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Liverpool Biennale 2004
(Musuem Mann, with Luna montenegro, video by Adrian Fischer)
The performance lasts around 30minutes, accompanied by Noel Coward’s
‘Mad dogs and Englishmen’. The performers are totally covered in food,
except on their faces, with meats, pates, creams, chocolate spread,
berries, salad vegetables, strategically placed fruits, sweets,
pastries, breads, and so on. Each item of food has a relation to shape
what they are concealing, ham strips wrapping the thighs for example.
Whilst the performers eat from each other, the viewer is able to watch
them through a fish eye lens positioned in the door of the performer’s
space. The performers eat with elegant cutlery, fulfilling all of the
clichéd rules of those captured in a mythological scene, but
paradoxically, their eating manner is quite repugnant, spitting, and
flicking food, showing all of their animalistic qualities. The idea for
the performance comes from the relationship western society has to food,
that being of feasting, a living painting of a glutinous scene. The
piece suggests the notion of being consumed, to cannibalise, linking in
to the Media images of women as objects to be devoured. The performers
are presented as bacchanalian players (reminiscent of Botticelli’s ‘The
Birth of Venus’). Encased in a white shell, surrounded by foliage, and
covered in the most delectable foods, we proceed to eat one another,
morsel by morsel.
