Feed 2015, at Husk Gallery, London. A collaboration between Louise Ashcroft and Lily Johnson.
This transcript is a record of the Feeder’s monologue.
Two people are holding elongated spoons. A third person (the Feeder) arrives with Tesco bags and unpacks them, then proceeds to feed the spoon-bearers. They must feed one another because they can’t reach their own mouths. They remain silent while they feed one another with food offered by the feeder, who talks about each ingredient as she places it on the spoons...
I’ve been in there the whole day trying to collect some stuff that nourishes you and feeds you and gives you a bit of a sense of what’s happening down there.
*
First I wanted to talk to you about the potato and Smash because they’re kind of, for me, an emblem of that moment in civilisation where man changed from being a savage that went out and hunted and gathered and was quite individual. There wasn’t even really a need for him to take things home to the cave, it was really just about eating in situ and then everything changed because he wasn’t able to eat things like potatoes or rice, but when fire started being used for cooking - that’s when society really emerged and civilisation appeared because people had to collaborate in order to tend the fire and to bring ingredients together and it was a collective process for the first time, so in some ways when the potato became edible (and that also had the effect of increasing the brain, the jaw got smaller, chewing wasn’t as necessary, and then we had to invent things like chewing gum to have a reason for that feeling of chewing), ultimately, civilisation came from the advent of fire and the fact that language developed as a result of that togetherness and the need to create a political structure. You couldn’t just all dive in – you had to share, and have hierarchy. As civilisation came to its sort of conclusion, Smash was invented and the thing about Smash is that it reverses all those things to do with togetherness because you don’t need a group to make it, you can just be there on your own and make it, and it’s alienating, and yet you still have that small jaw and that small stomach. So I wanted to give you a bit of that at first.
I’m going to water it down with some of this Oatley, it’s a product that, for a psychoanalyst, might be quite interesting because it’s fairly self-deprecating. So, on the side of the carton is written, ‘Yes we are vegan, so?’ And I like that because, I thought, not that many products are self-critical. I’ve got the organic version, which says, ‘Close your eyes, pinch your nose, and drink.’ It’s suggesting that it’s not appetising, and this becomes a kind of reverse-psychology technique to provoke desire.
Similarly the Starbucks siren doesn’t conceal the brand’s faults – the fact it’s an evil creature that lures you to your death through a sort of obsession and addiction. The logo tempts you without denying the fact that it’s trying to kill you and destroy the world.
*
So as you’re eating this, maybe think about that moment when the individual became collective, and then, that moment when the collective became individual again.
*
Of course the stomach has always been a separate animal. In African myth, all of the organs were separate animals and they were always arguing, and so the gods brought them together as a way of trying to reconcile these differences. So they were physically attached and they had to then negotiate systems. In the Aesop fable, ‘The Belly And Its Members’, when all the organs had the fight, again, they usually blame the stomach because they see it as being lazy – and really it’s not, it’s doing things, but it just doesn’t go out and find stuff, but it’s still doing all kinds of things.
This is a product I thought you might like, it’s called ‘Fuel Your 10K Hours’, and it’s a breakfast. The name of the brand refers to Malcolm Gladwell, the writer and theorist – he has this concept that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in something. So, it features a Cyclops eye that kind of revels in the fact that there isn’t a goal because if you’ve got one eye then you don’t have any depth perception, which means that you don’t actually need to – you don’t have an aim. The drudgery of that process is the destination. There’s a bit of nostalgia for maybe the communist idea of the worker and that the martyrdom of the process of working is kind of enough. It’s kind of the opposite of this one, ‘The Pay Day Bar’, which fetishises the moment of deliverance from drudgery.
*
As a product, I don’t think it’s as successful because you’re only really able to sell it once a month, if people stick to that recommended ‘pay day’ – I think maybe the pay day loan would be a better one – you could charge a hundred times as much for it as well.
*
This is ‘Lazy Jack’s’, it’s a cider – I wanted to bring some products that were about work ethic because I’ve been interested in the cliché that in the south of America people are said to be lazy, and the reason for that, it turns out, is hook-worm, which is a worm that burrows into the intestines. So it’s not really their fault that they’re lazy, they are just having all their nutrients sapped by a parasite, and when Rockefeller, the oil magnate, found that out he decided that as a philanthropist he wanted to make the workers work harder and in order to do that he had to, sort of, usurp the other parasite that was trying to suck all the energy out of the workers and that was hook-worm. And so he cured the disease, mostly, eradicated it, and – I think I’ll just –
*
He didn’t want to cure laziness, he only wanted to cure disease, because he didn’t believe that welfare should be given out to people that weren’t trying. So it was only ethical if they were not trying because it was something beyond their control.
This is a product that I thought you might like because it’s designed in the Philippines but it’s designed to look completely global, to appeal to global market – ‘Sky Flakes’ – so it looks something you would eat in an aeroplane or maybe in space. And it has this American feel but it’s not American. So it’s sort of reversing the Tower of Babel and allowing people to come together through food. Although, I don’t know, it doesn’t feel like it really promotes togetherness because it – I’ll stick it on with a little bit of Smash – because it’s not a food that’s really about enjoyment, it’s quite functional. In fact, most of these products – I tried to choose the most brightly coloured things, the things with the most interesting narratives, but when it comes down to it you realise that they’re all beige, or brown, on the inside.
*
This is ‘Forces Sauces - Brigadier Brown’, it’s a brown sauce that’s designed to promote – a lot of sauces are quite prone to ideology – so, there’s a Houses of Parliament sauce (‘HP’ Sauce) and this sort of British Army sauce.
*
There seems to be a way of condensing culture down to something that can just be added when desired. This is a pickled onion but it’s endorsed by Barry Norman, the famous Daily Mail film critic and presenter of that film show in the 90s and what I noticed was that in the pickle aisle they seemed to be perpetuating this myth of immortality by featuring names of people or photographs of people that are elderly. I suppose it goes with the thought of conserving or conservativeness.
*
This is prone to rolling.
*
Mary Berry has a salad dressing as well, again, showing the links between things that are long lasting, that unconscious, that death drive and that need to maybe try and – well, I think, just a reminder of that inevitability of death helps you to realise the need for preservation. There’s some sort of link there I think.
This is a nice one: ‘Grenade Reload - Protein Flapjack’.
*
It’s recently won the award of the UK’s most dynamic fat-burner. I’m not sure what it really meant, but it’s using warfare as a way to promote itself.
*
This is some ‘Smart Water’, now, it says on it ‘inspired by clouds’, and I thought that was strange because it’s not really inspired by clouds, is it? It actually is clouds. It’s like having a meat product that says ‘inspired by animals’, but it isn’t, it would actually animals. So I’ll just mix that in, I’ll make a little bit of Smash.
*
This water is not as smart, it’s more frivolous, it’s wearing – it’s sort of wearing an outfit designed by Kenzo, which was inspired by the new David Lynch film. But yet it still looks – it’s just some lines. But yet there are so many layers of culture that led to those lines being designed.
*
I just wanted to finish by talking about chance, and sameness, because I noticed that a lot of things that I was seeing were very much the same, but yet there was always this desire for novelty or surprise or chance. What I decided to do recently is to take all of the labels off all of the tins in my house, to try and give a sense of surprise – I don’t know what is in anything – and so I’ve been doing that in Tesco’s as well to try and reconnect people with that hunting feeling.
I’d seen there was an article in the paper recently where a woman in Nottingham had said that she was horrified to find a sea creature in her can of tuna, and I thought, well isn’t that what you’d expect, a sea creature in your can of tuna? But it wasn’t tuna that was the sea-creature, it was another proper bottom of the sea sea-creature. Like the kind that no one’s ever seen before because it’s so deep. And there was a photo of it with two eyes and it was staring back at her children and she nearly fed it to them – and so I’ve realised that people want surprise and choice but they only want surprise within a certain sort of range of possibilities.
So I’ve got one of the gendered Kinder Surprises here, just as a kind of after dinner – uh, we’ll see what it is –
*
Hmm, a kind of pirate – I’ll just give you some and we’ll conduct a kind of analysis of what – Do you want –? Both? You can have some on there.
*
So it’s the ‘Avengers Assemble’, some kind of pirate with only one eye, again, returning us to the cycloptic fuel – The not-having a destination but actually enjoying the process as the destination itself, the drudgery without deliverance.
*
Ok then, I’ll see you – tomorrow?
This transcript is a record of the Feeder’s monologue.
Two people are holding elongated spoons. A third person (the Feeder) arrives with Tesco bags and unpacks them, then proceeds to feed the spoon-bearers. They must feed one another because they can’t reach their own mouths. They remain silent while they feed one another with food offered by the feeder, who talks about each ingredient as she places it on the spoons...
I’ve been in there the whole day trying to collect some stuff that nourishes you and feeds you and gives you a bit of a sense of what’s happening down there.
*
First I wanted to talk to you about the potato and Smash because they’re kind of, for me, an emblem of that moment in civilisation where man changed from being a savage that went out and hunted and gathered and was quite individual. There wasn’t even really a need for him to take things home to the cave, it was really just about eating in situ and then everything changed because he wasn’t able to eat things like potatoes or rice, but when fire started being used for cooking - that’s when society really emerged and civilisation appeared because people had to collaborate in order to tend the fire and to bring ingredients together and it was a collective process for the first time, so in some ways when the potato became edible (and that also had the effect of increasing the brain, the jaw got smaller, chewing wasn’t as necessary, and then we had to invent things like chewing gum to have a reason for that feeling of chewing), ultimately, civilisation came from the advent of fire and the fact that language developed as a result of that togetherness and the need to create a political structure. You couldn’t just all dive in – you had to share, and have hierarchy. As civilisation came to its sort of conclusion, Smash was invented and the thing about Smash is that it reverses all those things to do with togetherness because you don’t need a group to make it, you can just be there on your own and make it, and it’s alienating, and yet you still have that small jaw and that small stomach. So I wanted to give you a bit of that at first.
I’m going to water it down with some of this Oatley, it’s a product that, for a psychoanalyst, might be quite interesting because it’s fairly self-deprecating. So, on the side of the carton is written, ‘Yes we are vegan, so?’ And I like that because, I thought, not that many products are self-critical. I’ve got the organic version, which says, ‘Close your eyes, pinch your nose, and drink.’ It’s suggesting that it’s not appetising, and this becomes a kind of reverse-psychology technique to provoke desire.
Similarly the Starbucks siren doesn’t conceal the brand’s faults – the fact it’s an evil creature that lures you to your death through a sort of obsession and addiction. The logo tempts you without denying the fact that it’s trying to kill you and destroy the world.
*
So as you’re eating this, maybe think about that moment when the individual became collective, and then, that moment when the collective became individual again.
*
Of course the stomach has always been a separate animal. In African myth, all of the organs were separate animals and they were always arguing, and so the gods brought them together as a way of trying to reconcile these differences. So they were physically attached and they had to then negotiate systems. In the Aesop fable, ‘The Belly And Its Members’, when all the organs had the fight, again, they usually blame the stomach because they see it as being lazy – and really it’s not, it’s doing things, but it just doesn’t go out and find stuff, but it’s still doing all kinds of things.
This is a product I thought you might like, it’s called ‘Fuel Your 10K Hours’, and it’s a breakfast. The name of the brand refers to Malcolm Gladwell, the writer and theorist – he has this concept that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in something. So, it features a Cyclops eye that kind of revels in the fact that there isn’t a goal because if you’ve got one eye then you don’t have any depth perception, which means that you don’t actually need to – you don’t have an aim. The drudgery of that process is the destination. There’s a bit of nostalgia for maybe the communist idea of the worker and that the martyrdom of the process of working is kind of enough. It’s kind of the opposite of this one, ‘The Pay Day Bar’, which fetishises the moment of deliverance from drudgery.
*
As a product, I don’t think it’s as successful because you’re only really able to sell it once a month, if people stick to that recommended ‘pay day’ – I think maybe the pay day loan would be a better one – you could charge a hundred times as much for it as well.
*
This is ‘Lazy Jack’s’, it’s a cider – I wanted to bring some products that were about work ethic because I’ve been interested in the cliché that in the south of America people are said to be lazy, and the reason for that, it turns out, is hook-worm, which is a worm that burrows into the intestines. So it’s not really their fault that they’re lazy, they are just having all their nutrients sapped by a parasite, and when Rockefeller, the oil magnate, found that out he decided that as a philanthropist he wanted to make the workers work harder and in order to do that he had to, sort of, usurp the other parasite that was trying to suck all the energy out of the workers and that was hook-worm. And so he cured the disease, mostly, eradicated it, and – I think I’ll just –
*
He didn’t want to cure laziness, he only wanted to cure disease, because he didn’t believe that welfare should be given out to people that weren’t trying. So it was only ethical if they were not trying because it was something beyond their control.
This is a product that I thought you might like because it’s designed in the Philippines but it’s designed to look completely global, to appeal to global market – ‘Sky Flakes’ – so it looks something you would eat in an aeroplane or maybe in space. And it has this American feel but it’s not American. So it’s sort of reversing the Tower of Babel and allowing people to come together through food. Although, I don’t know, it doesn’t feel like it really promotes togetherness because it – I’ll stick it on with a little bit of Smash – because it’s not a food that’s really about enjoyment, it’s quite functional. In fact, most of these products – I tried to choose the most brightly coloured things, the things with the most interesting narratives, but when it comes down to it you realise that they’re all beige, or brown, on the inside.
*
This is ‘Forces Sauces - Brigadier Brown’, it’s a brown sauce that’s designed to promote – a lot of sauces are quite prone to ideology – so, there’s a Houses of Parliament sauce (‘HP’ Sauce) and this sort of British Army sauce.
*
There seems to be a way of condensing culture down to something that can just be added when desired. This is a pickled onion but it’s endorsed by Barry Norman, the famous Daily Mail film critic and presenter of that film show in the 90s and what I noticed was that in the pickle aisle they seemed to be perpetuating this myth of immortality by featuring names of people or photographs of people that are elderly. I suppose it goes with the thought of conserving or conservativeness.
*
This is prone to rolling.
*
Mary Berry has a salad dressing as well, again, showing the links between things that are long lasting, that unconscious, that death drive and that need to maybe try and – well, I think, just a reminder of that inevitability of death helps you to realise the need for preservation. There’s some sort of link there I think.
This is a nice one: ‘Grenade Reload - Protein Flapjack’.
*
It’s recently won the award of the UK’s most dynamic fat-burner. I’m not sure what it really meant, but it’s using warfare as a way to promote itself.
*
This is some ‘Smart Water’, now, it says on it ‘inspired by clouds’, and I thought that was strange because it’s not really inspired by clouds, is it? It actually is clouds. It’s like having a meat product that says ‘inspired by animals’, but it isn’t, it would actually animals. So I’ll just mix that in, I’ll make a little bit of Smash.
*
This water is not as smart, it’s more frivolous, it’s wearing – it’s sort of wearing an outfit designed by Kenzo, which was inspired by the new David Lynch film. But yet it still looks – it’s just some lines. But yet there are so many layers of culture that led to those lines being designed.
*
I just wanted to finish by talking about chance, and sameness, because I noticed that a lot of things that I was seeing were very much the same, but yet there was always this desire for novelty or surprise or chance. What I decided to do recently is to take all of the labels off all of the tins in my house, to try and give a sense of surprise – I don’t know what is in anything – and so I’ve been doing that in Tesco’s as well to try and reconnect people with that hunting feeling.
I’d seen there was an article in the paper recently where a woman in Nottingham had said that she was horrified to find a sea creature in her can of tuna, and I thought, well isn’t that what you’d expect, a sea creature in your can of tuna? But it wasn’t tuna that was the sea-creature, it was another proper bottom of the sea sea-creature. Like the kind that no one’s ever seen before because it’s so deep. And there was a photo of it with two eyes and it was staring back at her children and she nearly fed it to them – and so I’ve realised that people want surprise and choice but they only want surprise within a certain sort of range of possibilities.
So I’ve got one of the gendered Kinder Surprises here, just as a kind of after dinner – uh, we’ll see what it is –
*
Hmm, a kind of pirate – I’ll just give you some and we’ll conduct a kind of analysis of what – Do you want –? Both? You can have some on there.
*
So it’s the ‘Avengers Assemble’, some kind of pirate with only one eye, again, returning us to the cycloptic fuel – The not-having a destination but actually enjoying the process as the destination itself, the drudgery without deliverance.
*
Ok then, I’ll see you – tomorrow?