Self Serve
(5 min excerpt)
12 min video, DVD loop, stereo soundeditor: Reaf Sawford
In Self Serve I appear as masked characters on a banquet table. This work was executed with the idea that humans think specifically in the form of oppositional pairs, specifically those referred to by Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss as raw versus cooked, nature versus culture and elaborated versus unelaborated. It was inspired by Peter Greenaway’s The Cook the Thief his Wife and her Lover, the film that has impacted most directly on me in terms of understanding the theatrics of eating, acted out at the dinner table of life and death. In one continuous scene, on the same table, Self Serve depicts the cook, the customer or a new dish; a dish that cuts, prepares and maybe eats itself in parody of the fast and discordant relationship between food, our bodies and self display. Performing similar yet opposing tasks directly onto their bodies, these characters invoke a sense of ritual performed within a fictionalized public space. One is methodically drawn towards images of the prime-cuts of butchery; these sections are brushed with egg and oil and dusted with paprika; the other methodically flays these sections of spice off with a boning knife only to be reversed when finishing the whole body in a loop of perpetual preening.