More Than the Eyes

Food is something with which every one of us shares a fierce intimacy. As well as directly supporting organic life, it plays a central part in all cultures. It is the vital stuff around which personal, family and social rituals are performed, and it is key to identity, both individual and collective. But food's manifold sensory qualities often mean our interactions with it are relegated to a lower status than other cultural offerings. In More Than The Eyes, writer Ellen Mara De Wachter considers the ways in which food, when used as a material in contemporary art confronts, subverts and ultimately brings us to our senses. Focusing on artists working between 1960 and 2000, the book shows how we have become restricted by a hierarchy of the senses that values sight and reason above other senses, and how encounters with food in art can help us break this bind and return us to our senses. It brings a range of existential concerns into focus, from the somatic, social, political, economic and environmental aspects of food to its relevance to questions of gender, race, nostalgia, pleasure and eroticism. By putting food at the centre of the highly visual art world, the artists in this book quicken a range of sensations beyond visual perception, helping us access and liberate aspects of our experience that have been ignored or suppressed. We discover how Carolee Schneemann introduces a notion of sensuality and play to whole-body interactions with meat; the way in which Hannah Wilke makes a seductive case for recognising and rejecting the imperative for women to be 'sweet'; and how other artists, such as Sarah Lucas and Andy Warhol, introduce the iconography, foods and desires of the working class into the rarefied environment of the gallery and museum.