Mini post #2

Gladys Barker Grauer
SATURDAY MORNING
1981

‘when looking at my work, what the viewer sees and feels is important, not what the viewer thinks I am saying.’

-       Gladys Barker Grauer 

When I was looking at her work, in the museum, I saw a mom with her children shopping in a grocery store, which is stocked with all the simplified standardized, and mechanically produced goods, and then I suddenly noticed that the food on the work is just what is common in our daily life. It is understandable that life sometime could be hectic, and the canned food from the convenient store became our first choice. It is hard to be aware of the things that are repeated tons of times in our daily lives, we are normally in a rush choosing what to eat, we choose to tase over nutrients, we prefer things that take less time and happen immediately, prefer convenience rather than taking more time to know more about the source and the ingredient, let along think about the consequences of purchasing them or consuming them. Gladys's work, SATURDAY MORNING, really gives me a strike in head that we all should think about the action we are making is supporting a certain kind of lifestyle which is becoming the mainstream and everybody take it for granted, but it could be scary when we think about this  further down to the future that - should we do something to the situation that our children will grow up consuming chemicals instead of real food which was born from our mother earth?

In the picture, it is not hard to tell they look like fruit, but they are not real fruit. However, when we shop in the store, it is hard to tell if the food on the shelf is real. It seems we are rarely thinking about this in a normal situation because we are taught that the food is safe and eatable as long as it is tasty and will not poison us. Food nowadays is connected more with commercial than with our feeling of bodies, or the knowledge of nutrients. Taste and the so-called 'healthy' are the main selling points that make a product charming and irresistible to customers. It is as if our taste bud to be blamed. The following artwork by Bosch pinpoints this theme that human is driven by their sensual pleasures, and it can trun out to be a disater like the typitch depitect in the right penal. 

Hieronymus Bosch
GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS (OPEN)

This painting is about the human being overindulgent in earthly life, we can see the sensual pleasures all over the painting- eating, drinking, and having sex. The dramatically huge strawberries have symbolized the pleasure of forbidden fruits, which also give a hint to fertility and sexual abandon. Like Stokastad said, 'in the strange garden: men are slaves to their own lust.' This painting was created over 500 years ago, but the theme it is showing  is still a noticeable topic for us in 21th century, people are suffering from their desire of sensual pleasures, just like what the food industry lead us from healthy natural food to tasty processed food, we follow too much with the taste and pleasure, and now its time for us to listen more to our bodies and be aware to what we normally bring into our lives.