
DATE: Wednesday, May 21, 1997               TAG: 9705210055

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY TERESA ANNAS, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  129 lines

ART YOU CAN SINK YOUR TEETH INTO EDIBLE EXHIBITS ATTRACT ART LOVERS AND FOOD FIENDS ALIKE

LAST WEEK, art curator Neill Hughes was glaring at a 1,200-pound couch, fretting over how the heck to move it.

He couldn't hoist it mechanically because the sofa was made entirely of hardened salt. It might disintegrate. It might collapse into a lumpy mound.

When you're using food for art, who can tell what might happen?

Todd Slaughter's salt sofa is just one of the artful edibles on display in ``Food for Thought,'' a sculpture exhibit that recently opened at the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia in Virginia Beach.

The traditional idea of the artist's studio, smelling of oils and varnishes and cluttered with easels, was ground in the garbage disposal with this show. Instead, the 16 artists were pushing grocery carts and baking cakes.

Also to be savored in the exhibit:

Chocolate cakes stacked on the gallery floor - 160 to start, with artist Terrill Gadde of Cambridge, Mass., adding 16 each week.

A year's worth of used coffee filters and muffin papers from the breakfasts of New York artist Karen Luner. The papers were lovingly glued onto canvas and arranged in a very long grid on a gallery wall.

A clear plexiglass suitcase filled with paprika, suggesting San Francisco artist Martha Schlitt's culinary tie to her Hungarian heritage.

Lemons and oranges tattooed with innocuous pictures of kitties, doggies and children by Illinois artist Donald Stahlke; as the fruit rots and dries, the imagery changes, too.

The show was organized by the Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wis., where it was on display last summer.

In her essay, organizing curator Alison Ferris attempted to place such work within an art historical context. She brought up Brueghel's rendering of feasts, and Caravaggio's paintings of fruit. At that time - the 16th and 17th centuries - food imagery connoted survival and life's trivialities, she wrote.

For Ferris, the contemporary use of actual food as an art material starts with the late German artist Joseph Beuys, whose butter-stained litany of foods and poetry gave the exhibit its name - ``Food for Thought.''

``Not unlike the paintings of food from earlier centuries, all of these works, in one way or another, refer to the fact that food is an integral part of our emotional and symbolic rituals and events,'' she wrote. ``These moments, sanctified by food, bring people together.''

The artists use the food as metaphors for nurturance, transformation and decay. In keeping with the latter, ``most of these works will begin to disintegrate over the course of the exhibition,'' Ferris wrote.

Apparently, some Sheboygan gallery-goers saw it as a half-baked idea.

``We had a lot of mixed reactions,'' said curatorial assistant Melanie Vis. One piece, ``Wheel of Fortune,'' consisted of chocolate cakes. ``A lot of people did not see the meaning. They just think, `Oh, it's a pile of cakes. What a waste of food.' That's kind of the mentality of the people in this area.''

When Vis explained the meaning behind the menu, people could appreciate it. ``I'd explain how cake seems to permeate everything we do - whether it's a birthday, a christening, a graduation, wedding. There's always a cake.''

Some people returned several times to watch pieces in the show gradually fall apart. A tower made of candy caramel by Californian Gay Outlaw slowly melted during the show.

By late summer, Vis said, ``it had kind of a Leaning Tower of Pisa effect.''

Back at the couch, Hughes - acting curator and preparator for CACV - was figuring it would take six strong people to move Slaughter's sofa.

And if six can't lift it?

``We have options. We just haven't dreamed them up.''

Slaughter's matching chair and sofa soon would be installed on a wooden pedestal that hides 23 humidifiers. Glass walls would enclose this uninhabited living room scene - and its humidity, intended to make the furniture flake like pastry.

The artist created ``Comfort Zone'' by making hollow rubber molds of a sofa and chair, then casting the molds with 1,200 pounds of salt mixed with glue.

``At this point in time, I'm working with specific metaphors involving domestic situations,'' Slaughter said from Ohio. ``The position of the two pieces of furniture implies people sitting there, in close proximity. And a certain awkwardness. And the fact that the salt is deteriorating.''

What is Slaughter saying here?

``Entropy. I think of it not as a negative thing. More of a natural thing. Maybe it has a lot to do with the fact that I'm 54 years old.''

The piece implies a peeling off of layers in relationships and in life. ``It's about dying in a literal sense, and in the sense of lost opportunities.''

Pause.

``I'm still thinking of having children, and still feel perplexed about it.''

Terrill Gadde, the cake baker, also acknowledged autobiography in her work.

``The reason I chose chocolate cakes had to do with my own overeating of chocolate, and how it was the color of feces. I think it spoke to how you can treat yourself in overeating - which is very badly,'' said Gadde, who chopped carrots as she spoke on the phone.

But she also connected to the sense of celebration inherent in cakes.

``They're a metaphor for life. Cakes can keep an awfully long time. They can be celebratory without any decoration. There's something that reaches from a very long time ago about cake.''

She titled it ``Wheels of Fortune,'' because while cake can provide a kind of comfort, it can turn on you, and make you fat.

In conceiving the piece for the Kohler exhibit, Gadde wanted to incorporate a ritual or performance aspect. So she baked 16 cakes a week, packed them and shipped them off, to be added to her growing stack. She'll be doing the same for Virginia Beach.

The memory of all that baking is still fresh in her mind.

``I considered it a performance piece. Not that I was a performer, but that something was arriving each week,'' she said.

``I'm in the process of halfway making dinner. And I've probably made this dinner a hundred times. Each time it's another creation, because it's not quite the same.

``And, the cakes are like that.''

``Wheel of Fortune'' is a reminder that the kitchen is a place of creation that is taken for granted.

``It's a part of our lives in such a way that we don't notice it. It's kind of relegated to the bottom of the heap,'' she said. ``But the oven is magic. You put these things together. You don't have to be a chemist. And by God, you can eat it. It's almost like alchemy.

``Alchemy in the kitchen.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photos

DONALD STAHLKE, 1994

``Boy Simultaneously Eating & Drinking''

(Paint on a lemon)

MARTHA SCHLITT, 1995

``Upon Arriving at Ellis Island''

(Paprika, plexiglass)

TODD SLAUGHTER, 1993

``Comfort Zone''

(Cast salt, steam vaporizers, glass, wood)