| Sonja Alhäuser (b. 1969) constructs sculptures with edible materials—chocolate, gingerbread, caramel, and cake—that are intended to be consumed by the viewer. She studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where both Beuys and Roth once taught, and where the former artist’s influence loomed large. In contrast to the work of Beuys and Roth, however, in which food is symbolic and becomes inedible as soon as it becomes art, Alhäuser’s work addresses the pleasurable aspects of consumption and the literal conflation of art and everyday life.
Alhäuser is interested in ephemeral materials. In the Städtische Galerie Nordhorn earlier this year she had viewers shoot water pistols at her watercolor drawings until the images washed away. She has used straw to make sculptures that were then burned (City Fire, 1997), and she has created numerous cakes, ice creams, buffets, and large edible sculptural installations, including an edible exhibition booth for Art Forum Berlin 2000.
In keeping with her concern that the audience have a pleasurable experience, she makes her works from strictly high-quality ingredients and gives them expiration dates to prevent spoilage. Each year she creates boxes of pralines in limited editions. When the supply runs out, people who have acquired the boxes can contact the artist for a refill. In short, she wishes her edible works to be eaten, not collected. She does not allow them to be preserved by museums or art galleries.
While traditional painting, drawing, and sculpture appeal mainly to sight, emotion, and intellect, Alhäuser’s work attempts to create an all-encompassing sensual experience, initially through an appeal to smell, the sense most directly connected to memory. She wishes to delay conceptualization of the work by first arousing emotions associated with the scent of chocolate, caramel, or marzipan as the viewer comes into the gallery space. The audience for Alhäuser is a body to be moved, to be prodded into free association through the triggers of the senses.
In addition to smell, the sculptures demand the use of touch and taste. Viewers are invited to break off pieces of each work to smell, taste, and savor it. Alhäuser hopes this transgression will arouse feelings of youth, newness, and vibrancy. Both positive and negative reactions are appropriate. Even a response of disgust is preferable to neutrality and disinterest, Alhäuser feels. Inherent in her approach are an anti-intellectualism, a scorn for distanced judgment, and a preference for the fullness of concrete experience. Ruminations about the status of Alhäuser’s work begin after the sensual encounter.
For Alhäuser, as for Roth, time is an important factor in art-making. She is aware that she cannot control the work once it has entered an exhibition, and she welcomes the process of change as the audience interacts with the work. For Alhäuser, audience participation is the artwork. The interaction of audience and work is a sort of performance that reveals beliefs about how we should behave around art—the rules of engagement, so to speak—and about how we balance what a work requires with what we have learned about the historical or aesthetic value of art. The work cannot evolve unless these conventions, as well as the limits of the museum, are addressed. The audience is needed to effectively complete the work, to help it fulfill its destiny of being destroyed to be created.
It is crucial to note that Alhäuser’s work is site-specific. She takes into account the institution or the gallery space—its history, purpose, or public persona—when she creates her work. Her comments below on the development of the current exhibition are from a telephone interview conducted in June 2001.
Tanja Maka: You were invited to see the collection and the teaching facilities at the Busch-Reisinger in November 2000. How did you put your impressions into artistic form?
Sonja Alhäuser: First I had to digest all the experiences I had during the four days in the city of Cambridge: the students, schools, public sites, and historical import. I spent a lot of time in the gallery space and tried to see a lot of the collection at the Busch-Reisinger, how it was steeped in the history of both America and Germany. I also thought about the other two artists, Joseph Beuys and Dieter Roth, and how they were involved with ideas about exhibition and education during their lives. I put my thoughts into sketches—private little diagrams that related to recipes or food. Over time the sketches became sharper and more concrete, the ingredients became more feasible. It is important for me to create something that fits associatively into the gallery space and the overall concept of the exhibition.
Specifically, the Busch-Reisinger collection reminded me of a treasure box or a box of pralines that contained all the specialties from different time periods. One is aware that the museum is part of a university because there are so many students in the galleries and special attention is paid to making the collection accessible to the public, through the Study Room, for instance. The technical analyses and descriptions of the processes used to discern the “ingredients” of an artwork were really interesting to me, too. The intricate layers of materials—as shown in Investigating the Renaissance [an interactive exhibition in the Fogg Art Museum exploring picture-making procedures in the Renaissance]—were like the construction of a butter-cream cake. This focus on process is essential to all three artists represented in the Eat Art show.
TM: There are two parts to your project: edible objects and drawings. What is the idea behind a display table and cases made of chocolate?
SA: I was intrigued with the flexibility of the gallery space. It looks different for each exhibition: the wall color, the temporary walls, and the display cases are added to present the artworks in the most attractive, didactic way. The works of Beuys seemed to stress social education, and the way works are displayed is the concrete result of that thinking. Having similar feelings about exhibition and education, and working in the medium of food, I decided to produce display cases of chocolate and caramel that have the same dimensions and color as the cases used for Beuys’s and Roth’s works.
TM: Why did you chose to create items that normally play only a supporting role in the museum?
SA: I think there is nothing really unimportant in the museum. The pedestal has a very significant role in the presentation of sculpture; it literally elevates the artwork. Isn’t it true that you see the means of display first and only then the content? Often the pedestal and the placement say something about the value—aesthetic or economic—of the work. I want to point out the crucial role of presentation, of context in the creation of meaning and value. I want to engage the visitor through both the subject of my work—display cases and other supportive elements people don’t usually pay attention to—and the materials, which people are not used to seeing in a museum.
I use chocolate, popcorn, and caramel to construct these objects because I want to entice visitors to nibble on them, to engage all their senses in an appreciation of the work. I allow viewers to alter and, in the end, to destroy my work. The norms of museum-going are turned upside down. I hope that visitors will be able to see my work and other artworks in a new perspective, with curiosity, in a way that removes some of the aesthetic distance. The usual way of approaching art seems quite staid, and it misses the point of actually enjoying art.
Because my installation has to be fresh, I will cast the chocolate parts at the museum a few days before the opening. I use dark chocolate with a high percentage of cocoa, and popcorn to stabilize the construction. The whole sculpture will then be covered with white chocolate, which I will dye with food coloring to match the color of the display cases. Regardless of what is displayed in these cases, the pedestal is the crucial part! The display itself I consider to be decoration, the last stop of the eye.
TM: The drawings are the only element of the work that will survive the exhibition. How are they connected to the project?
SA: The “What’s Happening” Drawing is a kind of distillation of all my thoughts and feelings connected to the exhibition: the development of the project and my ideas about the two other artists in the show. It is also a projection plane for my fictional journeys and, in this case, a place where I can meet Beuys and Roth personally, where a symbolic handshake can take place. I really have wished that I could have met these two artists in person, and the drawing fulfills the impossible dream.
In addition to the big drawing I will show three recipe drawings. One is for “Deer Burger”—as the name suggests, a burger made of venison (with some pork). All the ingredients are listed and the directions are given. I came up with this dish because it’s something you can eat on the road, and it combines some prevailing cultural myths about both Germany and the United States. I wanted to create a dish that was connected to my travel to the States, which for many in Germany is associated with fast food. Venison, on the other hand, reminds me of my home. I grew up in the Westerwald region of Germany, which has a lot of forests, deer, and Wildkammern [rural butcher shops for fresh game]. Every family has its own secret recipe for venison. In my work, I always try out my recipes until I have the perfect combination of ingredients. Then I draw them so the dish can be made again.
The other two recipes are dishes I’ve made in the past. I thought I would make something appropriate for my two colleagues in the show. For Beuys I came up with Hasenpfeffer Stew, a spicy rabbit specialty from the Westerwald region. The hare was an important animal for Beuys, a mythical entity imbued with healing powers. For Roth, I was thinking that something sweet would be better, a cake perhaps. Most appropriately, Layer Cake, because of his fascination with layers of materials, meanings, references, or his own identities.
TM: I’m sure some visitors will be wondering if you see your edible work as a kind of service, a reward for coming to the museum.
SA: No, I’m not trying to reach the hearts of my audience through their stomachs. By using this nontraditional material I hope to prod people out of the habit of “going to the museum to look around a bit,” of memorizing names and dates, which is tedious. To help viewers start all over again, to elicit a childlike curiosity, calling upon all of the senses—that is what I hope to do. What happens outside the museum and inside the museum do not have to be disparate modes of experience.
Tanja Maka is the 1999–2001 Michalke Curatorial Intern at the Busch-Reisinger Museum.
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