The Virgin Mary is outshone by various meat products. She has been relegated to the background, behind bits of cow, limp fowl, and the fanfare of sausages that grace A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms (1551). We’re hungry for this meat joy; we don’t even bother to look at whatever spiritual food the Holy Mother has to offer. And if we did, a beheaded cow’s mournful stare is ready to intercept our gaze, covering us in jellied guilt. The “message” seems simple: It’s delicious and despairing to replace traditional Christian values with the cult of cold-cut consumption.
Yet analyzing Pieter Aertsen’s 16th-century masterwork in his video essay Stilleben (Still Life, 1997), Harun Farocki points to another back-staging. Combining commentary on works from the Dutch Golden Age – the birth of the still life genre – with footage of three commercial photoshoots – for cheese, beer, and a watch – he goes further than suggesting the wholesale absorption of an artistic tradition within the logic of advertising. The real “background” – the image’s critical content – now lies outside of the frame: its means of production and circulation. More than Mary or a dead cow, Farocki tells us that this is how an image really “functions.”
The Golden Age of critical distance is however, also, seemingly over. The strategic irony of the Pictures Generation has been exhausted; art has completely internalized fashion’s economic and temporal infrastructure. Add to that phenomena such as sponsored content, ring lights, or brand authenticity and the world’s set has been dressed: There is no outside of the image.
In this endless inside, some may try to find an escape. Cue pre-network nostalgia. Cue the eternal return of Friends. Cue another Lee Lozano exhibition (I love her, we all do). But when we still haven’t found a way to drop out, or managed to make ourselves a door, another question becomes more urgent: As a piece of live-streamed living food, how might we at least make this interior life delicious?
— This text is printed in full our Spring 25 issue, Spike #83 – Food. Copies are selling like hot cakes in our online shop —