By Olivia Scheck
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
CHELSEA — A new Chelsea gallery exhibit explores the role of food as artistic subject matter, but don't expect it to whet your appetite.
Included in the exhibit, called "With Food in Mind," are films, installations and collages that take on the thoroughly unappetizing topics of pig slaughter, feces and urination.
While only a few of the exhibit's 40 art works feature scatological themes, they are arguably the most interesting ones.
Certainly the most eye-catching piece in the exhibit, on display at The Center for Book Arts through June 25, is a four-screen video installation, showing various stages in the slaughter/butchering of a pig.
Shot on family farms in Southwest France during the 1990's, the piece by artist Elaine Tin Nyo gives the viewer a window into every gory step of the transformation from pig to paté. As the farmers dissect the pig, removing each of its internal organs, on three of the screens, a fourth screen shows one of the farmers reciting a joke in French — titled "The Three Legged Pig," which is also the name of the art piece.
While the show's curator Nicole Caruth admits that the gruesome footage is hard for her to watch — Caruth is a vegetarian — she said the point of the work is to demonstrate the care with which the farmers take the pig apart.
"It's the slaughtering of a pig but the point is that it’s done in a very respectful way," Caruth, who is also a regular columnist for the Art21 Blog, explained.
Just a few feet away from Nyo's video installation, artist Hugh Pocock offers an investigation into his own inner workings.
To create the piece, called "My Food My Poop," Pocock spent 63 days meticulously weighing the food and drink he consumed as well as the feces and urine he excreted in order to determine how much of the weight was lost to energetic output. Pocock's experiment is documented through photos, journals and symbolic wooden blocks, which represent his input, output and the energy he presumably expended during the project.
"Hugh’s work, I thought, was a really interesting way to look at human energy consumption and production," Caruth said, explaining her reasons for including the piece.
"When I asked him why he wanted to do this he said it was out of sheer curiosity," the curator added. "It's a very intimate study."
Finally, across from Pocock's piece, hangs another intimate work by performance artist, photographer and collage-maker Isabelle Lumpkin.
The collection is a series of compositions in which the artist pasted photos of herself onto pages torn from art history books.
One of the surprisingly subtle insertions shows Lumpkin in a yoga bridge position, replacing a tabletop in Claude Monet's "The Luncheon;" another shows her sucking from the breast of an African sculpture.
A third has the artist inserted into a classic advertisement for Budweiser beer. Here, the miniature Lumpkin is seen squatting atop the rim of a glass as she urinates into the beverage.
While these graphic works may be what stand out to visitors, Caruth said she was particularly excited about some of the exhibit's more serious contributions, such as the collection of posters from Conflict Kitchen, a take-out restaurant that exclusively features cuisine from countries the U.S. is currently in conflict with.
Caruth will speak about "With Food in Mind," along with artists from the show Heather Hart, Elaine Tin Nyo, Maya Suess and Tattfoo Tan, at The Center for Book Arts on May 4 at 6:30 p.m.
The Center for Book Arts is located at 28 W. 27th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Admission to "With Food in Mind" is free of charge.
