VANITAS by John Yeadon at The Herbert Cafe, Herbert Museum & Gallery, & The Lanchester Gallery, Coventry University

The OED definition of Vanitas is “a still-life painting of a 17th century Dutch genre containing symbols of death or change as reminder of their inevitability”. John Yeadon’s exhibition, sub-entitled “the mortality of the eater and the eaten”, was appropriately sited for the first of these shows, in The Herbert Cafe; as in Pabulum, his previous site specific exhibition at Brown’s Restaurant and Bar in Coventry, Yeadon combined images of food with words

In Pabulum, Yeadon wrote that the words were, “randomly selected, but were rejected if the juxtaposition suggested a particular meaning or relationship”, but in this exhibition the shared title of the two major works, Rapture I and Rapture II, were chosen to present the viewer with a paradox which would cause him or her to reflect more closely on the two contrasting images. Rapture I showed a dead mackerel prepared for cooking. Gutted and washed, its head and tail intact, it lay across a pristine white dinner plate, which was sullied by a thin watery film of the fish’s blood. A continuous linear text composed of words and phrases associated with food and eating overlaid the whole image. In Rapture II, a similar plate was strewn with the remains of the devoured mackerel, the head and tail still intact but the backbone picked clean.

Anticipating the pleasure of a delicious mackerel might well send some people into a state of rapture; seasoned and baked in an oven with a squeeze or two of lemon would certainly get the juices flowing. Relishing the remains of the meal, the memory of its flavours and delicate textures, might also revive similar feelings, tinged perhaps with sadness that it was over and that it was at the mackerel’s expense. But this was not his intention here. The crisp, clear, dispassionate images Rapture I had the aesthetic simplicity of a road sign) were not designed to induce pleasurable sensations, they did not appear the least bit appetising. The paradox between the titles and the images was intended to give rise instead to conflicts of feeling and thought. They drew attention to the age old dualism between the sensuous world of the pleasurable and the supersensory world of the spirit, a divide between Eros and Thanatos, body and mind, flesh and spirit, pleasure and pain. Both the titles and the images retained their own resonances and there was no attempt at a resolution of the tension created by their juxtaposition; the viewer was left to ponder their oppositional relatedness. Simon Schama, for example, in his recent commentary on Giovanni Berniniís famous sculpture, The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, (BBC television series, Power of Art) suggested how close the physical manifestation of mystical exaltation might be to that of intense sexual arousal – orgasmic in itís totality.

Yeadon’s intention is not to reinforce cherished ideas, bolster established habits of perception or thought. There is an element of ‘agit-prop’ in his work, not in a direct political or social sense, but in his critical stance. He cajoles his audience into questioning the way words and images are deliberately and sometimes cynically manipulated for political and commercial ends. Unlike many media publications and television programmes, he is not so much concerned with particular issues, such as the evils of junk food, as he is about using such emotive issues to focus more effectively on the nuts and bolts of communication; words and images. Yeadon’s titles, are not just verbal descriptions of an image, i.e. Mackerel on a White Plate, they have a more active role, they add a component to the work which is not necessarily evident in the image itself.

Other work in this exhibition included: Menu; Six Stations of the Cross, six light boxes with images of food (see below); Full English (a computer generated movie), and a range of signed products for sale: menu cards, coasters, place mats and plates printed with images of food or the remains of meals. Full English, a miscellany of words and phrases associated with food and eating, was composed of a continuous stream of words and phrases; it had the rapid delivery of the ‘body mouth‘ of Samuel Beckett’s dramatic monologue, Not I (see Rehearsing/ Samuel Beckett in this issue), but without the voice. Perhaps a vocal accompaniment would have been too compelling, too distracting or even disturbing for the cafe’s clientele, particularly if the list included insulting or abusive expressions.

Menu was a boldly printed list of food and food related words that was sited on the wall behind the counter, at the far end of the cafe. There were some ‘prime cuts’ here: “… gut-bucket, gut bomb, greedy guts, guzzle guts, gutless…..fat gut, fat, fatty, fatso, fat boy, fat chance, fat pig, piggy, pig head, pig out, pig dog, pig it, pig ignorant …” Reading this list aloud for the first time I realised how disruptive and disturbing such a monologue would be to diners at the cafe. It says something about how we regard certain animals and body parts when so many of these phrases are informal, derogatory expressions, terms of abuse or ridicule.

Exhibiting Vanitas at the Lanchester Gallery enabled Yeadon to show three new large scale works: Full English Text, End Time, and Food Studies. The numerous plates printed with words and images of food were laid out on tables and his experiments with spray paint and ceramic ‘slip’ on the skeletal remains of fowls (breed or breeds indeterminate, probably the humble chicken) were housed in a glass cabinet.

Full English Text, with added colouring. A miscellany of words and phrases associated with food and eating (industrial manufactured painting), to give its full title, was approximately 8ft by 12ft. This omnium gatherum of words, row upon row, printed on a yellow background and picked out in a variety of colours – where words had become the image – seemed like decorative wallpaper, until the viewer looked closer, close enough to read the words themselves and find that they related to bodily parts, insulting expressions, dangerous food additives and pollutants, and unpleasant human ailments and diseases. That’s what you get with the ‘Full English‘! The piece was reminiscent of Yeadon’s two other large images, identical in size, Congeries Carnis Magnus and Congeries Cum Orbe, shown in London last year . It had the same obsessive delight in collecting and grouping. The Full English Text was a feast of words and a hymn to excess.

End Time (digitally assisted print) was an even larger image, some 5ft by 22ft. It was a record of 110 plates of food, a frieze of fifty-five meals shown before and after being consumed, grouped in pairs and arranged in twenty-two columns of five images. Printed on a white background, this work echoed the long table that stood in the centre of the gallery like a banqueting table, laid with white table cloths and white plates printed with images of food. End Time was a visual record of food consumption, the documentation (rigorous or not, it didnít really matter) of food consumed by the artist. It was the ‘end time‘ of the eaten, multiplied over and over; a reminder of the incremental approach, meal by meal, little extinction by little extinction, of the eater’s ‘end time‘.

Yeadon often delights in visual and verbal excess. In this regard, Congeries Carnis Magnus was his paean of praise, his grosse fuge – a celebration of excess as much as it was of fecundity. The oft quoted phrase, ‘less is more‘ is frequently and justifiably used to warn against verbosity and to encourage precision and concision, particularly with respect to the written word. It certainly can be applied to the writing of Samuel Beckett; but then what are we to make of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake or Francois Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel? End Time is a demonstration that more is more and better, or more circumspectly, that more is not necessarily less, that it can be more and different. The rich diversity and even irreverence in Yeadon’s work gives it an added raison dí etre when pitched against bourgeois attitudes and values, the middle-class inclination towards moderation and restraint.

Six Stations of the Cross (nine-fourteen), was composed of six light boxes mounted together, each with an illuminated image of a devoured meal: 1, four fish; 2, a number of lamb or pork chops; 3, two rabbit skeletons; 4, a chicken; 5, more ribs; 6, one filleted and battered fish with knife and fork. To include a vertical line of similar illuminated boxes (one-eight) to form a cross would perhaps be too obvious a reference to the culmination of Christís journey to Golgotha. As it is, the title alone is sufficient for the connection to be made, and the viewer, recognising the profound implications of such a depiction will draw his or her own conclusions. The title of the piece and its contents link all such small extinctions with the idea of sacrifice and the sacred. The work implies, that even if such creatures are not to be considered sacred, their lives should be respected and their individual sacrifices acknowledged.

In contrast to the larger works, Food Studies was a series of drawings/collages using a variety of materials, fluorescent acrylic, metallic spray, lazertran, glitter and digital images. These were more recognisable as ‘fine-art’ and the style was familiar. Although they were concerned with the same subject-matter they did not have the impact of the larger works and this was not just due to their scale. They were more playful and humorous (and why not). In Don’t Play with Your Food, for example, both food and art (items of food and paint arranged on a plate and seasoned with appropriate words and phrases) were seen equally as objects for play. Similarly in End Game, the flayed corpse of a rabbit was both the end of a game (a recreational and sporting pastime), and the end of a game animal (a wild rabbit, surely not a tame one). One of these, hunter and hunted, was not presumably, ‘game’ for it!

Yeadon’s work runs counter to the idea that art is concerned mainly with the experience of the aesthetic, an appreciation of ‘beauty’, however that may be defined. His work asserts the importance of the body (flesh) in the body (flesh), mind (spirit) equation. Vanitas acknowledges the physicality of our existence, the corpus from which we cannot escape even if we wished to. Put bluntly it links us fundamentally with animals, with our essential animality, as against an identity with an ideal sense of nature (both animate, fauna and flora, and inanimate), a relationship that has become increasingly romanticised and aestheticised. Christianity elevated the spirit at the expense of the flesh. To indulge the flesh was to behave like animals, like dogs or other creatures, hence the horror and sense of outrage which still exists today when Christís depiction includes references to bodily functions and appetites. Nevertheless there is a constant reference in Vanitas to Christian beliefs and practices. The image of the fish (a mackerel in this instance) was, and still is, a sign and symbol of the Christian faith. Its association with the word rapture, as in Rapture I and Rapture II, suggests a reference to ‘The Rapture‘, a specific North American term which according to some millenium teaching denotes the transportation of believers to heaven at the second coming of Christ. Similarly End Time may refer to the ‘End of Days‘, the time of the apocalypse, the end of the world and the Last Judgement. Rapture I, Rapture II and End Time, together with the Six Stations of the Cross and the symbolic representation of The Last Supper (the table laid with images of food printed on white plates) place the many visual and verbal references to food and eating throughout the exhibition within a well defined religious and Christian context.

But Yeadon’s Vanitas also celebrates the means of production, the material, technical reality of the twenty-first century, the new possibilities that computer programming, digital imaging and industrial manufacture offer. The Full English Text, End Time and other recent works, such as Congeries Carnis Magnus, would not have existed in the form they do but for these new technologies. By mimicking the universal advertising style of eateries, the photographic and illuminated displays of food, as seen in, for example, McDonalds, Burger King and Big Mac, Yeadon’s work gains authority. It plays them at their own game, turns the tables on them and lifts away the glamorous gloss that hides a less appetising reality. Like Pop Art artists in the 1960s, he brings the commercial, the outside non-art world into the gallery – that’s surprising and refreshing!

Nick Smale, April 2007.