Performed at The Artist's Institute with Betty Perry
May 16, 2015
This performance was curated by Artist’s Institute Fellows Ray Ferreira, Miatta Kawinzi, Erik Patton, and Pang Vang for the Carolee Schneemann six-month season: This pie offers self-realization,” Carolee Schneemann quips in the recipe for her six-step baking performance Americana I Ching Apple Pie (1972). As a domestic venue for her kinetic-theater, the kitchen becomes a potential site for “liberation through joyous aggression,” where questions of self-actualization and autonomy surface.
Cooking returns as a wry and defiant performance in Sondra Perry’s work Sondra Perry & Associate™ Make Pancakes and Shame the Devil, in which the artist and her mother transform the Artist’s Institute into a kitchen stocked with pulleys, head-mounted video screens, and Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix spiked with unexpected ingredients. Within this simultaneously elaborate and makeshift domestic set, the mother and daughter’s performance of labor exposes the entanglement of class, gender, and race. Still, their food will be served to guests, an equivocation about its status as concept or material that becomes a provocation to consumption.
