Let’s Eat Indoors Today
An aging art critic shuffled through the Tate, stomach rumbling, seeking something to chew on. Maybe the bubbled umber skin of Jeff Koons' Basketball-in-Tank, or, better, a steak carved from Damien Hirst’s Shark-in-Tank. It all gave off the same pretentious rubbery flavor, though, as the billion-dollar Matisse escargot that audiences flocked for—and that one didn’t even come with its own takeout box; not yet.
Giacometti's gaunt figures were far from hearty--the man craved something juicy, with rolls of flesh. He strode past some other name-droppings: plop plop, like a divine trail of colorful sugar buttons on a piece of waxed paper. A Miró to melt in his mouth! A writhing Bacon ensconced on a chaise: Bacon, who geschmacked of meat-as-murder, as if sparkling pork drippings roiled to life off the artist's scrumptious name onto a pan fashioned from stretched canvas. ‘Crispy,’ thought the critic with ravish, as he daydreamed how it would feel to gnaw the butchered ribs from Painting (1946).
The masters tantalized him, but these all neared expiration and had begun to emit a vinegared putridity, like the ambitious Hirstian feast the man ravenously devoured at the Royal Academy a few months prior.
Having almost given up hope for lunch, the nostril-piercing new-car aroma from a hyperslim Citroën brought saliva to the man’s lips at the touring Gabriel Orozco exhibition. The thing that really transported him, though, was the whiff of elevator chassis he barely could stoop into, as if it were made for him. It reminded him of the glass elevator from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which made his stomach peal with a crack of thunder.
Piqued by the supple glory of its humble industrial genius, the man gobbled the chassis’ guts with vigor: gnawing wires, crunching bulbs copper and all while purveyors gawked at him in wonder. He ravished it down to its certificate of inspection: City of Chicago, last serviced 1993 (a great harvest year). It did not take the man very long at all to gulp down the piece’s innards as screws and nails dripped to the floor.
Sated, the man eked on through the exhibition, belly fuddled by the promise of dessert. He popped a cue ball that swung from the ceiling by a rope into his mouth as he passed an interactive piece involving a billiards table, snapping the ball’s cord as if he were plucking apple from branch. To slake his thirst, he slurped up the lotus pool in the middle of Ping Pond Table, to paddle-wielders’ horror and general malaise.
Newly fattened, nearly satisfied; our man caught the Tube home to a coffin-like apartment off Covent Road—his own chassis—while mulling over a snack-bag of Ai Wei Wei’s ceramic sunflower seeds. Perhaps the knotted black tape inside a ripped cassette copy of Ono’s Cut Piece would be an appropriate midnight snack: but home food is never that good, nor that expensive.
