SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA
ARCHIVES

The Great Noodle Bowl of Reality

At the entrance to 'EAT! The FOOD Exhibition' at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney two months ago, were twp gigantic bowls of plastic noodle soup. Sitting in these bowls, one in each, were lifesize dummies of a young man and a young woman, both nude, both gorging on the noodles floating around them, while watching television.

The texture of the exhibit, made in stone powder, clay, plastic, resin, enamel and wood, was natural enough to create an uncomfortable association between the glazed texture of stale noodles and the pastry dough-coloured flesh of the diners, as they stared with rigid concentration at the television sets floating in front of them.

It was a fitting introduction to a show about food as obsession, as Art. One of the exhibits showed a dainty tree made of potato wafers, with a fork for its trunk.

Another was a work-in-progress: The artist was a Korean chef who sat at the end of a speaking tube, out of sight of the exhibition hall. Visitors could speak to him, requesting a serving of poh-piah which he would come up to make for them, while exchanging no other form of communication with them. After eating the dish, visitors could leave their names and comments on the paper plates, which were then used to decorate the area. Judging by the reactions, he was a good cook!

Yet another exhibit was of bread dyed the colour of Lego blocks, making it look utterly repulsive. On a video, one could watch the progress of food down the alimentary canal, while various short films explored different aspects of nourishment. The one I looked in on was an animation film showing an obese man devouring everything he encountered.

Oddly enough, the majority of the exhibits celebrated a sort of fascinated disgust. It was as if the artists, who must all have had the same nutritional needs as the rest of us, nevertheless chose to concentrate on all that is obsessive and neurotic about food. Very little of what was on display looked inviting, not even a carefully arranged stack of cookies.

One was reminded of mortality, of the ties that bind us to physical existence, of the cyclical need to feed, of the preying and scavenging aspects of food preparation. It was as if their very dependence on food had turned the artists against it. If we are what we eat, then we are also what is being eaten. The Great Noddle Bowl of Reality which nourishes us is simultaneously the soup in which we ourselves are immersed. To foul it is to foul ourselves. To create it is to conjure the powerful magic by which we convert inanimate material into our own living selves. But it a very private sorcery.

Most of us are fastidious about whom we are willing to share these edible incantations with. In traditional societies, the distaste for sharing food resources with strangers extends even to eating areas and utensils. I remember going to a wealthy south Indian brahmin household which considered itself to be very liberated. The family had broken with tradition enough to invite non-brahmins to a dinner party at home. But by serving food on disposable plates and by shooing guests away from the kitchen, the demands of both ritual purity and hospitality were maintained.

First World citizens appear, in some ways, to be less concerned about rituals concerning food and food preparation than Third Worlders. Who touches what matters less to them than what enters whom, and how. Quality, freshness, subtlety of taste, variety and presentation are the new fetishes. Food is treated as a form of entertainment, as if it were no longer a necessity. But it is, of course.

The society that can afford to treat food as fun is strutting its wealth in the face of all the millions of fellow humans who cannot afford to play with it or waste it. While wandering around looking at the exhibits at EAT! I asked myself how such a show might have looked if it had been created exclusively by Indian artists. Would it have been grimmer, perhaps? Would there have been a greater emphasis on the nourishing quality of food rather than its potential as an edible toy? On hunger rather than on hang-ups? On cost rather than value? Would such an exhibition be desirable at all?

The show was set out in a open-plan manner which encouraged visitors to straggle into rooms displaying other shows simultaneously. In this way, I walked into an exhibit which came to my attention because of a thin, shrieking sound I could hear. I looked around and finally saw a television screen on which could be seen, upside down, a young woman's face as she lay, screaming. Her face was dead-pan, devoid of expression.

A small placard explained that she was a performance artist and that she had filmed herself screaming for several hours till her voice collapsed. Feeling rather like screaming myself, and somewhat fed-up with Art, I left the show without making a note of her name.

Manjula Padmanbhan