*With apologies to Miss Grimble

everal years ago, I received a letter from the artist Naomi London which I later discovered she had sent to many other friends and acquaintances. The letter was memorable for its quixotic content leavened with a certain humor. It took the form of a seemingly innocuous request. She wanted my recipe for a favorite dessert. Well, I have a few of those and was thus intrigued. I started to think about my own fondness for certain outrageously sweet chocolate delicacies. Not only were the ingredients to be itemized, London requested, but the epistemology was to be iterated. In other words, she wanted something of the desert's wider surrounding social and cultural context and meaning for me. The previously unthought significance for me of such a guilty pleasure would require in its turn a rumination on the ineffable as well as the somatic ruin brought on by too many calories.

   I must confess that, with the press of events at that time, and so many other preoccupations, I failed to answer London's letter which was, I now understand, far more than a mere request, but an invitation to participate firsthand in her remarkable work. Each recipient who in turn replied would become a collaborator; their full complicity in her project would in turn empower her art. The final result, would be, of course, the creation and exhibition of a dessert compendium in ways undreamt of by Martha Stewart.

   The wry humour and irony implicit in the project extended to the mailing of the invitations. London modified the stamps on the envelopes. She subverted the image of a couple dressed in a traditional wedding outfit by pasting over the image of the couple with desert photos that she found in a 1950s dessert cookbook.

   If there was a certain perceptibly wry humor in the genesis of London's dessert project there was also, as is so characteristic of her work as a whole, a certain darkness at work — and it is a darkness which many people miss. Desserts are eaten for pure pleasure. Often purely sinful, many people believe them to be the best part of any meal. But there can be a fine line between pleasure and revulsion. "Beyond Sweeties," indeed. But there is more than sweetness and light here. In fact, the darkness in question resides in her deeply subversive perspective and interrogative intent; and her positive break with tradition. Over the last many years, London has shown her fearlessness in picking apart some of the presuppositions so irremediably wed to our social mores. She is adept at stripping the veneer off both our preconceptions and our conventions.The tangible, visual (but, sadly, untastable) results of the Dessert Project, now on exhibit at Bishop's University Art Gallery, demonstrate just how rigorous and unrelenting London was from the outset of the project in 1996. And once again how she undermines some of our cherished presuppositions about taken-for-granted realities like the life-worlds we live in, the domesticities we enact and the foods we eat. This is the first time a broad selection of these works has been shown in an institutional setting. The artist showed a Marmalade Wall at Concordia University and works from the series have also been exhibited at Galerie Samuel Lallouz in Montreal.

   I should emphasize that London prepared all the desserts herself, photographed them, bottled them, painted them and made an installation of them. The meticulous nature of her preparation and presentation is exemplary. But we should be mindful that the seeming order here is really designed to open up an abyss and release us from old ways of seeing.

   It must be said that the desserts on exhibit have undergone a sea-change — and not only in terms of intentionality and purpose. At first seduced by color and texture, and the similitude to the Modernist project while subverting it through analogy and what some would consider inordinately fey means, we are also unsettled to see the deserts made into tableaux vivant that suggest they will ineluctably, like flesh itself, deteriorate. The encaustic ground is now a simulacrum of the luxuriously-worked textural dessert. Indeed, so voluptuous is the painting here that we could justifiably call it 'painterly' in a different context. Finger-painting comes to mind. Daubing. And we are the willing victims of a particularly adept duplicity; the hoax leads us to meditate on a relationship to pigment -- but now a material that is seemingly not pigment however much it pleases the eye. Yet which, like pigment, can no longer be ingested. The green is such a glorious lime green; the purple such an intoxicatingly 'Blueberry-Flan' purple that both eyes and taste-buds are vicariously deceived. It has become a purely visual art — we may no longer partake of it as the original creator did. Something is lacking, yet even the perceived loss represents for us another sort of gain. Indeed, when the original purpose is lost, the innate frustration we feel at such a loss causes what Lacan would have called an "imaginary lack" and preys on our narcissism.

   We might suggest that the deserts are doubly transgressive. In the first case, they are as non-functional as the artist's non-functional clothing literally was (here because the deserts are no longer edible in their exhibited state of pure simulacra). In the second case, they playfully undermine the utopian signifiers endemic to much late Modernist practice, even while they may be said to achieve similitude with them. For instance, many of the dessert fields come uncannily close to Robert Ryman's work and, for that matter, Yves Klein. Ryman's rich impastoed whites within a self-imposed systemic order of limited if exalted possibilities are the subject of a beautifully subversive mimicry here. Furthermore, the physical extrusiveness of pigment is echoed in the heavy surface of marmalade smeared onto a support as relief. The references are both playful and dialectical. Doubtless, London would see it as a dialogic revision of late Modernist "purity"É(It is interesting to note that some of her first works were pretty competent, even dreamy abstractions.)

   Documentary photographs are juxtaposed with the dessert works. One of a series of the stamps used on the original mailing envelopes has been framed with Toffee Bars, Pumpkin Pie, Two Apricot Cookies, Chocolate Crinkles and Sugar Cookies and was collaged over the images of the outfitted couple I mentioned earlier. Presumably, London uses photographic elements because she wants to remind us of the integrity of the desert contributor's authorial roles. London never loses sight of her collaborators, whether it be 'ourselves' as in the grieving equipment wherein we were invited to experience our own catharsis, the non-functional clothing (where the seniors who actually knitted the clothing were always present in photographic documentation) or in the dessert project wherein the collaborators are always already implicit.

   On one level, London is reminding us all that the act of baking has historically been associated with the feminine, and thus the issue of female domesticity rises to the fore. On another level, she reminds us that 'heroic' abstract painting is often thought (and wrongly) as an exclusively male domain. On a still deeper level, London is telling us: this is not what it seems — for the very dessert that is now transmuted into an object of art is also a harbinger of the abject.

   But in another sense, what you see here is really the best of all surrogates: blueberry jam, orange marmalade. Not a Yves Klein blue monochrome. But an exacting evocation of a blue dessert. But more: a dessert that might bring on the blues, that is, open up abjection as a possibility of being. But despite the seeming disavowal of appearances here, there is an equally implicit claim: this is art, this is what I do. And the work is rich in humor, pathos and abjection. But, as is so characteristic of London's whole project, the auratic reach and documentary groundedness of the work extend far beyond the work itself: into the myriad life-worlds of its viewers and, particularly for those viewers who also contributed the dessert recipes, the project comes full circle and validates for us all the collaborative emphasis of London's work.

   London's work always has a definite edge; and that can be as enlightening for some as it is uncomfortable for others. It betrays the interrogative thrust and uncompromising deep thema of London's project; its questioning of static, unquestioned norms. Think of her grieving equipment and non-functional clothing. Those works were hard to confront while suppressing emotion at the same time. They elicited emotions as part and parcel of their viewing. And self-knowledge was the reward. Similarly, the food, which seduces the eye, might also signal repulsion. London has always worked with abjection as a thematic if shadowy (yet fully nuanced) subject at the core of her work. I say 'shadowy' because there is no preaching or heavy-handedness in her work; she wants to leave the work open to subtlety and porous enough for multiple interpretations.

   Having said that, we can seize upon one interpretation which, while by no means obvious, is nonetheless pervasive at a certain level in London's work. I mean, of course, the matter of abjection. Julia Kristeva argues that food loathing is the most archaic form of abjection [2]. She says:

This is highly relevant to London's work, which can induce a process of becoming an Other "at the expense of my own death". [4] The deserts removed from the original context of human consumption, and because they are such convincing surrogates, paradoxically engage the issue of private want. But we should remember that it is not London's project to literalise abjection, but rather to open up the problematic as an ethical basis for her art.

Kristeva says:

   In this work, Naomi London has sought to question our assumptive, belief contexts as well as the inherent phallocentric codes of modernity itself. Hers is an interrogatory ethic. In everything she has done to this date, this ethic is a signifying practice at the core of her thinking about art. And that thinking, to be intuitively true for our time, must also be about abjection, about being haunted by the Other, about the dark revolts of being. London does not seek an order that would, for her, only enervate her project by expelling wholesale the inchoate. Everything is still open, inclusive — and possible. As A.S. Byatt, in her recent novel The Biographer's Tale, knows, so too does London: when the desire for order comes up against the mysteries immanent in existence, it is always subverted and forced into closure. It may be a truism, but it must be said: At the threshold of our humanness, at the very limits of the human, taxonomy always fails.

 

___________________________

Endnotes

1. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Unibersity Press,1982), p. 1

2. Ibid, p. 2.

3. Ibid, p. 3.

4. Ibid, p. 3.

5. Ibid, p. 5.

6. Ibid, p. 10.