Foodless was an exhibition of sculpture/installation that raised questions about food, consumption, and sustenance. The title "Foodless" alluded to the simulacral nature of much of our food these days: it looks good, but has no nutritional value. Food is styled and engineered: one hears the terms "eye candy" and "empty calories". It is possible to be starved, physically and metaphorically, in the midst of plenty.
My approach
was based on Georges Bataille's idea of the "informe" as elaborated
by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss in their book, Formless: A
User’s Guide. Bataille used the term “informe” to speak
of an artistic operation which eroded the unity of modernism, setting
up a third term outside the binary opposition of form and content. Using
four categories - base materialism, horizontalization, pulse, and entropy
- the authors describe how the “informe” works against idealism,
representation, classification and structure.
The operations of the formless involve a levelling or downward pull to
the horizontal and a degradation of energy and systems toward disorder
and non-differentiation. Pulsating rhythms or irregular movements also
destroy viewer gestalts. Ideology, content and meaning are eliminated,
allowing only base material to remain. The confrontation with base material
invokes a sense of the physical body - carnal, maternal, scatological,
sexual, sensual.
For Bataille, the operations of the “informe” served to bring
down modernism, obscuring the traditional duality of form and content.
Similarly,
the growing presence of waste is what undermines the authority of the
consumer society and therefore socially waste serves a useful purpose.
Matter, as Bataille said, “has no rights and gets squashed everywhere”
but living in an “excremental culture” (Arthur Kroker), we must
come to terms with our base material.