Oka and Fitch | Statement

"What's for dinner mom?"

"Food for thought..."

"What does that mean?"
"Think about it..."

We like to make things and we like to eat things and we like to make things to eat and to eat things we’ve made.
So, for the past few years, we have found ourselves thinking about the nature of edibility. Things which are edible have, by their nature, a singular value: the potential to sustain life. We rely on experience to determine what is edible. This experience comes to us through our senses.
Babies, with no sense of danger or etiquette, feel free to bring the world into their mouths in order to explore it. As children grow, we teach them that it is impolite—and possibly risky—to go around licking things to decide what is safe or savory. We learn to judge with our eyes, to objectify and evaluate from a distance before accepting things into our bodies and allowing ourselves to be changed by them. The first explorers of what was and wasn’t edible were no doubt weighing the risk of starving to death against the risk of eating something that might kill them. What is it like to eat something that you don’t know is edible? Imagine the first person to taste curdled milk, which had turned blue and furry before it was known as cheese. Perhaps he wondered if this might be his last meal. Eating requires trust in the most basic sense. Inherent in every bite of food is the possibility of life or death.

A friend of ours, Marc Felix, was once the chef at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, where he was responsible for preparing food for the King of Morocco. When the king and his entourage arrived, guards were stationed in the kitchen twenty-four hours a day. They would inspect the daily meat and dairy delivery. They would sleep on the vegetable crates in the storeroom at night. Marc would find himself stirring eggs between two armed guards as he made breakfast omelettes. It was an issue of national security for the king to trust completely in the safety of what he was ingesting.
Like the king’s guards, we are constantly evaluating and inspecting the world around us. We judge books by their covers before reading them. We examine the labels of wine bottles, evaluating typography and graphic design for clues about the quality of the wine. We look at CD covers before listening to music. The more we objectify the world around us, however, the easier it is to move through it without engaging, which sets up a dilemma. The more we isolate ourselves, the harder it is to be moved by experience.
We want the baby’s freedom of sensory indulgence to continue to enrich our perceptions but we also don’t want to give up our adult ability to judge things before allowing them to affect us. We want to have our cake, play with it, and with full knowledge of its caloric content, eat it too. But we can’t always do that. It isn’t wise, or appropriate, or necessarily even good for us to always do that.
However, art operates on a plane where we can have it both ways. Through art we can allow a point of view other than our own to transform us, whether the perceptions of the other come to us in the language of images, or words, or music, or movement. Or food.
Food is nourishment and sustenance for the body, but also stimulates the mind and soul. Food is a good metaphor for how all experience affects us. We digest (process) experience in much the same way that we digest (process) food. To the extent that you are what you eat, you are what you have allowed yourself to be changed into by the process of eating. Implicit in edibility is the potential to embody what has been consumed, to truly own something beyond the material sense.   By applying the quality of edibility to things, we emphasize their inherent transmutability.
Take a chair. It elevates you from the ground, making sitting more comfortable. As an object, that function gives it value. As the owner of a chair, you can value the experience of sitting in it on a sunny day, reading the newspaper and sipping your morning cup of lapsang soochong. Your chair may have additional value if it is particularly luxurious or if it is an object of design or if it was once sat upon by some important person.
If the chair happened to be edible, this would call into question its basic definition as a chair, as well as any claim it might have to permanence. At any moment, its potential for being eaten could be acted upon.
Let’s say you turn the chair into soup and eat it, transforming the chair from furniture that supports your physical weight to fodder that fuels your body. You have ingested the chair and literally made it your own, part of your life and body.   Once digested, the chair is no longer a material object. It has become something you can only experience in memory. What remains are remembered moments of restfulness and the lingering taste of soup.
But why would one want to eat a chair?
You go to a museum to see a painting. Do you own the painting? No, the museum owns the painting, but the museum cannot own your experience of the painting. When you see the painting, you drink in an image with your eyes. You notice how a certain brushstroke pretends to be light, you love a color, marvel at the composition, consider the life of the artist.   Ruminating like this, you digest the work of art and make it yours. You don’t need to own the painting in order to own the art within it—that exists like the air to be inhaled. The art you’ve ingested becomes a part of you, kept somewhere in your mind or your soul and stays there for the rest of your life. You are what you look at, as much as what you eat or inhale or touch or hear.
Legend has it that the Native Americans, when trading their land for beads, thought they had made a pretty good deal, since from their point of view man could not own land any more than man could own the air or the water. Plus, they got beads. In many ways, art is like the land and the air from the Native American point of view. Who can own the “art” in a work of art?
In the late 1800s Wagner came up with the concept of gesamtkunstwerk, or the “total work of art”. Painting, music, drama, literature, architecture, dance, and light itself—all were brought together into a single medium—designed to communicate a message with greater impact than could any of the separate parts. The audience would live and breathe only within the artwork where the stage would expand to include the whole world. For Wagner, opera went beyond the confines of an experience bound by an appointed time and place to become a metaphor for life itself.
At the turn of the 20th Century, an artistic movement called Futurism emerged. The leader of the Futurists, F.T. Marinetti, called for a new kind of art for a new kind of man—one who could fly and transport himself easily about the earth and communicate long-distance by telephone. He imagined a time when vitamins and nutrients would be administered over radio waves, allowing the act of dining to become a purely aesthetic experience. In essence, he brought Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk to the table, incorporating taste, smell and touch into events he called multi-sensory banquets.   He exploded art beyond its traditional boundaries. Why limit words to the printed page? Eat poetry. Why limit painting to the confines of a frame or food to a plate.
Our work is about taking food and shifting the context in which it is experienced—the process of cooking, the act of dining, the experience of tasting—so that the food that we think of as food is not the only thing that we think of as food. By seeing all things as food and food as all things, it is easier to see how we are the product of all that we experience.

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