Sausage Comedy

Why do artist's use food?

As well as possessing some interesting visual and sculptural qualities, certain food items convey a particular mood or feeling.

Let us briefly consider the humble sausage:

This is a picture of Swiss artists Fischli and Weiss, 'Wurst series'. They made a series of photos in which frankfurter sausages are arranged as characters in scenes.

In this photo called, 'In the carpet-shop,' we are led to think that the upright sausages represent 'buyers' and the flat meats represent 'carpets'. This is interesting because the meat stands for both human and non-human at the same time, we could think of it as representing something and at the same moment undermining the logic of that representation.

I think it is fair to say that for Fischli and Weiss there was something inherently comic about using sausages. Maybe this is because it is quite a crude stand in for a human, and an object that is very easy for us to recognise. In this way the use of food here is a bit like the apple over the man's face in Magritte's painting, it is a willfull misuse or disruption of the ordinary.

Here is an example of an artwork by Dieter Roth. He frequently used foodstuffs, such as chocolate, cheese, yoghurt or meat in his artworks. Roth used food as a way to make his work confrontational- he would allow the foods to go off, to rot and to smell as part of the work.

This is an artist book he made called, 'Literaturwurst'. He researched the process of making a sausage, and then shredded the pages of an actual book and encased the pulp in sausage lining. It is a book as a sausage.
If you want to find out more his attitude to food look up the FLUXUS art movement.