Marah Siyam
The Representation of Food in Art
The portrayal of food in art carries many motifs and meanings but these meanings have significantly changed over time. The Feast & Famine exhibit encompasses this but in a contemporary voice that highlights the political, economic, social privilege or lack thereof, of food. While works like Juan Sanchez Cotan’s Still Life With Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber (Fig,1) focus on his own skill disregarding any meaning of what food can mean in terms of these social ideas. Cotan's oil painting is focused on the fruit but the subject is not actually the fruit. This painting is a display of Cotan’s immense skill of painting still lifes, even though artists still use this as a technique to practice it is not as prominent as it was at the time of Cotan. The way the fruit is painting is highly realistic, it almost looks like a picture. The attention to detail is very important and is what is making this piece effective (Stokstad).
Figure 1. Sanchez Cotan’s Still Life With Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber 1602 San Diego Museum of Art
Figure 2. Lucy Sparrow Twinkies 2018
Express Newark Gallery
On the other hand, in the Feast & Famine exhibit, Lucy Sparrow is an artist who completely rejects this idea of realism but she does choose a focus of her work even though the subject is different much like Cotan. Sparrows woven Twinkies box is an example of this (Fig,2). She takes away all realistic attributes to food and creates her woven pieces based on that. Sparrows works also replicate many processed and packaged foods which is another difference between contemporary and art before the 18th century. Our society is obsessed with the packaging it is almost just as important as the taste of the actual food we are buying and Sparrow uses this idea to her advantage through selling her woven creations for relatively cheap prices, paralleling how cheap these processed foods are even though they are not good for us.
Figure 3. Clara Peeters Still Life with Fruit and Flowers 1611, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Clara Peeters Still Life with Fruit and Flowers (Fig,3) is an example of the way early artists used fruits and flowers to convey wealth and power. The fruit in Peeters painting sits on an imported Italian silver like display plate (Stokstad). This is a theme of travel which in turn is a theme of wealth, as your eyes keep moving on this painting you notice coins, which allow the painting to be dated but also show the wealth of the owner of these fruits that will ultimately maybe eat them alongside his wealth and power.
Figure 4. Chris Thorson
Of Wrath 2015
Express Newark Gallery
A polar opposite work of this painting is Chris Thorson’s sculpture of rotten potatoes Of Wrath. This sculpture of rotten potatoes is not on a fancy plate, in fact, there is no base of this piece. The different potatoes and stems sit alone in a modest box on the exhibition. This work highlights the fragility of fruits and vegetables and how if a potato, for example, looks anything but perfect it is tossed even though it could be perfectly fine, but our society rejects food that does not look pristine. In Peeters painting the fruit is more natural given the time period hormones were yet to be introduced to fruits and vegetables, while in Thorsons portrayal of food is trying to go back to that and trying to teach people that the fruit that does not look perfect might be better for you than the fruit that is filled with hormones and GMOs.
Stokstad, Marilyn; Cothren, Michael W.. Art History, Volume 2. Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.
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