Creative Ties
Aesthetic Components within the Industrial Food System View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session John Pauley
The largest and by far the dominant food system in the United States is found in the upper-Midwest and most prominently in the state of Iowa. In this essay, I detail data and evidence that this system is self-destructive and a major contributor to climate change and environmental injustice. From the basic data and evidence, I move on to address some of the reasons why the system is strongly supported by the political/economic and social ecology. The center of this analysis is what I call "the landscape bias" which centers and determines the way the social world sees the landscape of industrial agriculture as fecund, wholesome, and normative. Evidence is gathered from the analysis of commercial landscape paintings. The human ecology is limited by the landscape bias (and the related conceptual scheme) and so there is profound difficulty in envisioning alternative normative landscapes. This bias connects to political-social-economic slogans that "Iowa Feeds the World."
Featured Food as Art Material in Museum Architecture and Art Exhibits: Dieter Roth's Mold Museum and Food Objects in Processuality, Transformation and Multisensory Reception View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jessen Ina
The "Schimmelmuseum" by the German-Swiss artist Dieter Roth (1930-1998) united food as art material in architecture and art objects as an entire installation. The performative act of the work's creation in the artist's kitchen, studio and museum is just as much a component as the multi-sensually perceptible objects and their decay. Olfactory, visual, tactile, or even acoustic sensory stimuli take the place of active ingestion processes, which characterized the reception experience in varying intensity in Roth's "Schimmelmuseum". Chocolates were cooked, cheese and spices were processed, and sugar was liquefied and multifacetedly colored. The material-specific process implies an essential level. Food objects such as the "Lion Self Tower" (1969-1993), which consists of chocolate busts, are continuously exposed to aging and decay through material transformation, insect damage, and external influences such as temperature fluctuations. In this respect, the sensual experience in the reception also changes and is amended up to the present. Even after the demolition of the "Schimmelmuseum" in 2004, such developmental processes influence the objects transferred from the Remise (2004) to the Dieter Roth Museum (today) and thus the current exhibition and reception practice. My paper combines a retrospective perspective on the "Schimmelmuseum" and its presentation and reception practices with today's museum- and material-specific requirements, conditions, and practices.
On the Power and the Trauma of a Tasting: Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's "Asako I & II” and Savoring Food in the Aftermath of Nuclear Disaster View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Fareed Ben Youssef
Japanese filmmaker Ryūsuke Hamaguchi explores the impact of the 3/11 earthquake and the resultomh Fukushima nuclear disaster in his work. He describes his quietly apocalyptic cinema as attempting to “capture a sense of dread as everyday life continues.” This paper examines "Asako I & II" (2018) wherein Hamaguchi merges fears related to tainted food from the affected Tōhoku region with a meditation on strategies to push against objectifying male gazes. In one sequence, a female volunteer from Tokyo helping Tōhoku fishermen is asked to eat local seafood after she has been verbally sexualized by one of the men. As she tastes, Hamaguchi stages a suspenseful pause that generates unease among the audience: after 3/11, does this Tokyo resident find Tōhoku delicacies inedible? While she claims that the food is delicious, her pause shows how the tasting of food can be an act wherein those objectified might regain destabilizing power. Their palate can be deployed to upturn the gaze’s hold. Simultaneously, the particular Japanese cultural conflict that Hamaguchi stages here—where Tokyoites taste Tōhoku seafood in the shadow of Fukushima—points to how the approval of the savoring palate of those from the center can be so vital for food workers from the traumatized site to heal. Combining formal analysis with personal interviews with Hamaguchi, feminist film theory on the male gaze and sociological studies around food safety concerns following 3/11, this paper ultimately reveals cinema's vital interest for food scholars seeking to more richly imagine how traumas taint our culinary pleasures.
