Gluttony may be one of the seven deadly sins, but for a majority of Australians, it’s also a way of life. With the popularity of shows such as Masterchef and My Kitchen Rules on the rise, contemporary ‘foodie’ culture has comfortably made its way into the mainstream. And as for what that means, intern curator Feyza Yazar is asking visual artists to dissect and examine contemporary food culture in Gluttony And The Gourmand – the Town Hall Gallery’s latest venture into our strange, borderline-neurotic, obsession with food.
“I think it was just this recent fascination I’ve seen both in the media and in discussions I’ve had with friends about food,” Yazar begins. “I was really surprised to find out last year that close to five million people watched the Masterchef finale and that our national election debate had to be shifted to a different time slot. So, you know, I was really surprised that food was more important, or just as important as national politics.”
Sure, something as essential to life as eating has always on the day’s to-do list, but Yazar found the Masterchef implications to go deeper than that.
“You only have to watch television for a few hours before you’re heavily bombarded with either cooking shows or heavily branded images of food. Even the basic idea of having a coffee is so loaded with status. And there are all these blogs about the best coffee in Melbourne, the best restaurants… I’m bamboozled by all this information we have with regards to food that, I mean, it’s a $100 million diet industry that we have in Australia. So it’s this dichotomy of being intrigued by food, but by the same token we’re a country with very high levels of heart disease and diabetes.”
From this level of intrigue, Yazar submitted plans and was selected to see the contemporary food culture exhibition from concept to installation to de-installation.
“I do cross-reference all my ideas with gallery curator Mardi Nowak first, but from start to finish, it’s pretty much been my baby,” she explains. “It’s been a great opportunity because I’m currently a student at Deakin – so working at the Town Hall Gallery has been a really exciting opportunity for me.”
It’s also a chance for both emerging and established artists to submit their work on any topic underneath the wide umbrella of the theme. “My only requirement is that it be visual artists,” Yazar tells me. “The content is totally up to the artist. They must send a short essay or a statement reflecting their intentions, and if it fits in with the whole theme, there’s no reason why I would reject it. The more interesting the ideas, the better.”
But what might be a good example of this, I begin to wonder… As an on-again, off-again vegetarian, the issue of morality and food seem like the first place I’d start digging.
“I did receive a submission this morning, and it was about somebody who was originally from the country, where going to food markets to get your meat was quite standard, and now the shift to having supermarkets has changed things [for them]. So far I haven’t seen anything to do with the morality issue, maybe because I mentioned the culturally loaded issues of status and celebrity, but I really look forward to having that issue expressed in the exhibition as well.”
Yazar has also set the exhibition’s focus on food culture in Australia and more specifically in Melbourne.
“I’m interested in what’s happening in Australia with this idea of fusion food. You know, Melbourne is so multicultural, and we’re getting all sorts of second-generation Australians producing foods back to their ethnicity. A celebrity that most people would know would be George Calombaris getting back to his Greek roots, or Kylie Kwong getting back to her Chinese roots, and that these are second or third generation Australians but they’re going back to their backgrounds and looking at the historical and sometimes very geo-specific areas of their heritage in relation to food.”
From culture to class to social status and health, no topic in the food genre is taboo.
“The more people, the more ideas, the better,” Yazar confirms. “Food is so complex, and yet it’s a huge passion of everybody’s. I mean, everyone has to eat just on a basic human elemental level, but then there’s the notion that you have dinner parties as more of a social exercise in meeting people. So I’m hoping to generate some discussion… It’s a very loaded topic, and I can’t wait to see what people come up with.”
