Art for a Collective Crust
Edited by Barney Pau
It’s early 2020, and a virus moves stealthily and indifferently across biological, social and media thresholds, seeping in like an amorphous fog. Suddenly and overnight, life comes to a standstill and passing time becomes acutely pronounced; decelerated. The Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns expose an alarming inability of global neoliberalism and ‘just-in-time’ supply chains to adequately sustain diverse populations strewn across the planet. As fear and uncertainty settle into the uncomfortably upended rhythms of prior daily life, a quiet revolt foments, mostly in bacterial and yeast communities.
Fig. 1. ”Still Life with Bread and Figs, by unknown artist, fresco fragment, Naples, Italy, National Archaeological Museum.
When faced with a growing chasm full of time and the unknown, countless people take turn to an ancient activity; one today primarily subtending the interests of commodity markets and shareholders, or relegated to niche artisan practices: baking bread. There were loaves, lots and lots of loaves. And microbial cultures, sourdough starters, yeast strains and relentless bread selfies too. Hand-kneaded and home-baked tutorials, experiments and failures streamed in waves across the mediasphere. Bread-themed videos and posts dominated grids and threads, revealing what communities already forced into precarity by austerity economics and manufactured scarcity had known prior to the lockdowns — food sovereignty is indispensable to survival, community, self-care and determination.
A common and foundational staple for many modern cultures; bread is formed from dough prepared from flour (typically wheat or other grains) and water, often including the addition of yeast. Anthropology situates bread between nature and culture, craft and ritual, agricultural techniques, culinary traditions and sustenance. A consequence of technological and cultural interventions, grains come from grass, which has been cultivated for at least 10,000 years, with recent excavations suggesting the processing and baking of bread might even predate agriculture.
The domestication of ancient wheat varieties first emerges in Western Asia, before spreading to geographies far beyond. Today’s wheat is primarily grown and cultivated at the behest of profit-oriented, high-yielding agribusinesses and corporations, rather than quality of nutritive sustenance and sustainability. Alternatively, the less hybridized and heirloom varieties of wheat and other grains remain rooted between the past and present, and offer potentially life-saving ways towards a regenerative world.
Evidence of bread can be found in art, depicted as symbol and icon, celebratory and didactic. A motif used across diverse cultures and eras; bread is featured in architectural and decorative arts, and throughout the pictorial art of ancient cultures [fig. 1]. Religious icons and devotional imagery often depict the sacramental bread wafer, a rematerialized offering of Christ’s resurrected body; part of the story of the Eucharist. Bread is also featured largely in 17th century Northern European domestic interiors and lavish still lives, symbolizing merriment and health, as well as indexing the plethora of riches and resources obtained through the violence of colonial exploits and extraction. Between the 13th and 15th centuries, Mughal painted miniatures and illuminated manuscripts illustrate scenes of unleavened and leavened flatbreads local to South Asia. In earlier examples, bread and wheat grain are constitutive of the literal architecture of empires, clearly demonstrated in numerous depictions of bread and bread-making practices in ancient Egyptian art and architecture [fig. 2].
Fig. 2. Stela of the Steward Mentuwoser (detail of lower half). Middle Kingdom, Dynasty 12, (ca. 1944 B.C.). Northern Upper Egypt,. Limestone, paint. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1912.
Bread often demonstrates an offering both literal and figurative. A stranger is invited to ‘break bread’ in company or with a companion, signifiers of friendship and hospitality, and both nouns which contain the Latin word for bread, panis. Beyond its representation in pictorial arts, bread more recently has been used as an artistic medium itself. Contemporary artists have taken to employing the bread-making process— from the baked loaf, to processing wheat, to forming dough —as a method and model for enquiry and performance. London-based Irish artist Laura Wilson integrates bread-making and bread dough into her artistic research, creation and performance art, using the food and its production as a medium to express embodied practices, intergenerational and tacit knowledge. Since 2016, Wilson’s ongoing project, Trained on Veda, has worked with galleries and local bakeries to highlight and problematize how post-industrialized production and global supply chains have deleteriously impacted communities, affected culinary histories and nutrition. As a part of the project, Wilson spotlights veda bread, a less appreciated and often overlooked Northern Irish bread thought to have originated by accident no later than the 19th century [fig. 3].
Fig. 3. Laura Wilson, Trained on Veda, (2016 - present), Bread and Wrapper, www.trainedonveda.com
Unique tasting and a highly digestible, the brown loaf uses malted barley—a flour made from germinated barley grain. The malting process converts the starches into sugars, imbuing the flour with a broader spectrum of enzymes and assimilable B vitamins and minerals than most available commercialized white breads. Working to reintroduce veda bread to mainland UK, Wilson has collaborated with sixth-generation baker, Marc Darvell, and his family bakery in Chesham, England. Veda bread reestablishes both the nutritional and traditional values of the bread loaf as an alimentary material, as well as a medium for discourse, knowledge, commerce and exchange.
Wilson’s Fold and Stretch (2016), You Would Almost Expect to Find it Warm (2018), and Dough Baby (2019), are performances which negotiate dough as a living and responsive material, inflecting various scales of culture; from microbial to human. Impacted by atmospheric and environmental changes and pressures, dough further materializes its interactions with the forces of hands, and through the gestures that knead, roll and cradle it. Wilson’s analogy between the sensuousness of dough and the rhythms of human flesh is most pronounced in the four-hour performance of You Would Almost Expect to Find it Warm. In the work, performers methodically transfer a bundle of fresh and pliable dough between them, continuously shifting and moving amongst one another. The agility of the dancers in response to the haptic, voluptuous and gooey agency of the animate dough sits in contrast to the sterile stiffness of marble sculptures in London’s British Museum.
Fig, 4. Laura Wilson, You Would Almost Expect to Find it Warm, (2018). British Museum. Photo: Manuela Barczewski
Fig 5. Laura Wilson, To the Wind’s Teeth (2021) _ I Ddannedd y Gwynt (2021). Still from video 11 minutes 19 seconds. Commissioned by The Landmark Trust.
Wilson’s more recent project, To the Wind’s Teeth (2021) / I Ddannedd y Gwynt (2021), includes a moving image and a performance work which focuses on the manual labor and bodily capacities required for grinding and milling wheat grain into flour. Site-specific to Llanthony Valley, the work is performed in an old threshing barn. Wilson collaborated with Cardiff based choreographer, Deborah Light, to create a performance that suggests the somatic practices exercised in separating wheat from chaff. The choreography evokes the transfer of embodied knowledge, inculcated and habitualized in the movements which sow, harvest, thrash and winnow.
Wilson’s ongoing bread and human collaborations, performances, and moving images work continues to challenge (mis)conceptions of both an iconic and generic food; now so ubiquitous and reduced within mass production’s contemporary and capitalist imaginary. Wilson’s artistic interventions reframe and elucidate the inextricable interdependencies between food matters, and social politics and processes. The ‘objectness’ of bread is sliced open, and reconfigured through communal bodies to reveal a vast and dynamic network of technological, logistical, microbial, vegetal, human and (im)material interrelations.
Fig. 6. Laura Wilson, Dough, Baby (2019). Commissioned by AB Mauri for the International Baking Expo 2019. Photo: Laura Wilson.
