A selection of artworks by international artists dealing with the food theme and all its implications. This volume accompanies the international traveling exhibition FOOD, that focuses on the preservation of Earth and food choices, as well as the effects of climate change, the poisoning of agricultural products, the food distribution gap, famine, and other related concerns.
Parkett 78 features the artists Ernesto Neto, Olaf Nicolai and Rebecca Warren. Neto's drooping, opaque lycra installations envelop the viewer in a fog of fabric, a cushion for the gaze, their milky skins leaving children ecstatic and adults in a Fredric Jamesonian "Hyperspace." Olaf Nicolai's concept-driven art, like much of the avant-garde work of the last half-century, remains set on integrating art with daily life. We experience this "blurring" in his randomly arranged pre-fabricated Pantone colors, ornamental stones taken from a 1960s Dresden shopping mall and wall text reading, "A short catalogue of things that you think you want…" Rebecca Warren makes vulgar, lumpy plasticine figures that show the influence of Giacometti and R. Crumb alike. As Neal Brown writes, her figures are, "fingered and improperly squeezed into something that is compulsively-chaotic-masturbatory-fat-ugly-disfigured-repressed-incontinent-excretory-bestial-bulimic…" The issue also features Erwin Wurm, Andro Wekua and Vito Acconci, with texts by Yuko Hasegawa, Paulo Herkenhoff, Charles Esche, Vincent Pécoil, Catherine Lampert, Marjorie Perloff and Kate Fowle, among others.