Art From London Markets, a-n feature

So there is this magical thing, the way that we tell stories, the way we project ourselves into the lives of others and the way that those stories reflect back at us.

There is the moment a baby recognises his or herself in the mirror, when the concept of self is establishing and the self becomes a recognisable entity.  There is the development of visual and oral language, and the stories we tell with these, unlimited by the boundaries of truth, but often containing an element of it any way, even perhaps when meant as a disguise.  And towards the end of life for some people these narratives fade and become entangled while the people themselves are still alive, to the point when the person in the mirror is a stranger in the room, a slow loss of self.  For most of us this loss of stories and of self comes with death.

Because we can dissemble, even to ourselves, then, over a life time we “remember” somethings that are retold family stories and maybe we weren’t even there, or we remember a true moment in a way that is resonant only to ourselves, or we remember a truth, perhaps a real truth, that it is difficult to share.  And these memories, they make up ourselves, as we shape them we shape our being and in a sense they are us.   And when we share them we make our culture, our subjective collective reality.

I have been putting together a proposal for a temporary “Food Church” installation, exploring the ideas of food as sin as expressed in contemporary food and pop culture, and of the way that stories can be influenced by cultural prompts.  I will be asking for Food Confessions as well as food stories.  Iam interested in the power of language so will use text  in the space inviting people to donate a story, to help themselves to food and to give a food confession.  A confession is after all another kind of story, just with a particular moral inflection.

Broken reflections

• artfromlondonmarkets.blogspot.com
• artfromlondonmarkets.com
• National Gallery
• pocketarts.com

Happily I find myself with an unexpected extra day to work on Tuesday 5th March.  Virtuously thinking I would take this day to the DIY that needs doing: fixing the boxing around the now fixed leaky pipes, I arrived at the timber merchants and found I had forgotten my measurements….. so I bought some off cuts instead and decided to make some work.

Making that decision  brought joy to my heart, the boxing can wait.   I  dedicated the whole day to making! Hurray.  A woman’s day present to myself.  The balance between the domestic work, care work  and artistsic work is a challenge even though I am no angel in the house.

Which in turn meant I could spend a good chunk of time  online making applications and registering for opportunities. So I have a place in the Kensington and Fulham Open Art Spaces once again, and am waiting to hear from the others.

So the freedom of the week with the extra work day allowed me time to think about ways of symbolising the ephemeral nature of story and how it offers us glimpses into ourselves:  The broken reflective surface of the gild symbolises the way our stories offer an incomplete and impartial version of ourselves at a personal level, and still the preciousness and frailty of those stories at a social level.   This piece is for Padma.

It also allowed me to mess about with colour, prime the boards I bought at the timber merchant and mess about with my daughters type writer experimenting with ways of combining text gild and paper, the type providing an indented surface.

I am currently playing with new ways to combine selected quotes from the stories collected so far with images.

I went to the National Gallery Early Renaisance Galleries (No51 to 65) to look for food imagery as a way of exploring the history of ideas about food and in particular friuit.  So what do you find on such a search?

In the early rooms there are  images relating to birth or St John the Baptist and Salome.  In the later rooms images of the virgin, with reminders of the role of Eve in original sin symbolised by orchard fruit in bowers and cornucopia around her.  So these slightly later pictures with a stronger influence from classical 

culture and the relationship of the birth of Jesus to the virgin and her role in redeming us from that sin, and then the virgin offering a pomegranate to the baby: Symbolising her  knowledge of his later suffering. 

So the food that is present is not for sustenance but symbolic, and representing female sexuality, bodiliness and sin.  Thinking back to the aspiration voiced in Bee Wilson’s book to gain a healthy relationship with food based on pleasure and without associated guilt, it is important to recognise just how old, and embedded the ideas of guilt, sexuality, sin,  femininity and food are.  They are biblical in origin.  

In the galleries representing the earliest part of this period the images of food were very rare.  The paintings are largely early Christian, lots of beautiful gilding work, where the red bole can be seen emerging from behind the, now cracked, hundreds of year old gold surfaces which were originally made on wood.  

But the food? Where was it?  Can its noticeable absence can be explained by the reliogious ideas of the time, seperating the spiritual from the corporal: It was  the spiritual is being celebrated here.  And the dominant idea of the masculine as spiritual and feminine as corporal .

So I was thinking about the role of fruit to represent sexuality and sin in Christian iconography, and the way this dominated medieval thought. Original sin is after all represented by an apple (or perhaps any orchard fruit)  offered by Eve to Adam and the dominance of original sin in religiosity and in determining the role of women in the Church, and in this early stage very linked to medieval thinking.  

The few images of food in these paintings were largely associated with child birth so that in the birthing chamber scenes that were depited and the preparation of food for the mother can be seen.  This is where the corporal and spiritual meet, in the magical virgin birth and the images of food are minor details in small panels.  But also perhaps a reminder of the link between suffering in birth and original sin and food as a symbol of that sin.

The other images of food are in the early galleries are  associated with St John the baptist, where the  food is short hand for bodily indulgence and sinfulness and again associated with the corporal and sinful tempting feminine.  In “The Assencion of John the Evangelist” Giovanni del Pomnte 1383-1437  one of the minor images on the frame there is a figure who appears to be holding three gilded fruit on a plate probably referring to the dinner that lead to St John’s demise perhaps? In the image in room 52 both these motifs can be found in the minor panel of  Pietro’s “The Baptism of Christ with the Saints” 1387.  There is an image of on the lower right hand panel of the feast table with the head of John the Baptist, and of a woman in bed being fed after the birth of her child.  The other incidents of portrayal of food in this gallery are images depicting  more clearly the dinner which leads to the beheading of St John the Baptist at the request of the dancer Salome, who is the biblical embodyment of female sexuality as an agent of revenge. So original sin and then later biblical sin.

And then we get to the 1400s and the van Eyke’s “Potrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife” 1434. This is the first image without a Christian religious narrative.  This painting celebrates material power and wealth and features some beautifully painted oranges  and a lemon sitting on the windowsill among all the other potent symbols in the painting of wealth and power.  These oranges were rare in Northern Europe at the time, a symbol not only of the wealth of the sitters, but also of the sophistication of the painter, a boast maybe that he had travelled to Southern Europe and seen them growing, and also an indicator of change, in trade and farming across Europe. (Carola Hicks*)  so here we have food as power. A celebration of knowledge, and a shift in knowledge as positive power.

So in later galleries  galleries we can see the change that came about through the influence of the pagan images of ancient Rome, where fertility was celebrated as a good thing, fruit representing that abundance.  This is coupled with the rising symbolism of Mary’s role in the  redemption of Christain women through motherhood of Jesus. The beauty of the fruit in the images of the Visitation and of images of Mary as the mother of Jesus appear.  And we have the exhultation of the asexual mother-woman Mary with Jesus as redeemers.  

So perhaps the early absence of food depiction is more to do with the placement of food stuffs firmly in the feminine  realm, which appears to have been understood to be essentially material and sinful. These stories would be familiar to medieval and early renaissance people, and their symbolism would have been clear.  The later images perhaps illustrate changing thought, with an increaing emphasis on redemption, and the exploration of the material and knowledge as more acceptable.

As we go through the 1400s and images of the Virgin decorated with fruit appear, classical imagery is used, so that cornucopia and fruit are embedded in the images of Mary emphasising her fertility in a new way where there is repeated use of pears, quince, some kind of gourd and peaches, they are notably orchard fruit.  Is the presence of the gourd or cucumber  a symbol of purity and Chirst(Riley2016)?  Are the orchard fruits reminders of the exchange Mary is making in  repressing her sexuality and suffering the birth and loss of Jesus in making up for original sin?  These are particularly prevalent in the paintings of Cosimo Tura  1431-1495 and Carlo Crivelli 1430-1494. Is this the virgin transformed into an albeit asexual fertility goddess? At least in the imagery the influence of ancient  Rome is clear but perhaps not the symbolism.

And yet we are still not clear of the association of femnine sinfulness or suffering and fruit: Delilah cuts Sampsons hair under a bower of grapes in Room 61, and the same artist includes images of fruit with St John the Baptist wherever he goes. And this use of food boding ill  persists across the room in Bellini’s image of the virgin and child passing a pomegranate between them, a symbol of Passion. Mary knows that her child will suffer, her passion is her love for God which overides her wish to protect her child. His Passion in the sense of the suffering of Christ leading up to his death.  So this is suffering but moral suffering.

It’s still dangerous this fruit, consistently dangerous, feminine  fertile and sinful. Even in portrayals of childbirth, which was itself the biggest danger a woman of the time faced, birth was seen as the punishment given to women in payment for their role in original sin so is the food here a reminder of that?

So here we are in the 21st century, and food is still a marker of material wealth, a power show, associated with desirable life styles(as in the Arnolfini). Disfunctional 

relationships with food are still tied up with ideas of guilt and sin “naughty foods” but usually with fruit and veg presented as good or healthy.  And debates around food are often presented in moral (moralistic) terms, and as an extension of that so is health. To change this discourse, and to create functional relationships with food within this environment of plenty requires an understanding of where these ideas originate. To change this discourse, and to create functional relationships with food within this environment of plenty requires an understanding of where these ideas originate.  Food should be seen in relation to health and pleasure rather than sin.  Over consumption and waste as unhealthy and dangerous for the environment rather than evil.

There is something about the creative process as I experience it, a process of collecting and bringing together which starts out quite chaotic and then clarifies as gradually distinctions and clarifications appear.   So it is with water gilding: I realise one of my problems is the the distinction between the area to be gilded and the area where I do not want the glue to spread needs a physical boundary, a tiny trough in the surface.

I have also just read Bee Wilson’s fantastic book “How we learn to Eat”.  Which essentially is about how our consumerist food culture has no boundaries apart from those associated with making money.  So we are bombarded with messages to consume for the sake of consumption.  The health messages  are up against a wall of messages selling us stuff.   And that the family challenge is to create boundaries based on health at home  within that unruly non domestic culture. And that what we need to be creating at home in response, rather than being scary and rigid or puritanical and off putting or guilt inducing needs to include the notion of pleasure at the very heart.

This book which is well indexed  lead me to research more about a Finish approach to sensory food education for Nursery children,  which also has implications for looking after the elderly.  It looks at an approach to food education that encourages the use of all senses by using art, play and culinary approaches, and a concentration on basic natural produce using creative processes to explore and create positive experiences of food produce and cooking and a base line of experience of a wide range of fresh produce.  Anyone involved in child or elderly care might be interested by this:

http://sapere-asso.fr/finlande/

The site is in Finish bit don’t be put off there is an option at the top of the page for English Language.

W London Story No 4

And West London Story Number 4 is about the pleasure of rule-breaking in childhood with a complicit Mum!

This story teller told me of how strict her father was, in particular in relationship to school attendance, but how sometimes without his knowledge her mother would indulge her with a day off school…

“My story is about a childhood memory which is about when we were let off from school which was not a lot, um, my Mum would go to the….my Mum would go to the local butchers and buy some pies, like um Cornish pasties, particular pies, we’d have these for lunch.

Yeah, Cornish Pasties (laughing) yeah. I loved the way they looked, you know the way they were glazed with the egg, yeah…”

So these little food memories, these small pleasures that make up our basic selves…

The process of dementia can be seen as an unravelling of all the understandings we have built up over a life time.  I have not written much about Padma recently, her stories are disappearing, her ability to frame her world is falling apart, and her ability to manage daily basic needs are collapsing, a source of anxiety and anger for her and grief for those of us caring for her.

The Phoenix Cinema in East Finchley has started some dementia friendly screenings, they have chosen some films with great care, they are light on plot, heavy on music, the sound is low and the lights are up. There is a break in the middle for some “Singing for the brain”.  Last week we went and the cinema itself seemed to delight her, the routine of popcorn, and the seats and the setting, she felt like she had been there before.  It touched something that gave her a reason to speak and to be contented.  And above all it demanded nothing of her we will be back.  Use the link below to find out more.

https://www.phoenixcinema.co.uk

And this week I caught, just in time the show “Nature’s Bounty” at Kew which ends at the end of this month, looking at botanical drawings.

http://www.kew.org/visit-kew-gardens/whats-on

You walk though the modern galleries, with these simple colourful beautiful images, floating in the space of their pages, iconic and defining as they were, each in its own space, curated for a sense of calm and beauty and connectedness between the present and the past: between using drawing to clarify and define, and celebrate, and often explore the new. And then you go up the stairs to the chaos of the old gallery with image after image climbing up the walls and it is shocking to the point of being unbearable, like a travel agent run by a hyperactive toddler…. overwhelming.  And then it seems clear to me that without memory, or ways to understand things, to clarify and bring things together, where your senses no longer make sense, perhaps this is what it is like.

Since the last post there has been half term, and that combined with pouring boiling water from the kettle onto my hand while cooking has meant this has been a week of very little art production.  I’ve been doing a bit of reading, see list at the end of this piece if you’d like to follow suit.

I have recently come across these granadilla in markets all over London, externally very pretty, they open up to be like passion fruit but with bigger grey seeds and a slightly milder, sweeter, less tangy taste than the more familiar varieties of passion fruit. They seem to be a newish South American import.  So for a new fresh view, last week we had a look at how food and guilt have been long expressed in art: This week I want to look at the history of food and pleasure, and later food as treasure, none of these ideas are new.

So thinking about the exotic and new: Just as a reminder of the symbolic role of the apple in Sri Lanka, a luxury and rare product in the early twentieth century, I would like to share a recent story from Padma.  Picking up an apple from the fruit bowl she said

“Oh, this apple is delicious.  Do you remember my sister, my younger sister,  she was beautiful, and she was clever, you know she’s not alive any more…When we were children she would bribe me, she would get me to do things and promise  an apple, so I’d do her jobs for her, and then she’d just show me a picture of an apple on the calendar!!!”

So for all my interest in art and food it has to be remembered that the symbol is never a replacement or the real thing.  In addition the real thing can have a symbolism of its own, it’s enjoyment can prompt access to memories that are hard to retrieve otherwise.

In contrast to the last blog which concerned food as symbol in the Early Renaissance and late medieval period it is also possible to find examples from that period of food as nurture and health giver, so the work of monks and nuns collecting and copying herbalist texts, and the work of the Nuns with Hildegaard of Bremen, in describing both horticultural practice and the heath giving nature of plants as food  as a spiritual gift from God (Causae et Curae) are in direct contrast to the ideas of food simply as an expression of desire and a symbol of sin which underpinned the art for public consumption I looked at at the National, which were about the subjugation of the physical in pursuit of the spiritual.

And to think about some questions:

Are the contradictory attitudes to food expressed in different art forms of the late medieval early Renaissance period an expression of anxiety at social change, and is that the same for us?  Is it that living in politico-economically changing times where power structures fall and rise that social anxiety is expressed through anxiety about the very sustenance of life?  Or is it that at the basis of our relationship with food there has always been contrary pressures, and that what is different now is the abundant availability of imports and “new” technically developed foods and really big business with massive advertising budgets and a weakening state?

I think the complexity of Western attitudes to food are long term.  In the late medieval period  people moved away from the feudal structures of the rural environment and trade became central to material survival.  There was a growth in the guilds, becoming a baker , or cook, or market stall holder provisioning the city was a source of income new migrants to the city and in particular for the first time lower class women, independently of husbands,  could make their own livelihoods.  This is the point when lower class women became able to own property and business rather than solely being regarded as property themselves.

I also think that current socio-political and technological changes are relevant:  Why as reported recently in the Guardian in its review of the British Birth Cohort Studies  does it become apparent that the current rise in obesity in the UK started in the 1980s?  In contemporary culture, especially as expressed in a city like London, this is also a period of flux and change.  There is the increased power of Transnational Corporations, the changing and weakening role of government, in particular the expression of these in the context of global economic crises, massive advertising budgets cthat can be contrasted  with the increased democratisation of communication though the internet,  added to which a marked rise in consumerist culture.

This is at the same time as a shift towards increasing women in the workplace, contrasted with the  pressure on those women to conform to unachievable ideals, and without a sufficient corresponding shift towards shared domestic duties across gender.  Also it is  a period of increased difference in the wealth from  the top to the  bottom of society.  We are in a period where we are struggling to understanding our ideas of a social contract which underpinned the health gains of the period between 1945 and the 1980s where the extreme excesses of income differential were compensated for by the welfare state.  The cohort studies have been a  useful source of information that has lead to progressive changes in maternity care and other areas. Let’s hope they become a source for change in food relationships based on concrete research.

In the middle ages the plague and the freeing up of people from bonded labour led to increase trading and population drift towards cities like London: This move to urban centres and the building up of trades, selling of produce or the early processing of produce to make them easier to keep and sell is the start of the city as market and reflects the move to a money economy .  The plague really was the beginning  of the end for bartering, it was from this time that peasants were paid rather than indentured, but this transfer to monetary wealth caused the old powers great anxiety. During feudalism food produce was either grown directly by the powerful or collected as taxes from their indentured peasants.  At the top of the feudal heap was the King, then came the Lords and Monasteries  The feudal lord/monastery taking most of the produce in exchange for the land and ‘protection ‘provided.  So the late medieval early Renaissance saw a break down in the social order as it was understood at that time.

In reaction what people from any class could consume was strictly and directly controlled through the Sumptuary Laws which covered not only clothing but also food.  The greatest part of everyone’s income was spent on food and it was an important symbol of wealth. On the part of the Royals, the sumptuary laws were brought in to control conspicuous consumption by lower class people and to shore up the powerful classes, and as a sort of protectionism, to discourage the importation of cloth from Europe and increase the use of wool from the UK, and the consumption of fish rather than meat.  In addition they had a public order aspect where clothing was an official indicator of class and gatherings of groups of peasants could then be easily recognised for their potential threat. Food preparation and selling businesses were incredibly materially important.  And in response to periodic shortages and the expansion of the known world food importation grew.  The feudal system gave way to money,  money  and trade was controlled through guilds some of which are still important in the city of London.

And in contemporary London the growth of Farmers Markets allows access for the more wealthy to fresh produce.    Traditional street markets which serve the less well off are in places being revived and others under threat from the privatisation of the land they have been on for centuries.

An appreciation of the sensory can be found still within the ranks of work by Monks and Nuns during the medieval period, including work by the Nuns led by Hildegaard of Bremen(*1 & *2) show that food was also understood in relation to health and religiously as a gift from God to be enjoyed.

These Herbalist texts are contained in books rather than alter pieces, and interestingly would have been largely exclusively in the hands of the educated religious elites who were the literati, and in fact though more religious also more likely to have access to excess:  In the Feudal period taxes of produce would have been paid to the monasteries and convents. And in a sense it could be argued that the convents and monasteries were often centres of consumption, certainly the allowances for eating and drinking for monks and nuns may give some truth to stereotyped fat monks like friar Tuck. They are beautiful works, and there were herbal manuals that were beautifully illuminated and illustrated.  They also link food with pleasure and mental and physical well being. (G Riley*1)  So do these books have a relationship to the many and various cook books that sit on out shelves?

However at the time of the witch hunts the knowledge contained within could get you accused of witchcraft.  The witch hunts were a hysterical reactionary force which had their roots in puritanism, magical thinking and anxiety at social change.  As is often the case the socially less powerful were held to blame for societies ills, and so unmarried women, travelling medicine people, and people otherwise marginalised by society were far more likely to be accused.

The shift of people and power to urban rather than rural settings created an environment, much like our own of flux and change, of power shifting from the hands of one elite into the hands of another, and of counter cultural manifestations which looked back at an idealised past.  That sounds very familiar, and in addition the increased literacy of the urban trading classes has its parallels in the increased democratisation of communications in the current age of twitter, blogs and e communications.

It is not surprising that food had strong emotional connections both positive and negative when very high proportions of incomes  of the both rich and poor were spent on food so it was even more powerful as a symbol of wealth and power.  And women who were less powerful had less food security in society, where they were expected to eat last in the family, were unable to secure land, and if nuns were more likely to fast (Law), was giving way to women able to feed themselves.   In the same way the shift in social structures that allowed women to own property rather than be regarded as property have their parallels in increased participation in the paid work force by women in the 20th and early 21st centuries, and just as then there is a backlash surrounding that change.

But the greatest threat to your ability to survive was, as it still is, poverty.

Food as a marker of status was well established.

Material consumption was clearly controlled, more controlled than it is today where in places like London excess provision is more the norm ( Bee Wilson). So can we link the idealisation of a non physical spirituality, the antagonistic duality of the human as expressed in Thomism and later Puritanism, can this be compared with some of the more extreme versions of diets? The kind of purist diets which are not successful as a means to achieving health,  as they don’t lead to the development of healthy moderate eating habits, but are more related to a disordered relationship with sensuality?  And that idea of extreme control of the physical which appears to underpinning of anorexia?

So while there is a long western history of anti-sensuality including food and linked to sex, there is also a long history of food as health giver and linked to the pleasures of life in a good way and the struggle between the two has a long history of duality in our culture.

The conflict between food as a basis for health and pleasure, and food as a source of guilt persists in contemporary London food culture within the frame work  of overall excessive consumption, waste and uneven availability of fresh produce which actually threaten health.  In addition there is interference of the most powerful forces the promotions of the large corporations of foods which have been developed with the subsidy of the state (US space and military food technology sold on in products to the public)  countered by promotions of food concerned with naturalness or  the ability to trace the food to its producer.     Both sides of this argument fall into two camps: Using guilt and sensuality within the context of “naughtiness” or “sinfulness” and puritanical arguments for health and goodness.  Sometimes sinfulness is poised as environmental degradation, sometimes the promotion of fresh food is posed as oppressive to women, an alternative “sin”.

So that while we may feel like we live in a modern largely secular society, we are still dominated by ideas about sensuality which link food with sex sin and naughtiness, illustrated by hashtags like foodporn.  This does not help us to develop a healthy relationship with food

Desire has always had its complexities, there have always been forces trying to influence and distort desire because it is powerful and at the basis of human nature.  In a society which is increasingly consumerist it is not that surprising that more people are consuming more.  It is in the interest of business that that is so.

If you are interested in reading more around the subject, or more lazily feel like watching a bit of TV here are some useful books and TV programmes, many of which are available online.

1. Gillian Riley, Food in Art 2015

2. Whitney Chadwick, Women Art and Society (1980s edition)

3. TV: “Cooked”, Netflix

4. TV “Food Unwrapped” Channel 4

5. TV ” Huw’s War on Waste” BBC

6. Jay Raynor “A Greedy Man in A Hungry World”

7.Jennifer Lawler, Encyclopaedia of Women in the Middle Ages,

8 Bee Wilson “First Bite: How we learn to Eat”

9 Features on UK Cohort Studies Guardian, Saturday/Observer Sunday 27/28 Feb 16