Feast: Radical Hospitality In Contemporary Art

Published by the Smart Museum, Chicago, 2012

by Stephanie Smith

A leading figure within Indonesian art communities, Mella Jaarsma has helped build catalytic cultural institutions: in 1988, she and her husband Nindityo Adipurnomo founded the Cemeti Art House (€”a key site of creative production, display, and international dialogue within Indonesia) €”and she also helped launch a related project, the Indonesian Visual Art Archive. Food and meals have figured in many projects at Cemeti and also feature prominently in Jaarsma’s own work. Notably, she has used meals within projects like ‘Hi Inlander’ (1998€/1999) and ‘The Feeder’ (2003), both part of a larger series of works in which Jaarsma used contemporary performance art, traditional practices, and current ethnic and political tensions within Indonesian society as points of departure for elaborate costumes made of materials such as goat leather, fish skins, frog legs, and chicken feet.

Feast features several of Jaarsma’s works that use meals to address cooperation and cross-cultural respect. She began to explore these topics in the aftermath of the repressive former president Suharto’s resignation in 1998—a time of instability that included violent riots against Indonesians of ethnically Chinese heritage. ‘Feast’ includes video documentation of a work that grew directly from these riots: ‘Pribumi Pribumi’ (1998). In this performance, Jaarsma and other Western friends set up simple cooking stations along a Yogyakarta street and served Chinese food to passersby as a means to spark face-to-face dialogue about ethnic conflict. ‘Pribumi Pribumi’ offers a culturally and politically specific counterpoint to the more open-ended ‘I Eat You Eat Me’ (2002/2012) also featured in the exhibition. In this performance, Jaarsma invites participants to partner up—each selecting food for the other, donning a lightweight span of metal held between leather yokes, and then feeding one another. When worn, the sculpture temporarily binds the participants, creating an intimate, mutually supported table surface for this shared meal. For ‘Feast’, Jaarsma created a new iteration of this piece for six participants. She used one for a performance in Yogyakarta timed to coincide with the opening of ‘Feast’, while a copy of the original sculpture was used by a group of University of Chicago students at an eventorganized by the Smart’s Student Advisory Committee, and was then shown as a static object within the gallery. One participant, James Levinsohn, reflected on his shared meal: “In enacting Mella Jaarsma’s piece, I experienced feeding another person and being fed by another person for the first time in my adult life… [throughout the meal] one constant remained €”the way the ritual of feeding and being fed articulates power relations€. In Jaarsma’s piece, our proximity to those we have power towards makes us generous; one wishes this was the case more often outside of art.[i] To further bring the work to life in Chicago, a copy of the original two-person version of ‘I Eat You Eat Me’ was available in the Smart Museum for visitors to use to feed each other in their own meal-performances.