TWO FRIED EGGS

“I had all the paraphernalia for frying – the little Primus stove, the pan and so on.  It smelt of frying.  I was quite happy to go there every morning, buy a kebab and fry up the eggs.  It seemed part of the installation.  It never crossed my mind that someone would buy it.”

Collings/Lucas 

The eggs congeal and the meat putrifies.  Rotting-food art is a cliché of the contemporary avant garde.  In the early 1980s and early 1990s, Helen Chadwick used fruit and vegetables to allude in a metaphorical or poetic way to all sorts of aspects of the feminine; the shape of genitalia, female fecundity, sexual exchange, and so on.  Foodstuff in Chadwick’s art often went with images of her naked body.  Food went with a less emotionally distanced and more freaked-out kind of nudity in performances of the 1960s and 1970s in America and Europe.  In New York, Carolee Schneemann rolled naked in supermarket chickens and sausages.  And in Vienna members of the Aktionismus group, led by Hermann Nitsch and Otto Muehl, slaughtered farm animals in front of audiences, and writhed in the blood, in orgiastic happenings styled after fantasies of pagan rituals.  But Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab is different from any of these precedents, because it is not soppy, solemn or frenzied, but dry, witty, clever and sly.

ibid

More Posts

Leave a comment