The Art Institute Profiles Art And Appetite In New Exhibit
By Melissa Wiley in Food on Nov 8, 2013 9:40PM
“A painting is never really just a painting. In every still life there’s the food itself but there’s also a code. This exhibit is about demystifying that code while also enjoying the sensuality of what’s in front of you,” Erin Hogan, director of public affairs and communications, told Chicagoist earlier this week during a preview of Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture, and Cuisine, due to open to the public Tuesday, November 12.
A trompe l'oeil of a scrawny chicken we could all but reach out and grab by its flaccid, yellow neck thus represents not only a feat of artistic bravura but all-American allegory. In its featherless flesh you can read the struggles of the impoverished masses, for whom a Sunday chicken dinner equaled an ever-elusive prosperity, who nonetheless largely survived a sagging economy as well as any tough old bird.
William’s McCloskey’s wrapped oranges likewise depict more than a meditation on the beautiful in the mundane. Within their varying degrees of undress from translucent white tissue paper lies nothing less majestic than American ingenuity itself, as Florida farmers were the first to forestall rot in oranges shipped long distance, cutting their stems and then wrapping them in tissues stem-down inside their crates.
The impact of such innovation on the American diet, however, does nothing to negate the painting’s lushness, a quality that continues to accrete in palpability as you wander the rooms exploring further cornucopia. As we gazed at arrant displays of Victorian tabletop bounty, food’s fundamental sumptuousness struck us afresh, making this exhibit feel more immediate than others we’ve toured in recent memory. “If you have to eat five times a day as I do, this is going to feel very real,” Hogan said echoing our own thoughts.
Just as we are cerebral, social beings who nonetheless need—and like—to eat, Art and Appetite addresses the body and brain in due proportion. You’re free to tease out the social implications of the halved melons before you, weighing the extent to which your desire to taste them is socially and politically informed. You can also just enjoy a very pretty picture.
Pointing to a portrait of a Boston matriarch, Hogan observed, “She was known for having a lot of children, so people usually associate the fact that she’s sitting with her hands resting on a bowl of apples as a symbol of her fecundity. But she also owned an orchard that produced quite a lot of apples. Sometimes an apple is just an apple.”
Walking deeper into Regenstein Hall, we stood before an oil painting of raw beef, observing its tender red encasement of a ripe carrot flush with a head of cabbage, almost intimate in its boudoir lighting. Staring at food for so long, it’s hard not to lapse into some personification. Progressing centuries forward in time in a matter of minutes, it’s equally difficult not to develop déjà vu as you realize our founding fathers were serious farm-to-table folk.
“The founding of the U.S. coincided with what you might call the original locavore, self-sustaining movement,” Hogan noted. “Thomas Jefferson had a huge garden at Monticello and wrote extensively about horticulture as well as his own cookbook. Through this exhibit you can really see how history operates in cycles.”
Although the exhibit progresses largely sequentially, the first room combines works spanning the centuries in homage to Thanksgiving, where turkeys and American myth-making abound. We're reminded that the harvest holiday was a creation of the 19th century, when white, middleclass America promulgated the peaceful Pilgrim story to assimilate an influx of immigrants, staving off a looming urban amorality via wholesome agronomy fable. Lichtenstein’s oversized turkey juxtaposed besides Rockwell’s “Freedom from Want,” however, archly reminds us Black Friday is just around the corner.
Our personal favorite piece in the exhibition, meanwhile, makes a convincing case that the lower 48 are shaped less like Manifest Destiny and more like a swine—minus the curly tail—though the artist, a business magnate exulting in the country’s newly transcontinental meat market, deftly adds one trailing off Seattle into the Pacific Ocean. “This was made in 1876, yet it looks completely contemporary, like something you might find hanging at Publican Quality Meats,” Hogan commented.
The porcineograph maps out each state’s primary pork specialties, celebrating the interconnection of the country via railway as well as the advent of restaurant and café culture, allowing diners to feast on foods grown far from home. New York boasts perhaps the most appetizing signature meal of roast pig, fried oysters, strawberry shortcake, and “uninvestigated drink,” while Cuba is left looking like a plump, brown sausage.
Opulent culinary accoutrements and old menus are also on display, revealing our ancestors’ taste for staples such as baked macaroni and oysters, as common as beer nuts throughout the 1800s. Post-Civil War we see that oysters, even in the Midwest, once littered restaurant menus just like a side of coleslaw and that a mixed salad once meant a mélange of lobster, chicken, and sardines. Modern diets, it must be said, begin to look a little peaked in comparison. Then there’s the fact that we’re such abstemious drinkers.
A tankard of hard cider, John Adams’ morning beverage, embodied temperance in action compared to the nation’s drinking habits as a whole in his day. “Workers used to be given two whiskey breaks a day, one at 11 a.m. and the other at 4 p.m. The movement toward wine was actually part of the temperance movement,” Hogan told us.
Stepping forward into the 20th century, we confront industrial progress and the colorless cuisine it wrought in unprecedented quantity. The exhibit’s voluptuousness wanes dramatically as you progress from the rococo epergnes designed for serving asparagus in the Gilded Age to Andy Warhol’s iconic can of Campbell’s.
Perhaps the Art Institute’s most famous painting, Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” speaks to the atomization of modern urban existence most poignantly of all. The ease with which we can access food and drink in public spaces often feeds our sense of isolation as much as our appetite. When mass production has created more bounty and less beauty than ever before, we become inured to the horror of being a fast food nation. We no longer live to eat, relishing a fundamentally sensuous experience, but eat to live and then question the value of that living. Or so it was before the pendulum started to swing back to the fields again.
A welcome addendum to the crisis of conscience at exhibit’s end is the online cookbook the Art Institute has thoughtfully curated featuring recipes from some of Chicago’s favorite chefs and accessible to the public come Tuesday. Inspired by this pictorial social history of food five years in the making, Chef Bill Kim shows us how to make tea-smoked duck breast with crispy sticky rice risotto, while Paul Kahan prepares lobster thermidor sausage with wild mushrooms and sea beans and Carrie Nahabedian whips up some early winter blancmange with cauliflower, hen-of-the-woods mushrooms, juniper, and pine.
Cyclical as history may be and as Art and Appetite powerfully demonstrates, we can’t escape the fact that there’s no traveling backward in time. We may fold farmhouse napkins in our laps while eating farm-fresh cuisine, but most of us haven’t done much farming. Whether our appetite for sustainability is strong enough to outlast fashion remains to be seen by the artists who will chronicle our progress.