Gullet, video installation
Meirav Heiman: Family Dyes
Text by Tami Katz-Freiman
"Wanted for a video art project: individuals, couples or families for
a documented meal." This was the wording of Meirav Heiman's ad published
in the paper and on the Internet toward the current show. After a long
series of interviews and meetings, the final participants were selected,
among them actual relatives of the artist, and were cast in various combinations
to form six fictive families. These ranged from the traditional nuclear
family of a father, mother and two children, through an alternative family
of two grandmothers and two grandchildren, to a family of two mothers,
an aunt and three children.
For each of these invented families the artist matched a residence
in the suburbs; she modeled the dining and living rooms in keeping with
their staged image, and invited the participants for a meal she cooked
by herself. Her instructions toward the meal shoot were minimal yet
strict: the participants were asked to come dressed in a certain color,
to eat naturally and finish the meal within exactly twenty minutes without
talking to each other. Each of the meals was documented in a single
shot with a static camera, without rehearsals. Through editing manipulation,
Heiman played the meals in reverse, so that they are in fact seen from
end to beginning at an accelerated synchronized speed.
The show is made of five monitors, simultaneously and incessantly screening
five meals in five colors: yellow, orange, red, black, and white. All
the meals begin and end at the same time, and are screened in a loop.
The sixth meal, likewise familial, is projected on a separate wall,
only this time the diners - father, mother and three children - are
seen pulling out bags of snacks and cans of drink, eating them while
jogging in the open landscape.
The white meal is held in an antique-style living room. The dining 'family'
includes two grandmothers and two grandchildren, a boy and a girl, who
eat cream cakes and drink milk. The red meal is an all-girl meal - two
mothers, an aunt and three daughters. It is held in a living room against
the backdrop of a collection of reproductions and tacky wall decorations.
Some of the participants wear red wigs. They drink wine and eat salmon
and spaghetti with ketchup. The yellow meal's participants are a father,
a mother, a son, and a daughter - a traditional nuclear family - all
wearing blonde wigs, eating corn and drinking lemonade. Two sons and
three mothers eat the most aristocratic, black meal in a fancy dining
room (one of the mothers dines wearing gloves). They eat chocolate fondue
and drink coke. And in the orange meal (a candle-lit breakfast), a redheaded
family - father, mother and three daughters - eats in a standard dining
room. The menu consists of pancakes and orange juice.
This is not the first time Meirav Heiman cooked meals for strangers,
creating human situations of anonymous intimacy. In the project Sister
of Mercy, at Borochov Gallery, Tel Aviv (January 2001), she documented
blind-date stories with people she met in chat rooms on the Internet,
and invited for a meal at home or in places where they felt comfortable.
There too, Heiman dictated the date conditions: you will receive a meal
and intimacy and in return, expose your identity and be documented with
me. The results attested to the bizarre nature of the encounters: with
one of them she was photographed in bed, with another - during a romantic
candle-lit dinner, and with the third - in the bath tub.
"I was fascinated by the anonymous intimacy of the media," Heiman said
at the time. The desire to shatter the mask of anonymity made possible
by virtual space involved risks, which, in turn, generated the tension
she is after - total control of a clearly uncontrollable situation.
In an interview published in proximity to the project's presentation,
she confessed: " I was willing to do anything, I talked to everyone,
boys and girls, perverts, lonely-hearts, liars; witty and smart, bitter
and naive, professors and fakers." The current project is a direct sequel
to Sister of Mercy, only here the idea was expanded - from the intimacy
of a couple to familial intimacies. This time Heiman took fewer risks
and made sure she has more control. The random and unexpected were filtered
through the preliminary interviews and meetings, thus allowing for exact
casting of the fictive familial combinations.
In Gullet too, she focuses on the gap between the ideal and the concrete,
the virtual and the real, the personal and the anonymous. The individual
virtual identity of the chat rooms, however, is replaced by the fictive
family she has fabricated, a family that is, in fact, a mixture of acquaintances,
authentic family members, and total strangers. The radical treatment,
the props, the stylized design, the humor, the exaggeration, and the
grotesque lend each of the meals an air of familiarity and estrangement
at the same time. On the one hand, there is the mundane banal ritual
of a family meal; on the other - the setting looks like a maquette,
like theatrical decor. The houses ostensibly represent the stylistic
spectrum of the kitsch-oriented Israeli bourgeoisie (plastic flowers
and animal figurines on the windowsill). The ritual becomes mechanical;
family members resemble a monstrous shredder (note how they nibble on
the corn and saw the pancakes). The reverse screening creates a discharge
effect, as if the food is returned from the mouth to the plates that
gradually pile in the course of the meal. The body language is distorted,
and the reverse sound transforms the rustle of knives and forks into
a hiccup-filled fencing match.
Heiman subverts the fantasy of the family's sanctity. A potentially
intimate graceful moment of familial togetherness becomes a hollow choreography
that speaks of loneliness and detachment. The meal remains functional
("In the museum they will eat continuously for eight hours a day").
Apart from passing the salt and pepper, there is no communication whatsoever
between family members. Each keeps to his/her own plate. Every bite
they take into their mouths gnaws upon the utopian harmony of the family
unit; the idyll is violated, and as the minutes pass, the meal is increasingly
perceived as an empty ritual of collective stuffing.
The 'family institution' is defined in terms of relations based on birth
or marriage, namely on shared origin. A more open definition would describe
a 'family' as a hierarchical organization or as a group of people who
identify themselves as related to one another and maintain intimate
relations of inter-dependence. In any event, the meaning of the term
is socially structured in culture. Heiman's definition of family is
determined by color, not by blood relation, nor by biology. The intra-familial
relations were determined arbitrarily through color unification: the
family of yellows, reds, blacks, oranges, whites. A twofold goal was
thus obtained: suggesting a class-oriented social critique while subverting
the standard family and challenging divergence within the family.
The personal identity of each member of the fictive family has been
assimilated and absorbed within the 'organization.' All of them are,
in fact, puppets in a set. The figures appear stereotypical and hollow,
and the relationships silenced by order are disturbing in their alienated
and superficial nature. With typical humor, Heiman places an unflattering
mirror, reflecting the eating customs of the average Israeli family.
Unlike American contexts where the familial gathering is regarded as
artificial to begin with, in the Israeli Middle-Eastern context a family
meal is considered warm, at times emotionally stormy. In this respect,
the very act of silencing the Israeli by the dining table is tenfold
radical. From a sociological-anthropological point of view, Heiman ridicules
the food-oriented culture, highlighting the boredom inherent in the
eating rituals and hinting at different types of anomalies within the
family: eating disorders, abuse, incest. As in the work of American
artist Robert Melee whose works are exhibited alongside Heiman's, here
too a hidden violence, pain, and a great deal of sadness are revealed
under the veil of grotesque fantasy.
Gullet is deeply-rooted in the contemporary post-feminist discourse.
Many female artists have addressed the food obsession in an attempt
to undermine conventions pertaining to the traditional functions of
the woman as food-provider. In this context, one can mention Cindy Sherman's
series of film stills from the late 1970s where she plays the role of
a housewife in the kitchen, as in Holliwoodean clich?s, or her 1987
series of color photographs depicting the remains of festive meals,
highlighting the repulsive aspect of eating rituals.
The link between consumerist culture and the kitchen and the affinity
between body and food (in the context of interior and exterior) have
led many women artists to deal with the food obsession typical of affluent
society as part of the discourse of the 'abject' - the rejected and
despicable, disgusting and sickly. Thus, for instance, Sophie Calle
has composed a color-coded diet for each day of the week (The Chromatic
Diet, 1998); Janine Antoni nibbled and gnawed for weeks on two large
lumps of forbidden carbohydrates - lard and chocolate (Gnaw, 1992);
and Marina Abramovic starved herself for twelve days spent at Sean Kelly
Gallery, New York (2003).
Under the guise of a comic fantasy, Meirav Heiman too offers a poignant
comment on the eating culture and family entity. Her nice families spit
their food into the plate, and all the acts of biting, munching, scrunching,
chewing, and swallowing appear non-gratifying and automated. The family
meal has been neutralized of any feelings. All that remains are the
food-related gestures. This is achieved through a strategy of estrangement
(note the title of the piece, Gullet). In keeping with the medieval
traditions of the grotesque and carnivalesque, everything is exaggerated
but not all the way. Like the decision regarding the food colors and
their matching to the colors of wigs and outfits, so the dosages and
ratio between humor and subversive energy, between normal and abnormal,
between familiar and ridiculed are carefully calculated. Next time we
sit at the table, we won't be able to avoid thinking about this bizarre
game called 'family meal.'
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