A Recipe for "Blackened 'Other'"

When you sit down to eat your delicious meal, it's better that you don't know that most of what you are eating came off a plane from Miami. And before it got on a plane in Miami, who knows where it came from? A good guess is that it came from a place like Antigua first, where it was grown dirt-cheap, went to Miami, and came back. There is a world of something in this, but I can't go into it right now.-- Jamaica Kincaid (14) The exhibit of Argentinean Art that recently travelled to the Phoenix Art Museum in the United States, Cantos Paralelos: Visual Parody in Contemporary Argentinean Art1, features the works of nine contemporary artists, among them Victor Grippo, whose fascination with food pairs economy and chemistry, politics and psychology. Three of his works in the exhibition are particularly interesting to students of food and culture who wish to appreciate art which reveals the structures that become relevant when one begins to consider the larger cultural implications of food: Analogy IV2, The Baker's Little Case3, and The Artist's Dinner4. These works explore presences and absences and so call attention to processes by which the existence of an object outside of the self is established as processes of "othering", as processes involved discursively with food. The art of Victor Grippo exists, on one hand, as a representation of the "other", and, on the other hand, it participates in the structuring of that representation. It is thus made to be a representation of the process of "othering". His art, in other words, creates what it would represent. While Grippo questions the process by which discourse on food becomes discourse on the "other" -- and while he leaves us to understand that the movement from one to the other is itself a process of "othering" involving food and the self -- he presents us with a perspective on how this transformation could occur, suggesting that it is the effect of heat, the effect of the application of excessive heat, a technique of "blackening". NVictor Grippo's sculptural instalments using objects from everyday life encourage a new attention to the relationship between product and process in the making of art and food. Grippo plays with the existence of the work of art as "not-quite-product" through references to the Dada movement in the use of "ready-mades", found objects and everyday materials. In refusing to enter into a hierarchical system that informs the choice of artistic product represented, Grippo rethinks the relationship between product and process in the making both of food and art by simply choosing to valorise process. His work specifically addresses the tension between product and process in food manufacturing through the use of food objects in varying states where the effects of the process, baking or cooking, are visible -- a burnt loaf of bread in The Baker's Little Case, and in The Artist's Dinner, the comparison established, between a dried kernel of corn, a kernel of popped corn to whose initial state a little heat has been applied, and a burnt kernel of corn which has been heated too much and has thereby not been able to "pop". The clue to decoding the transformative process invoked by Grippo's The Artist's Dinner is that it is self-reflexive; it has to do with discourse itself. InThe Artist's Dinner, an installation containing plates of food on a table, Grippo combines object and text on one of the plates with the following equation that alternates between object and script: dried corn kernel (actual object on the plate) "+ heat =" piece of popcorn (actual object on the plate); dried corn kernel (object...) "+ excessive heat =" a burnt corn kernel (object...). While this "not-quite-product" is displayed as object -- we have the presentation of what is on the plate as a product like the other food items that sit on the other plates, but what is on this plate is actually the recipe for a process -- it makes manifest the process involved in the transformed food and which also makes apparent a demonisation of "blackness" that bases itself on ideas about form and function: the extreme case of heat application which results in blackness also results in a product that is unable to be consumed, and in relation to the object preceding it, a product that is wasteful. It is the sum of the visual and the textual, the visual effects of the heating process on the object combined with the listing of the elemental ingredients that make up the object, that offers itself as the discursive space in Grippo's works such as The Artist's Dinner and The Baker's Little Case. Victor Grippo has found a visual recipe for conveying the plasticity of the transformation of energy that occurs as energy crosses borders. This observation is applicable to food substances as well as to cultural substances which food comes to signify (a transformative process in itself). Grippo has found this recipe in his fascination with the effects of heat on various substances, how what we know as an element is altered, made "other" by heat. Societal politics are related to how food signifies cultural identity and it is social critique that ties other elements in Grippo's work together so that the process of transformation that is represented in his pieces is understood as a process of making "other", of "othering" in the cultural sphere. Grippo's work is a graphic (plastic) discourse on the nature of how the addition of heat works in a system of "othering", how discourses on food that would otherwise seem innocuous could be transformed when under "fire", that is, how extremes of process, when put into question, actually reveal cultural "othering". In both the context of the exhibition and in Argentina's larger political context, his perspective is from the "other's" side, as he who has been "othered". Victor Grippo, discussing the influence that his parents' lives had on his work, describes his experience of artistic development in the following terms: "a ceaseless clarity informed my curiosity, my search for a meaning: a path out of darkness towards a glimmer of light" (qtd. in Ramírez 224). His project verges on a confrontation with the notion of demonising that which is dark by associating what is dark with what is "other". The food items present in his work produce a critique of the Argentinean economy and class structure -- the foods are those of the poor: potatoes, eggs, bread -- as well as a critique of the place of the artist in Argentinean society: the sparse dinner is that of the artist, but the table is, in effect, empty, except for the viewer who does not partake but who just passes through the art exhibit. The emptiness of this set table evokes the mass disappearances of Argentinean citizens and intellectuals who have come to be known as "Los Desaparecidos" ("The Disappeared") and who are "present" as a recurring theme in the exhibition: whose presence is produced by the process of showing them to be absent, or of symbolically "othering". Grippo's articulation of the importance of food in constructing selfhood on a national scale and the importance of food in denying selfhood to those we wish to "other" on an international scale is countered by his choice of foods to include in the installations which acts as an examination of identity on a personal level: Grippo's parents were immigrants from Italy who settled in the province of Junín and whom Grippo refers to in this respect as "'eaters of garlic and onion' (and potatoes)" (qtd. in Ramírez 221, 224). His use of the potato is also symbolic of a larger identity that makes reference to the history of colonisation by the Europeans: the potato is native to the Americas and it was only introduced to Europe as a result of the Conquest. Grippo's vision of the process by which food becomes consciousness is an "en-lightening" vision of discourse as a process that transforms food into identity, and thus, by unmasking processes of "othering" food Grippo unmasks processes of "othering" identity. By exceeding the limits of a process by which a substance is transformed (i.e. through the application of too much "heat"), the product can be destroyed. He displays this with items of food in order to simultaneously display how the subjectivity, the identity of certain peoples can be destroyed. It is here that the ethics of Grippo's graphics comes "to light" in the sense of coming to be understood, as well as in the sense of being developed out of how he approaches heat, for the heating process itself remains invisible, its presence only invoked by the visible product, only apparent in the contrast between the piece of popcorn and the dried kernel of corn next to it; done even to "excess" the heating process remains invisible, however its presence is accused by the state of the product, in the display of the burnt corn kernel. The passage at the beginning of this text from Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place talks about the power and the processes of transformation involved in the movement of food across borders. In this passage Kincaid echoes the dynamic found in the work of Victor Grippo, but where Grippo deals on an individual and national level, Kincaid takes an international approach. This larger scale that operates in A Small Place only reinforces the ideological nature of the dynamic played out in the works of both Grippo and Kincaid: the nature of the process of this transformation is driven by -- while at the same time it reproduces -- a system of political power that refuses to be made present in discourse that seeks to target it. It is this system to which Kincaid refers when she speaks of the "world of something" that is inherent in the global movement of food but which she cannot articulate; although it is this system that participates in processes of "othering", the system itself also remains "other". Grippo contributes to an understanding of this political system in attempting to pin down the contexts concerned by the movement of energy across borders: whether those borders are between the territories of self and other, between interior and exterior, or between the contrasted states of a product that has undergone a transformation. It is in the physical representations of these transformations into "other" that Grippo suggests a genealogy of discourse on how products refer to the processes that made them; how, whether it be in regard to food or in regard to the cultural "other", the effects of a process can be traced but the particulars of it remain hidden. Grippo's contribution reminds us what is lost through process. He reminds us that political and ideological processes, if taken to extreme limits, consume the very object they sought to produce. It is perhaps in the precarious balance between a consciousness of identity and an awareness of the object which represents it, as evidenced in Victor Grippo's work, that we are to find a recipe for undoing the process of making "other". Footnotes 1. The exhibition catalogue written by Mari Carmen Ramírez is available from Amazon.Com, and from the University of Texas Press, http://ftp.cc.utexas.edu/utpress/books/ramcap.html. The University of Texas has a website devoted to the exhibit, http://www.utexas.edu/cofa/hag/cantos2.html, and the Phoenix Art Museum's on-line archives of past exhibitions also has a site at http://www.phxart.org/index_events.html. 2. Analogy IV is a table where one half is covered by a white cloth and the other half is covered by a black cloth. On the white side there is a porcelain plate with three potatoes on it; there is a metal fork on one side of the plate and a metal knife on the other. The black side of the table repeats the same scene but in Plexiglas: there is a Plexiglas dish on which are three Plexiglas "potatoes" and which is flanked by a Plexiglas fork and knife set. 3. The Baker's Little Case (Homage to Marcel Duchamp) is a Plexiglas case containing a partial loaf of burnt bread. Underneath the bread is the title followed by the word equation: "flour + water + heat (excessive)". The case is a reference to Duchamp's use of the "valise" in his own work. 4. The Artist's Dinner consists of a large table with five stools seen through (or around) the frame of an open doorway and on which are placed four ceramic plates with food on them, and one empty plate. References Counihan, Carole, and Penny Van Esterik. Food and Culture: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 1997. De Certeau, Michel. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. (Theory and History of Literature vol. 17.) Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, Minnesota: U of Minneapolis P, 1986. Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. New York: Plume, 1988. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Ramírez, Mari Carmen. Cantos Paralelos: Visual Parody in Contemporary Argentinean Art. University of Texas at Austin: Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, 1999. Scapp, Ron, and Brian Seitz, eds. Eating Culture. Albany: State U of New York P, 1998. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Harper, 1984. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Lynn Houston. "A Recipe for 'Blackened "Other"': Process and Product in the Work of Victor Grippo." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/grippo.php>. Chicago style: Lynn Houston, "A Recipe for 'Blackened "Other"': Process and Product in the Work of Victor Grippo," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 7 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/grippo.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Lynn Houston. (1999) A recipe for "blackened 'other'": process and product in the work of Victor Grippo. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(7). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/grippo.php> ([your date of access]).