through some of my work from when I was round 17.....










Very beautiful, very romantic. It's funny, while I don't record as profusely as back then, I think I still photograph a lot, so that I'll have something to look back on and remind me... There's still this desire to capture and idealize moments.

"A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera's twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images."
-Susan Sontag, On Photography P. 178