CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/6/2025

Art, food and the senses in 'More Than the Eyes'

“Food is a radical tool. If you want to bring up difficult issues, involve food. If you want to know what’s going on in a culture, look at what is happening with food. Food is an arena in which the dialogues between the individual and community play out with intensity.” So begins More Than the Eyes: Art, Food and the Senses, London-based writer Ellen Mara De Wachter’s highly engaging and beautifully designed new study of food as social ritual, personal liberation and spiritual alchemy, as witnessed in contemporary art. “In this period, artists handled and sculpted food, they put it on and in their bodies, they cultivated it and served it and stitched it—all in the name of art. It was a time when working with food was unheard of in many circles, which gave the material a potent experimental charge. These experiments confronted and seduced audiences, producing a range of reactions and behaviors. They nourished the culture of their time, and subsequent generations of artists have fed from them…” Pictured here, a 1995 view of Zoe Leonard’s NYC studio, during which she was working on Strange Fruit, a group of almost 300 fruit skins that Leonard repaired, after peeling, with materials ranging from thread and buttons, to sinew, zippers and more.