This artwork is concerned with deconstructing hierarchies. Using taste as a mode of aesthetic appreciation to break down Hegel’s hierarchy of the senses, which dismisses taste, touch and smell from aesthetic appreciation. Now neuroscience has proven that these senses are not detached from higher consciousness, but instead reach it by relay through the emotional and subconscious centres of the brain, facilitating a new ‘pre-objective’ realm of perception that has never been fully explored in art.
The chandelier is used as a symbol of social inequality to interrogate form. Form has always been declared essential to the work of art, but it is also the cause what Derrida calls the ‘object-fiction’, where vision is limited in its understanding to the surface of the art-object. This is most clearly expressed in the objectification of women; their being transmuted into the representation of a body. This artwork corrects the ‘object-fiction’ through not having a definitive form; you can look through it, and inside it. It represents a window into feminine, aformal perception, where taste, smell and touch are privileged, as a way of referencing the ‘Other’.
Participators are invited to help themselves to the lavender and nettle flavoured meringues attached to the artwork, giving the viewer performative agency in a symbolic enactment of wealth distribution. The lavender and nettle flavours create a complex web of signifiers, tapping into memory and emotion. Together, they construct the social division between rich and poor through taste. Their similarity as plants is overwhelmed by socially constructed differences, much like Hegel’s socially constructed delineation and hierarchy of the senses. When perception is actually formed from all the sensory interactions in your body. Although processed through different organs they are encoded in the brain as one ‘embodied’ experience. Hegel used logic to exclude taste, touch and smell from art, to create a masculine art for a patriarchal society. But an equal society has artworks exploring different perceptions, through different senses.
Emily Ludolf 