![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
Abstract
This article explores the role of the “culinary feminine” in arts practice and popular culture. Tracing a genealogy of significant British female food personalities and female performance artists working with food, I locate my artistic practice inside the “gap(s)” in between these dual culinary and artistic legacies. British television cook Nigella Lawson and her media image as a domestic goddess is used to examine how representations of food and women are produced and performed in popular culture. I argue that Nigella constructs ‘paradoxical femininities’ and exists outside the parameters of traditional women-food boundaries. This article documents my trilogy of performance works that re-appropriated strategies used by Nigella, combining contemporary arts-practice with a popular cultural food aesthetic, through which I trace the gaps that arise in my own food-practices as a woman/artist/consumer.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Professor Mick Wallis for his critical insight during the development of this paper, the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions and the editors and typesetters for making the presentation of this essay possible.
Notes
1. Some of the arguments presented here develop from my previous paper “Disturbing Objects: Making, Eating and Watching Food in Popular Culture and Performance Practice” (2008).
2. The three works include: 1. If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake – commissioned by gallery curator Jane Linden as part of the Curating Knowledge residency program, Alsager Arts Centre gallery, UK (now Axis Arts Centre). This was a durational performance, in which I set out to “bake” my autobiography out of cake and sugar craft decorations (for a more detailed analysis of this work see Lawson Citation2009). All photographs represented here belong to the artist and have been selected from both the “rehearsal” process and the final work shown at the Alsager Gallery, March 2009. 2. A Little Drama Over Dinner – an interactive sited performance work taking place over dinner in a restaurant. Playing with the form of the popular murder mystery dinner, each guest represents a female food personality. Following a set of instructions, the guests become entangled in the autobiographical narrative that unravels over the three-course meal. All photographs represented here belong to the artist and have been selected from the performance at Seven Arts Centre in Leeds, UK, July 2009. 3. Good Enough to Eat – a theatre show taking the form of a confessional live/television cookery show with a chorus of Busby Berkeley inspired tap dancers and visual food spectacles. All images represented here belong to the artist and have been selected from the performance at stage@leeds, UK, January 2010.
3. Hollows is here citing Brunsdon 1997, McRobbie 1994, and Mosley and Read 2002.
4. In the two council-run annual food festivals I attended in Manchester (2008) and Wakefield (2010), the chef demonstrations were conducted solely by men. In the BBC Good Food Festival in Birmingham (2008) Angela Hartnett was the only female chef included in the celebrity chef demonstration line-up. It is also worth noting that Angela's initial media success arose from her status as the female protégé of male TV chef Gordon Ramsay.
5. For a detailed account of the extensive use of food in arts practice see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett in Richard Gough Citation1999.
6. As a performance-maker working within a tradition of women's autobiographical solo performance in the UK, my work is perhaps more stylistically similar to that of Baker's, yet my aims reverberate with Rosler's popular cultural food aesthetic.
7. Alberro lists some of Rosler's works indicative of her “concerns with the social, cultural, and political uses of food” (1998, 91) including: The Art of Cooking: A Mock Dialogue Between Julia Child and Craig Claiborne (1973), A budding gourmet, Tijuana Maid and McTowers Maid (1973), A Gourmet Experience (1974), A Budding Gourmet (Video Work, 1974), and Losing: A Conversation with the Parents (1977).
8. This work initially took the form of a 12-page postcard novel (1973) and was later made into a video performance with the same title.
9. For Alberro the work also addresses the gendered bias of the cooking profession and he acknowledges that in 1974 at the time of the show most of the “master chefs” were in fact male (1988, 75).
10. Some of Baker's most well-known performances include: Drawing on Mother's Experience (1998), Kitchen Show (1991), How to Shop (1993) Take a Peek (1995), and Box Story (2001).
11. Baker also states that her intentions were to “encapsulate and critique” her experience as a young mother including “loss of significant status” and “pride” (2007, 47).
12. This is a selective, rather than a definitive account and my discussion is concerned with a Western tradition of female food personalities and specifically a British genealogy.
13. See Hughes (Citation2006, 206) who gives a detailed account of other eighteenth-century British female cookery writers such as Hannah Glasse, Elizabeth Raffald, Maria Rundell and Eliza Acton, whose recipes were all used in The Book of Household Management.
14. Although, prior to Patten, Moira Meighn had a five-week series in 1936 that offered advice on quick snacks, Marcel Boulstein had a regular BBC slot in 1937 and Philip Harben fronted the team of “post-war cooks” in 1946 (Ellis Citation2007, 77–8).
15. Information sourced from Delia Smith's (n.d.) biography from Delia Online.
16. ibid.
17. D. Smith Citation2008.
18. See Ashley et al. who also highlight that “the gendering of cooking as leisure or labour is frequently negotiated in television cookery shows, especially those that emphasize cooking as lifestyle such as The Naked Chef and Nigella Bites” (2004, 207).
19. Hattenstone Citation2002.
20. Farndale Citation2001.
21. In this work Baker performs thirteen “actions” using food and kitchen items that each leave a “mark” on her body. Some of these include a wooden spoon in her hair, a bandage on her hand, and a pear placed inside her overall pocket. See Barrett and Baker 164–70, Lesley Ferris 172–77, Griselda Pollock 178–84, and Helen Iball 185–90 in Barret and Baker Citation2007 for detailed accounts and analyses of this performance.
22. For a detailed discussion of Baker's work in relation to the abject see Baldwyn Citation1996.
23. American performance artist Karen Finely has notoriously smeared chocolate over her body in her performance works We Keep Our Victims Ready and The Return of the Chocolate-Smeared Woman. See Kirshenblatt-Gimblett who describes her use of food and the body as “Bakhtinian performance of the lower body that confounds its secretions with food” (1999, 11).
24. The extremity, scale, and duration of Heston's and Hugh's food projects/excursions border on performance art. In his television series Heston's Feasts (2009 and 2010), Blumenthall constructs a life-size Hansel and Gretel House made entirely of cake and sweet foods and an enormous pie crust, which he trials in a builders yard mixing the dough in a cement mixer. Also see Ashley et al. (Citation2004, 36), who cite Hugh's television series TV Dinners (1998) in which he famously ate a placenta following the birth of a newborn baby. The placenta was made into a pâté for a “welcome to the world party” and was also eaten by the family and guests.
25. Jamie Oliver has also notably used his celebrity chef status for political and social effect: his television series Jamie's Dinners (2005) documented his campaign for healthy school meals. The series resulted in an online petition with 271,677 signatures to Prime Minister Tony Blair, requesting improved standards of British school meals. Consequently the government pledged £650 million for the cause. Jamie also offered 15 “disadvantaged” young men with limited educational background the opportunity to train with him and work in his new restaurant, Fifteen, which was documented in his television program, Jamie's Kitchen (2002).
26. Although Nigella is filmed outside of the kitchen in her programs she is still captured in domestic environments such as the supermarket or taking/collecting her children to/from school.
27. Tana's cookbooks include Tana Ramsay's Family Kitchen: Simple and Delicious Recipes for Every Family (2008), Tana Ramsay's Real Family Food: Delicious Recipes for Everyday Occasions (2009), and Home Made: Good, Honest Food Made Easy (2010). In the UK, Delia's legacy as the “perfect” home cook still prevails along with her “traditional” and “proper” approach to cookery and Rachael Allen is also presented as a calm, patient Irish housewife cooking hearty home-cooked food.