Margarine and the Museum
Volunteering for a gallery show made completely out of butter
The Exhibition
When I volunteered to help German artist Sonja Alhäuser make sculptures out of butter, I pictured something sensual. After all, don’t you find, among the synonyms for butter, “lubricant”? Or, “lubricate.” Alhäuser would be orchestrating a “catering performance” at the opening of an exhibition about shared meals as art practice called Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art at University of Chicago’s Smart Museum in February of 2012. This exhibition, which included documents like Filippo Marinetti’s 1930 Manifesto of Futurist Cooking, objects like Laura Letinsky’s photographs of table-top aftermath, and a slew of events and performances including Michael Rakowitz’ traveling Enemy Kitchen food truck, will travel, in adapted form, to the Blaffer Museum in Houston (August 31, 2013 — January 5, 2014) and SITE Santa Fe (February 2014 — May 2014), followed by other venues yet to be announced.
And look at the butter sculptures we’d be making, the reveling baroque creatures that Alhäuser has become known for in a decade of sculpture and performance with foodstuffs like marzipan and chocolate: Thigh-height (although propped on an overflowing banquet table, they’d look visitors in the eye), a bellowing fish-tailed sea god, spewing forth from a butter wave; a mounting turbine of entangled puti with messy ringlets, fat thighs askew; and as if the tablecloth were the surface of a pond, a naked woman, flesh dyed algae-green with watercress, emerging with just her tits buoyed up over the surface. Sorry, her breasts. It’s hard to hold a classical vocabulary in your mind or your mouth when you’re looking at forty pounds of Swedish Gold margarine. (Margarine holds its form better than butter, apologies to Jennifer Garner.)
Margarine as Medium
There is surprising poetry at the heart of margarine: The French chemist Chevreul who first isolated fatty acids and noted their nacreous sheen pulled the name from Margarites, Greek for pearl. So the French invented it—an 1869 patent resulted from government-sponsored research sparked by anxiety about population growth and food shortage—but the real boom happened after WWII, partially the result of butter rationing. Germany was Europe’s highest producer of margarine throughout the cold war (the Dutch a close second) and still was as of 2001.
Let me appear as the Ghost of German Margarine Eroticism Past and spirit us to three scenes: One, a Lätta-brand margarine TV spot from the 1980s featuring a hot West German yuppie couple. He high-fives his way to work, where he reads a Financial Times in front of a prop computer and later practices knife-throwing for sport; meanwhile fraulein kills it at a board meeting and then challenges herself with a sick jog along the boardwalk. They tangle at home with their pants off, while the domestic version of Van Halen scorches his trachea with the brand’s name. Their bodily health and professional drive are the mere coefficient of the awesome sex they have before and after eating margarine every morning.
Cut to a 1998 TV ad and we’re properly in Alhäuser territory: To the sound of a cowbell hammering out just three primitive iron-age notes, a naked woman with a great pair of naturals pumps across a crystal-clear lake and then emerges at the shore, a live-action version of Alhäuser’s watercress nymph. She pulls a box of Lätta out of the water. I won’t describe the rest except to say that I wonder whether a family of four in the suburbs of Stuttgart dining in front of the telly grinds to an awkward halt as the ad airs and they collectively realize that the margarine parked on their table next to a heap of potatoes is what I think is called a “tickler.”
Most likely, nothing grinds to a halt, because nudity is naturalized and I’m just being a squeamish American, but by a 2002 Lätta ad, our third stop, I have to throw my hands up: Yikes to the family in Stuttgart, because it’s just a naked threesome in bed.
A rich medium for an artist, no? No one walks out on a threesome for acrylic paint, anyway. And the baldness with which corporate marketing has turned this oleaginous lab-rat into something as timeless and natural as alpine lakes and the sex drive of healthy adults is ripe for an artist’s critique. An imposter of luxury (its first name was beurre économique, or “thrifty butter”), margarine would travesty bronze in Alhäuser’s final banquet, and invite the conversation that so frequently attends food in contemporary art: Food demands engagement, not contemplation—it breaks down the intimidating authority of art, it destroys hierarchies. Take a 2003 Gastronomica articleabout Alhäuser: “Don’t we arrange our sculptures on pedestals, and contemplate aesthetic at arm’s length? … Alhäuser thumbs her nose at such convention.” So while a gilded eros decorates a palazzo somewhere in Europe, you get to swipe the smirk off Alhäuser’s Swedish Gold gods with a Dinkel’s pretzel roll and then wash it down your throat with an Amstel Light. You don’t need élite knowledge to get it; teeth will do.
Staff Only
But I realized the day of the opening is that a major part of Alhäuser’s work had nothing to do with destruction or glee or breaking boundaries on the part of the public. That’s all there of course. But turn 180 degrees, away from the gallery, away from the margarine bosoms (sorry; we’ll come back to them) and the baroque banquet, toward the usually invisible guts of the museum itself, the warren of offices with their own hierarchy, the neatly labeled one of the museum staff. Alhäuser asked the staff (aided by volunteers) to do everything butsculpt margarine. She needed caterers. So she turned the museum staff into a catering staff, who over the course of a work day assembled hors d’oeuvres for 400 people. We were asked to cut canapés and toasts, to shape marzipan from molds, to skewer chicken and peppers, melon and strawberry. In fact, much of what we did involved skewers, and “skewers” is a word designed to make German mouths flap and deflate like a balloon released.
“Skeeeuuusssssss?” Alhäuser ventured at the planning meeting a few days before the opening, tucking her chin down and scanning the museum staff for recognition.
“Skewers,” offered the Events Manager, who had spent the morning at Whole Foods buying “artists’ materials.”
“Skyeuuusssss,” said Alhäuser, reassured. A baby hung off her hip (the danger of exposure to margarine).
I thought we were all in love with her at that moment—she is a warm woman with a wide smile whose work, after all, stages act after act of generosity—but I was wrong, because the night of the opening, the volunteers mostly bailed. Alhäuser had seen worse. At a summer event in Berlin four years ago—recounting this to me, she didn’t want to name names, given the hostility that had ensued—she had proposed an ice sculpture and when she showed up, there was no refrigerator.
“They think artists can…”— she struggled for words, holding up a spatula covered in green margarine—“they think I am like magic, I make everything from nothing. But I need everything a caterer needs—even though I am an artist.”
Ideas of artistic magic on the side of production couldn’t have been harder to sustain as offices behind the gallery space filled with raw materials in vats and sacks that needed to be broken down and somehow reassembled into the dancing Rockette kicklines of bite-sized delicacies that Alhäuser had drawn.
