This bacon teacup is from Meat After Meat Joy, an exhibition of artists who work in meat (yes, there are more than one!), now running at the Daneyal Mahmood Gallery in New York. If you think bacon art is a contemporary phenomenon, you'll find it interesting to learn that artists have been using meat in the work since at least as far back as 1964, when Carolee Schneemann staged a "happening" involving chicken, sausage, raw fish and several semi-nude performers at the Festival of Free Expression in Paris. Other works at the Meat After Meat Joy exhibit include an animatronic meat shoe that twitches with electricity and a lard and meat flag that is already swarming with maggots. Mmmmm.
We've had Obama Pez dispensers, Obama sushi, Baracktoberfest Beer, now this: A portrait of our 44th president rendered entirely in breakfast cereal. Click through to CerealArt.com for a larger image. Though the artists, Hank Willis Thomas and Ryan Alexiev, don't specify which cereals they've used, I think I spy Cheerios, Cap'n Crunch, Honeycomb, Lucky Charms and Froot Loops.
What kind of statement is the portrait trying to make? Thomas and Alexiev have this to say: "The sugary sweet mosaic, made of thousands of cereal bits, depicts idea of what a healthily balanced breakfast (democracy) might look like when considering the role that marketing plays in myth building around corporate and political brands."
There's Mona Lisa, dressed in folds of deep green kelp, her tofu noodle hair hanging down over her white rice face. And there's Van Gogh's iconic self portrait, its frenetic lines rendered with vari-colored snippets of leek. The melting-faced horror of Munch's The Scream is represented by psychedically twisted slices of carrot and sweet potato. The goulishly curious medical students in Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson have had their faces replaced with bulbous knobs of pickled cabbage; the cadaver is, cleverly, a hollowed-out squash filled with beans. Warhol's Marilyn Monroe gets the cabbage treatment too, Picasso's The Dream is a vision in tofu, and David's Napoleon Crossing the Alps looks ever-so-slightly less noble on a potato steed.
Give a bunch of super-crafty DIY types the theme of "indulgence," allow time for their creativity to fester, and what do you get?
You get Sugarcraft, more than a month of sugar chandeliers, felted ice cream cones, watermelon earrings, and any other food-cum-craft project that you could dream up. The designers range from Heidi Kenney of My Paper Crane fame, who crochets food items complete with googly eyes and facial expressions, to the UK's Alison Tennant, who makes confections out of polymer clay - at a 1:12 scale.
Any way you slice it, these artists have some great ideas about indulgence and how it is represented in various mediums (sand art, sugar, paint, needlepoint...the list goes on and on). Go ahead: indulge yourself in a few photos from this year's Sugarcraft. And if you want to see them in person, get over to Chicago - it's going on through August 9.
One more great eggs-ample of food art! This piece was created by artist Henk Hofstra, and the Wooster Collective reported back in May about the project that's located in Leeuwarden, Netherlands.
Each egg is about 100 feet wide, and they were spread out in one of the largest squares in Leeuwarden, called Zaailand, where they'll be walked on and photographed for six months.
Diana Eid of Inventor Spot said that this art project was just made for Google Earth, which tickled me to no end. I wouldn't have thought that, but I think it's great that someone did. New and creative ways to view food and art are always welcome in my book.
This is Liz. She's an artist who works in a very delicious medium; Jell-O.
In this particular clip, she shows how she fashions San Francisco's entire Mission District out of the gelatin dessert.
The process is simple, but tedious: Liz takes pictures of the District, and then uses the photos to build molds out of balsa wood and foam core. Then, she builds silicone rubber molds around the sculptures, and when they dry, she makes the Jell-O and lets it set in the molds.
(Oh, and Liz makes Jell-O the way us normal people do, but sometimes she adds additional coloring to make the sculpture more vibrant). She also sprinkles dry Jell-O around the model to represent streets and parks).
One caveat about working with Jell-O (besides the overwhelming urge to consume your sculptures, of course) has to be the fact that eventually, it gets moldy.
But instead of letting that ruin her work, Liz uses the moldiness as a metaphor for change and adaptation within urban areas.
Here at Slashfood, we tend to post a lot about food art. Like, a lot.
So, obviously, I didn't hesitate when I found these crazy creations. Made primarily out of produce and baguettes, these ain't your grandmomma's food sculptures.
The images have that creative, slightly eerie feeling of those in Joost Elffers' books, like Food for Thought.
I don't believe that I could ever make a chocolate portrait that looks as good as the ones made by Emily W. Jones featured on Flickr. However, thanks to a step by step guide on WikiHow, I now know how to make a basic one if I ever get inspired.
The instructions don't look that hard. They involve tracing a photograph onto waxed paper and then piping milk, dark, and white chocolate onto the traced image.
If you are artistically inclined, you should give this a shot! It would be an amazing gift for a chocoholic!
The Museum of Modern Art Store might not immediately pop into your mind as the perfect place to fulfill all your kitchen needs.
Makes sense - much of its items are pricey and elegant, and not appropriate for everyday use. But if nothing else, it's certainly fun to peruse the products and place them on your mental kitchen wish list.
From inside-out martini glasses to panda-shaped pink lunch bags, MOMA's got funky kitchenware covered. Check out some of the fanciful finds below.
In case you didn't know (I sure didn't), there is a Japanese ban on beef imports from Britain. That seems pretty straightforward, but it ended up causing some problems for an art exhibit traveling to Japan recently.
It seems that part of a retrospective of the British Turner Prize are works by artist Damien Hirst. Here's where it gets tricky. Hirst's art consists of preserved cows, as in whole dead cows stored in a formaldehyde solution. When presented with these preserved cows at customs, officials had to be convinced that these were not cows for consumption. Officials also had a problem with the possible fumes from the formaldehyde, but they were finally convinced that no one would be harmed.
I am all for art, but preserved cows? I also have to wonder what kind of bureaucrat would be so worried that someone would consider this stuff edible that they thought about denying it entry into the country. I guess a ban is a ban to some people.
There's a new magazine out of France, and it's kinda cool in that weird, hipster-y PoMo sort of way. It's called Yummy, and its calling itself a "JunkFoodDesignMagazine" (because spaces between words are so passé).
The magazine - and web site - are mostly en Français, but obviously, art transcends language, and all that jazz, so your lack of French-speaking skills will not hinder your appreciation - or revulsion - from the site.
The featured art runs the gambit from Whodonut?, Virginia Barre's slightly disturbing illustrations of people living in a fast food nation, to Show Her, which seems to be a big excuse for the artist to show photos of a half-naked woman in a rainstorm, occasionally holding a soda bottle (hence, the food connection, I suppose).
Go check it out - you might just be inspired to make some food art of your own. Or just be really grossed out.
I posted about edible landscapes yesterday, in reference to Carl Warner's photographs of happy broccoli forests and nifty Parmesan cheese villages.
Well reading more, I stumbled onto a site featuring English artist Gayle Chong Kwan, essentially Warner's darker twin. Kwan also makes and photographs edible landscapes, but hers are sinister, decaying. Think shadowy jungles of rotting lettuce, desolate icy wildernesses made of butter and lard. Kwan calls the project "Cockaigne," after a mythological glutton's paradise from the 14th century, where the streets are paved with pastry and the sky rains cheese. The photographs are intended as a critique of global tourism, consumerism and the quest for utopia. Heavy stuff, and startlingly beautiful.
Broccoli forests sprouting from powdered cumin soil. A cauliflower coral reef. A pea pod boat drifting on a sunset sea of pink salmon.
London photographer Carl Warner constructs elaborate landscapes made completely of food, from mozzarella clouds to an entire village sculpted from chunks of Parmesan. There's a photo gallery of his work up on the BBC website. It looks look ultra-time consuming and amazingly cool.
We clearly have a deep-seated fascination with edible landscapes - think about the candy testing room in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, with its lollipop plants and chocolate river, or the lunch pail trees in Return to Oz. Or remember the town of Chewandswallow, where it rained juice and snowed mashed potatoes in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, a seminal text for the (4-year old) budding foodie?
Anyway, check out the photos. They'll have you gnawing on the nearest tree limb.
If you ever happen to find yourself with 7,200 -- that's 600 dozen -- bananas, you could bake a year's worth of banana bread for you, your family, friends, neighbors, and probably people you don't know, or you can create a work of art like Stefan Sagmeister's.
The artist's work, which includes this banana wall thing (I have no idea what to call it -- a sculpture?) are on display at Deith in NYC. All 7,200 of the bananas are real, and according to Make, "it smelled like 7,200 bananas too, slightly rotting." There are more pictures on flickr.
You remember: she's the chewing gum fanatic in Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory who broke a world record by chewing one stick of gum for three months straight. And we're guaranteed that Maurizio Savini would be her hero.
Savini's chewing gum sculptures have getting a ton of press lately, probably less for artistic merit and more for pure gawking value. For the record, all of the gum he uses is un-chewed, and according to a bio on nonprofit art foundation Pastificio Cerere's site, Savini chose gum as a medium for its barrage on our senses and because it reminds him of childhood.
Check out more of his sculptures here, and then give us your opinion.
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In case you didn't know (I sure didn't), there is a Japanese ban on beef imports from Britain. That seems pretty straightforward, but it ended up causing some problems for an art exhibit traveling to Japan recently.
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