The way to every child’s heart is through the stomach. This much is clear upon walking into the National Gallery of Victoria’s latest blockbuster, its just-for-kids , where the wallpaper is covered in brightly coloured pictures of fruit and veg and the floor is adorned in a busy crop of root vegetables. The installation by Catalan artist has well and truly hit its mark: small people are running around everywhere, licking that wallpaper, “cooking” fake food using fake appliances, and generally having a whale of a time.
The parents love it, too. Some join in the cooking; others simply sit smiling in happiness, both at their offspring’s joy and the fact that they won’t be the ones cleaning up afterwards.
Hands-on activities in Fake Food Park are designed to encourage children to think creatively about common foods. Source: NGV International
Some art is timeless. Some art is of its time. It’s safe to say the Fake Food Park comes at the exactly the correct point in history. In an era when eight-year-old contestants on Junior MasterChef are being asked to cook their signature dish, artist and designer Guixé (his works and exhibitions bring together disparate elements including gastronomy, science and anthropology) onto something with his kitchen fantasia that lets the little 'uns take over the sauté station.
To start, you wash your hands. Not under water but under a tap over a screen approximating a basin of water. Fun. You put on an apron, riotous with colourful fruit and vegetables, and head to the cooking station - first picking up a stainless steel bowl then adding ingredients such as a red fiberglass puck (meat?), furry purple felt (eggplant?) and pink knotted cord that looks delightfully like intestines.
Martí Guixé in his Fake Food Park, on at NGV International until 11 September. Source: NGV International
Then cook. There are knobs and levers and sound effects. There are lights and smells. Some of it makes no sense. Plenty of it makes no sense, really, but it makes no sense in the most delightful way.
Now, you could argue adults of the modern age are busy projecting their food obsession onto their children. You could say that the NGV staging a children’s exhibition about food is legitimising the cultural values that esteem a blue swimmer crab soufflé over a sausage in bread. But Guixe’s deliberately naïve way of looking at food takes it back to the childlike level. Essentially his exhibition speaks directly to a whole bunch of (small) people with no idea of cooking but big ideas about fun.
My eight-year-old companion, a young lady who only several years ago demanded every time we visited the supermarket that we play Taco Truck in their Thomas the Tank Engine, wandered about in calm superiority, occasionally pausing to saute her eggplant. It was the four-year-old driven to a frenzy, not only by the knobs and levers but - I presume - the feeling of being in control of a space where normally his freedom is curtailed by nervous parents hoping he survives childhood with all ten digits and no full-thickness burns.
Kids, huh? They mightn’t be able to whip up a lamb roast just yet (give it time...) but they’re totally down with the food thing. They’re hip to the edible dream, to the pop culture that has engulfed the process of shopping, cooking and eating. Sausages in bread? Not when you can pimp a soufflé with blue swimmer crab, mum.
is at NGV International, Melbourne, until September 11, 2016. Entry is free.
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