Hard To Tell If It’s Going Well
I have, of late, been starving you of artistic sustenance. Here, let me fix that with a big dollop of the stuff. Specifically, some “performance documentation” from Manhattan’s Grace Exhibition Space. The mighty talent featured in the following video is artist, educator and “community organiser” Alex Romania, whose work teeters on the edge of profundity, as will doubtless become clear, via juddering and convulsion, and the strategic deployment of 25 pounds of powdered cheese.
Come, sup ye at the teats of creativity.
Yes, I know. It’s a lot to take in.
As Mr Romania reveals during the subsequent ramble-cum-interview, the piece above is but part of an even more staggering trilogy. He is, we learn, “interested in exploring, like, substance.” When not “investigating bodies of cultural debris,” and being showered with atomised dairy products, Mr Romania teaches those less gifted than himself, at New York’s Centre For Performance Research, and other places of learning.
Should your inner being have been suitably moved, the Grace Exhibition Space is seeking “significant financial support.”
Update, via the comments:
Captain Nemo notes the resemblance with numerous children’s TV shows – Fun House, Tiswas and the like – in which “dumping food or gunge over someone’s head was de rigueur.” Well, yes. And it’s hard to see who, exactly, all this alleged transgression is aimed at. The handful of socially and mentally uniform poseurs who turn up, at least if it isn’t raining, or the general public that doesn’t care?
Consider this an open thread.
My mother cooked healthy, not vegetarian: Meat was always a valued part of the diet, and there was none of that salt-is-evil, sugar-is-satan foolishness. She merely recognized that highly sugared foods should be eaten in moderation (she grew up in the time when it was still universally understood that the road to obesity was paved with excess carbs and sugar.) So lots of vegetables, preferably fresh from our garden, etc. (I wish my grandmother could have lived to see the vindication of her rejection of all those health food fads and panics, with their demonization of eggs and butter and the promotion of high-carb diets.)
Ouch, my sympathies! I never was involved in that, although I encountered the attitude in that little health food coop (some of the angry rants posted on the bulletin board were…amusing.) And I did read Diet for a Small Planet, but never gave up eating meat.
Remember “Junk Food Junkie“?
Well, it was the Depression.* You had real pork drippings? Posh bastards! Envy! Resentment! Hurling of insults! Incitement of class hatred!
* Grandpa never psychologically recovered: Even in the sixties, when they were financially secure, he remained, deep down, very insecure and fearful, which was reflected in his habits.
You had lard? We had to wait years to get lard….
I still can’t stomach oatmeal porridge made from steel-cut rolled oats…
Every now and then, I cook up some ‘Scottish Risotto’ (or polenta, if you wish). Your favourite risotto flavorings, but with steel-cut oats. Yummy with lamb.
Remember “Junk Food Junkie“?
YES! Heard that for the first time on Dr. Demento late one night on an AM radio station. My dad had Diet for a Small Planet and made my mom cook recipes from it. He had a gift subscription to Rodale’s Prevention magazine, eschewed Western medicine – yes we were whole hog into that 70s hippy health food craze. But the real reason we didn’t eat meat was because Dad was also a lazy barely-employed commie dreamer and we couldn’t afford it. Welfare still had a stigma back then – better to grift and scrounge than go on the dole.
Dad would try anything but work to get money, including trying to promote artist friends of his, who unfortunately were of the Classical persuasions. Just think what riches could have been had if my dad’s friends had dumped powdered cheese on each other, or turned hand driers on and off, or stuck their rumps in the air while squeaking their feet in their shoes.
For those who were puzzled by the reference.
Romania has nothing on Diana of Ephesus.
For those who were puzzled by the reference.
Some things cannot be unseen. I know, credit note only.
I am not sure why that particular one of all the “art” served up here over the years should have stuck with me, but it did.
Ever since that Goose Thespian, feasting on such cruel negativity keeps me coming here (Sigh!) even if it is only doled out in tit bits.
I just want to say – I’m bloody fuming!
That’s a bit like claiming that all hydrocarbons are just molecular chains of hydrogen and carbon. And no-one is pumping crude oil into your cornflakes.
Cellulose is a macro-molecule of bundles of glucan chains – glucose molecules. The distinctiveness of the various forms comes from the length and configuration of the chain bundles. Which is why eating fruit or mushrooms doesn’t resemble eating trees.
When I were a lad we used to get dripping sandwiches to take to school after the Sunday Roast [praise be]. The fat and, more importantly, jellified juices that dripped off the pork or beef roast (heart, if you were really lucky – though not so much for the drippings; it’s a very lean organ) were smeared on cheap sliced white bread for a delicious and nutritious lunch. Or, as it is called in my neck of the woods, “dinner”.
As I recall you could also buy pots of pork dripping from the local butcher (long replaced by another fucking nail salon) which had a layer of fat covering that unctuous salty jelly that made it so very tasty. And healthy. Possibly.
Oh, and another thing.
When I first moved to the States I was horrified by my first bite of a sandwich proclaiming itself to contain “Muenster” cheese. This appears to be a wedge of orange packaging material, carved and sliced into a cruel caricature of a French cheese called “Munster”.
Unfortunately, unlike the French version, it tastes of flip-flop.
Imagine my disappointment!
As to what food-related atrocities might be being perpetrated in the video above – I couldn’t bear to watch!
This is not my first visit to the site.
The local butcher’s, owned by a burly Yorkshireman who calls me duck, sells dripping.
It’s next to the nail salon.
It’s only a matter of time…
Er, I had to watch the bloody thing. Don’t see why anyone else should get off lightly.
Remember when Velikovsky somehow thought that carbohydrates and hydrocarbons were they same thing? Saying that the manna the Israelites ate in the desert could have been hydrocarbons fallen from a passing comet?
“Ever eat a pine tree?”
–Euell Gibbons
My personal objection was focused on how such “processed” cheese would not taste like freshly grated Parmesan. Plus a dislike of the increasing use of artificial ingredients to extend shelf life or as cheaper replacements of flavor-enhancing ingredients. I recently bought a few cans of chicken soup and was very disappointed in the flavor–grossly inferior to fresh-made soup is like, although I don’t know exactly why.
The former. The general public will just roll their eyes and move on because, as mentioned, they’ll have seen this sort of thing when they were children, and often in a more entertaining setting. When I came home from school, I wanted to watch Fun House and the like. (I wanted to appear on it too, but it ended before I was old enough to go on, and anyway, that’s not the point.) Whereas I never want to see the above “artwork” again.
Well, that’s why you get the big bucks!
Oh my, yes I do. When I was young I collected all those mad “aliens visited ancient earth” books. Even age 12 I was amused by Velikovsky’s ignorance. My favourite was one I can no longer quite recall that purported to have surprisingly detailed alien spaceship designs gleaned from Aztec temples. Might have been a Zecharia Sitchin?
I’m uncomfortable with the modern, hip, rejection of “processed” foods by which they mean “cooked”. As if they were an improper intrusion into the sacred markets of kale and quinoa. But there’s little doubt that many commercial products are pretty poor quality. Like real food – you pay for what you get.
[ Slides tip jar to more prominent position, adds tinsel, glitter. ]
Erich von Daniken?
That reminded me of a 1950’s juvenile novel that I read in grade school, in which the protagonists contend with a crackpot school official who imposes a raw foods diet for the kids. Had forgotten all about that book.
Erich von Daniken?
Someone even more batshit I’m afraid (I know!). I probably still have it stashed away at the back of a cupboard but I now can’t remember enough about it to even
GoogleDuckDuck it.Isn’t that the tinsel from the spittoon?
You mind your own business.
[ Adds more glitter. ]
Better take this opportunity to settle my bar tab. Ping!
Heh. Bless you, sir. May the screen timeouts of your various devices not occur at the precise second you want to use them.
See, I knew tinsel and glitter was the way to go.
[ Drags enormous sack of glitter up from cellar. ]
[ Speculates about possible prior career as rock musician…or roadie. ]