Designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky the Frankfurt kitchen was designed for social housing to maximise ease of use, whilst being small and economically efficient. Although separated from the rest of the house, its rational design is considered to be the fore-runner of contemporary fitted kitchens.
Recognisable as a kitchen the fabricated TV studio replicates the functions of a kitchen, but with the added requirements of demonstration and filming. Seen from this angle we loose its illusory potential.
The London art dealer Ben Brown commissioned Cattelan to produce a portrait of his grandmother, he made Betsy a unique life-like wax-work of an old lady crouched in a fridge.
Repurposing the historically loaded German Pavilion, Liam Gillick installed an usable structure inspired by the Frankfurt kitchen (1926). To further destabilise the ‘church like’ interior he installed an animatronic kitchen cat which, using Gillick’s voice, perpetually circulates a story of a talking cat but also referring to “evil in [the] building”.
Typically oedipal and visceral, Sauce (1974) is a film work where a groaning and self-flagellating Paul MaCarthy smears Heinz tomato ketchup on himself on top of what appears to be a dining table.
Set in the fictional restaurant Le Hollandaise, Peter Greenaway’s 1989 film charts the the love affair between the criminal’s wife Georgina and a bookseller Michael, who is a regular at the restaurant. The criminal Spica learns of the affair and kills Michael, who Georgina forces the restaurant owner to cook and feed Michael to Spica before she shoots him in the head.
A self styled gastronomic scientist, Heston Blumenthal creates food that blends TV and restaurant spectacle and a contemporary taste for technology augmented experience with cultural culinary nostalgia rooted in a home-made style of cooking.
An advert for the Dettol anti-bacterial cleaning product, specifically designed for use in the kitchen which is increasingly promoted less as the centre of the home and family, but more as a battle ground for innumerable food related paranoias.
In his numerous seminal soup kitchens, famously celebrated by Nicolas Bourriaud, Tiravanija attempts to break the social hierarchies attached to art and social interaction by providing within an exhibition space the materials and equipment to make and eat meals such as Pad-Thai.
On the opening night of Norma Jeane’s solo show at Sextant et Plus, twenty Norma Jeanes were invited for three minutes each to destroy new kitchen appliances with demolition tools whilst listening to Born Slippy by Underworld. The act of destruction is implied as a rite of passage, after which the untouched result is opened to the public.
