Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Aaron Head: What do I know About Bedford Anyway?
BCA Gallery, Bedford
8 December – 2 February
Reviewed by: Rachel Lois Clapham
As the title suggests, Aaron Head’s solo show ‘What do I know About Bedford Anyway?’ takes an openly interrogative look at the once-thriving industrial and market town of Bedford. Bedford serves a dual function for Head. It is the artist’s home town and so acts as genuine case study for his interests in the local, domestic and the everyday. However, Bedford is also both the geographic and conceptual location for Head’s artistic practice. Head’s subject, object and material are Englishness, specifically Middle England, the small town and suburban.
Head works with Englishness primarily through the medium of the everyday itself: food. To this end, the exhibition comprises a fully fitted kitchen, including cupboards, drawers, sink, fridge, lino flooring and a seated dining area. The kitchen is the space for several live food-related performances by Head, but is also home to several discretely placed sculpture and video works that are all variously inspired by, or made from, food. A row of small but perfectly formed terraced houses, Terrace 2 made from baguette, ciabatta and white sliced bread nestle in between two bottles of Chianti on the second shelf of the kitchen fridge. Lurking under the kitchen sink is Tower (Babel), a slightly abject-looking maquette of an intricate tower sculpted from a wooden food palette planted in dark compost. And inside the utensils drawer is a mini seascape, complete with fishing boat, made wholly out of ‘hundreds and thousands’ candy sprinkles. These individual sculptures are low-fi, ham-fisted and definitely worth searching for. Their narrative implications for Bedford, and other towns just like it, are made manifest in and by their materiality: the pitta, ciabatta and white sliced bread terraced houses tell of how food is performative of different cultures, and moreover how those cultures are often concealed behind uniformly working class English facades. The palette tower lurks under the sink as a biblical allegory and dark reminder to us all of the global distances ‘English’ food has travelled, and the languages – and lives – its powerful market economy has encountered along the way.
The themes of Englishness and food, combined with Head’s unapologetically amateurish execution, are also present in the artist’s performance-to-camera works which are displayed on the wall and inside the cupboards of the kitchen. What do I know about Bedford anyway? is a shakily shot look at Bedford from the inside of a moving ice-cream van. Over-pruned hedges, tidy square lawns, as well as litter and people-free roads hurtle past the camera to the tune of the Italian national anthem. This is a cheeky drive-by, a swift undercover nod to ice-cream’s controversially Chinese (according to Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat’s History of Food) origins whilst passing through Bedford’s large Italian community. In keeping with Head’s domestic interests his mum, although always off camera, features heavily in the exhibition. She is the driver behind the wheel of Head’s Bedford ice-cream van drive-by. She coughs uncomfortably when filming Head’s futile, street-side attempt to sculpt masses of unruly soft ice-cream in the ice-cream van’s service hatch. She stifles giggles whilst recording Pallet, Head’s repeated and pathetic attempts to mount a wooden palette from the local food market, to the 1982 Survivor song Eye of the Tiger. Mum and her Anglicised curry are also the main stars of Curry House in which Head films her making the family recipe curry – whose key ingredients include English mustard, OXO cubes and marmite – which he then proceeds to slather over the front windows of her house.
The benign and unskilled appearance of Head’s work is only in part due to the inherently unsuitable sculptural qualities of food. Whether in form, material or subject matter, the domestic – including the overtly homemade and amateurish – are central to Head’s renegade approach to art making. For Head, food is a Duchampian readymade, pre-loaded with narrative. As such, food is made subversive, with economic and intellectual value located beyond its social or practical use. Head’s relatively disparate approach to art making (including shuttling from installation to performance, video and sculpture) and his shambolic or de-skilled approach to each of these individual artistic genres also signals a recognisably contemporary and/or antagonistic relationship to the Academy along with traditional notions of artistic skill and technique.
Duchamp is not the only influence: Head is by no means alone in using food or aligning himself with the everyday in order to prove that the personal, local or domestic are legitimate and effective political mediators. Due to a combination of 1960s European and US Civil Rights protests, the second-wave feminist rally call of ‘the personal is political’, and the influence of post-structuralism (which located meaning and agency in the embedded and personal), visual and live artists throughout the twentieth century have continually turned to their own bodies and individual experiences as a highly political source of everyday, translatable meaning, as well as a charged antidote to hierarchical, removed positions of taste and judgement in traditional fine art and High modernism. Of course, such concerns also mark the birthplace of performance art, a subject never far from Head’s heart. And to this personal and domestic end it is no coincidence that one of the first New York galleries to present performance art in the 1970s was called The Kitchen.
Back in the kitchen it is clear to see food’s art historical debt to the personal, domestic and everyday in contemporary art. For starters, think of Martha Rosler’s faintly psychotic use of kitchen utensils in her 1969 Semiotics of the Kitchen, showing the kitchen as a power-laden space of (female) subjugation. Add to this Helen Chadwick’s repulsive and overtly sexual food fest Cacao (1994) – perhaps the true precursor for the current dinner party fashion for chocolate fountains – together with Sarah Lucas’s very own tasty take on Englishness and female sexuality Kebab and Two Fried Eggs (1992). Mix with Paul McCarthy’s regular comical and violent stage-set kitchen appearances involving ketchup, raw meat and mayonnaise and what you have is distinctly contemporary art in which food manifests sexuality and identity; food that is psychoanalytically significant, and performs so much more than being put in our mouths.
Despite the shared food theme, ‘What do I know About Bedford Anyway?’ has much more in common with performance-based relational practices that use food to engage communities or as a means to a socially engaged end. In this sense, Head shares ground with artists such as Bob and Roberta Smith, who continually aligns himself with the amateur, local and everyday via food in order to openly question the validity of art, and the social role of the artist. Also Mem Morrison’s Leftovers, a series of site-specific performances entirely served up in English greasy-spoon cafés run by Turkish Cypriot families in which Morrison uses food to analyse Englishness, trauma and (Turkish Cypriot) cultural memory.
But perhaps the strongest parallel to ‘What do I know About Bedford Anyway?’ is the work of infamous kitchen artist Rirkrit Tiravanija. Tiravanija, like Head, not only demonstrates a distinctly Kaprowian approach to installation by “creating sensory stuff of ordinary life”1. He also uses his kitchen stage sets and food – including Pad Thai, Vegetable Curry and Cup O’Noodles – to perform, according to Nicolas Bourriaud2, micro-utopian social spaces and communal bonds with audience members. In comparison to Tiravanija’s clear utopianism (albeit ‘micro’) Head’s subject is grounded in an often grim sense of reality concerning the stuff of Bedford and English suburbia. It follows, then, that his artistic aim is much more local (but no less political) than Tiravanija’s. Yet it is precisely because of this specific focus on the local that Head’s desire to unpick and engage with the community of Bedford – and encourage people into the newly located BCA Gallery via the familiar everyday environment of the kitchen – comes across as more realistic, genuine and achievable. That said, as an exhibition ‘What do I know About Bedford Anyway?’ (including Head’s kitchen and the visitors who sit inside it) is perhaps no less institutionally complicit than Tiravanija. Head might be genuinely from, for and about Bedford but the implicit and underlying agenda of audience participation and inclusion is detectable and proves that whether it’s in a church, a Salvation Army soup kitchen or a gallery, there really is no such thing as a free meal.
1 Kaprow, A (1993) Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, University of California Press p12.
2 Bourriaud, N (1998 and 2002) Relational Aesthetics, Presses du Reel
Aaron Head will be performing as part of the ‘Obsession’ series at Modern Art Oxford 8-16 March.
Writer detail:
Rachel Lois Clapham is a writer with Writing From Live Art, a Live Art UK initiative.
rachelloisclapham@gmail.com |
www.opendialogues.com
Venue detail:
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