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 Current and Ongoing Upcoming Past
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October 5 through December 16, 2001
Busch-Reisinger Museum (more about the Busch-Reisinger Museum)
Throughout the 20th century, food has been used as an artistic medium in sculpture, painting, collage, and performance. From the art of the Dadaists in the 1920s to the international Fluxus group in the 1970s and contemporary artists, edible materials have been a powerful means for speaking about consumption, politics, or art making itself. Eat Art joins three German artists: Joseph Beuys (1921–1986), Dieter Roth (1930–1998), and Sonja Alhäuser (b. 1969), each of whom has used food as a medium to address concerns of social change, satire, or pleasure.
Dieter Roth, Chocolate Lion (Self-Portrait as a Lion), 1971.
Joseph Beuys treated materials such as honey, tea, and margarine as social curatives endowed with various nonphysical properties through his complex and personal system of symbols and metaphors. Swiss-German artist Dieter Roth used food to visualize the dimension of time as well as to integrate chance as a factor in art making. He liked the idea that the work had a life of its own and that the process of physical decay could be neither predicted nor controlled. Working with chocolate, Düsseldorf artist Sonja Alhäuser will contribute a site-specific work. Interested in erasing the boundary between the audience and the artwork via the interaction of eating, Alhäuser encourages the visitor to actually consume her work. In contrast to Beuys’s and Roth’s work, where food becomes inedible, even poisonous, Alhäuser’s food sculptures encourage hedonistic enjoyment. All three artists, however, use food as a unified call for the conflation of art with everyday life.
The following texts are taken from the essay by Tanja Maka, 1999-2001 Michalke Curatorial Intern and the exhibition curator, in Eat Art: Joseph Beuys, Diether Roth, Sonja Alhaeuser, Harvard University Art Museums Gallery Series no. 33, (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).
© 2001 President and Fellows of Harvard College