John Yeadon, James Joyce and Francois Rabelais..

There have been two exhibitions recently of new work by John Yeadon. Pabulum, the first, at Browns in Coventry, followed by Carnis, at the Wagdas Gallery, London. In Pabulum (bland intellectual matter or entertainment), Yeadon combines words with images of food, either in lists or singly, as for example, ‘Fish and Chips’ with chimera, ‘Full English’ with paradigm, ‘Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding’ with avant-garde. In the Carnis exhibition there are two major works, each measuring some 12ft x 8ft, composed of hundreds, if not thousands, of collaged computer generated erect penises. These are accompanied by smaller framed works, which juxtapose words, in the form of titles, with a background of male genitalia, on which are superimposed a central photographic image.

Yeadon’s work has much in common with the great Irish writer, James Joyce, and the French medieval/renaissance scholar Francois Rabelais. They have a common preoccupation with food and eating, with sex and bodily functions. Yeadon shares their particular interest in language, in words, in lists of words, and very often combines image and word in a critical, oppositional stance towards established social and political norms, confronting his audiences with their prejudices and misconceptions. He is fond of the grotesque, in the sense that it is bodily and popular, positive and regenerative, a corrective to individual and spiritual pretence. These characteristics, some more so than others, are found in Joyce’s Ulysses and Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Fifteen out of eighteen episodes of Joyce’s Ulysses are allocated an organ of the body. Joyce makes his anti-hero, Leopold Bloom (Ulysses, or ‘Poldy’ by his wife), who first appears in the fourth episode, a character who relishes food, particularly kidneys. He introduces Leopold Bloom with the following Rabelaisian description:

“Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod’s roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palette a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”

Yeadon writes in his introduction to Pabulum, “There exists a primordial psychological relationship with food………as with sex, food is sensual, even visceral.” This is illustrated perfectly a little later in Ulysses where Joyce writes of Bloom’s response to a display of meats in a butcher’s window: “The shiny links packed with forcemeat fed his gaze and he breathed in tranquilly the lukewarm breath of cooked spicy pig’s blood. A kidney oozed bloodgouts on the willowpatterned dish…..” and when Bloom turns a moment later and his glance is arrested by the sight of a young girl, the connection between food and sex is explicitly made. Joyce writes, “His eyes rested on her vigorous hips”, and when she leaves the shop he hurries out after her, “..to follow behind her moving hams.”

Descriptions of food and the enjoyment of vast quantities of food and drink are a feature of Rabelais’ great work. In the fourth chapter of Book 1, Rabelais describes how Gargamelle, the pregnant wife of Grangousier, “did eat sixteen quarters, two bushels, three pecks and a pipkin full of tripe” at one sitting. Like the example quoted from Ulysses, food is often associated with sex, as in the following: “These two did oftentimes do the two-backed beast together, joyfully rubbing and frotting their bacon against one another, in so far, that at last she became great with child of a fair son.”

The many digital images of food at Yeadon’s Pabulum exhibition are not glamorous, like those Yeadon mimics, the ones which advertise the menus of franchised eateries, such as McDonalds and Pizza Express. Yeadon prefers the ‘reader’s wives’ photographs of food, the ‘raw, vulgar and awkward’, rather than the sanitised, soft-porn images of the professional photographers. The glamour of professional pornography would immediately be dispelled by the vision of models indulging in urgent, natural bodily functions and likewise customers accustomed to the bland illuminated advertisements of McDonalds would be turned away by the vulgar realism of “giblet soup, nutty gizzard, or the I fine tang of faintly scented urine.”

Apart from the images that juxtapose a particular food or dish with a specific word, Yeadon also combines in a single image, lists of words and pictorial lists of food. These, he writes, “..are deliberately chosen to represent a collision and confusion of categories. The words relating to food were randomly selected, but were rejected if the juxtaposition suggested a particular meaning or relationship.”  In these images, and in those combining a single image with a single word, he seeks to puzzle and worry the viewer into realising how words and images can be used to direct and control the way we see the world. We become disturbed by the unexpected absence of meaning, the absence of order, of coherence, and acutely conscious of our desire to make sense of things. This need causes us to search for meanings, for order, in seemingly disparate images and words. Try for example, Yeadon’s pairing of an image of ‘Corned beef’ and threnody (lament). Yeadon takes a mischievous delight in word games and in making lists, and as Will Barton had written,Literature loves lists. Joyce and Rabelais are no exceptions. Ulysses is full of them, from itemising … “all kinds of lovely objects ….. golden ingots, silvery fish, crans of herrings, drafts of eels, codlings, creels of fingerlings, purple seagems and playful insects”, to a prosaic list of thirty-two society ladies attending a fashionable wedding. Rabelais on the other hand is a veritable glutton. Chapter twenty-two begins with a list of games Gargantua plays. The list fills two pages, some two hundred and eighteen real or imaginary games, and chapter fifteen lists forty-four defamatory epithets, including such choice examples as, shite-a-bed scoundrels, lubbardly louts and ninny lobcocks.

Yeadon also includes menus on the tables at Browns. They consist of printed lists of fourteen words and fourteen images of food. One side reads: Menu, List, Catalogue, Series, Programme, Manifest …etc, and on the verso, Menu, Diet, Fare, Nourishment, Victuals, Fodder…etc. In contrast to the other lists of words and images, seen elsewhere in the exhibition, these illustrate categories of words based on two different meanings and uses of the word ‘menu’, and show how the words within each category diverge from one another, how they have different associations and separate meanings, how they may become the starting points for new lists and categories. Joyce, in Ulysses, and even more radically in Finnigan’s Wake, also forces the reader to pay attention to words, how they are constructed, the fluidity of their meanings and associations, their social, political and psychological functions. Words once liberated from the constraints of conformity, from particular forms of communication and control, generate new meanings.

The broad theme of Yeadon’s exhibition at Browns is concerned with national identity and culture. He writes, “Food is political and central to national and ethnic identity, but national identity, along with national character, is a myth, a construct”, and he points out how many of our traditions are inventions, such as, how ‘fish and chips’ was introduced into England in the 19th century by Jewish immigrants, ‘morris dancing’ from Moorish Spain and Islamic North Africa and the traditional British Christmas Tree had pagan origins in Germany. There is also a strong underlying political and social dimension to Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce, who grew up in Dublin under British rule and experienced the 1st World War, had an aversion not only to war, violence and licensed coercion, but to nationalism, even the particular form of Irish nationalism advocated by the poet W.B.Yeats. Like the intellectual, well-educated but priggish, Steven Dedalus, he feared “the big words that make us so unhappy”, the military myths of heroism that sent soldiers to their deaths. The very ordinariness of Joyce’s creation, Leopold Bloom (a Jewish advertising salesman, an outsider, who is preoccupied with the sensual pleasures of life), is an antidote and reproach to the glamorised, idealised and ennobled images of heroes. Perhaps in the same way the disconcerting non-artiness of Yeadon’s images of food, the way they are presented and displayed, as well as the dismissive title of the show, serves to underline the exhibition’s covert seriousness. It is also an antidote to the value laden glossy images of food presented by eateries.

The wit and humour (humour is an essential ingredient of Ulysses), the critical and subversive stance of Joyce and Yeadon bring them close to Rabelais. Rabelais’ depictions of joyous revelling, of robust immersion in the physical, of carnality, of delight in eating and drinking and other bodily functions, his love of words, of excess and hyperbole, of grotesque realism, oppose and subvert dogma and authoritarianism, narrow-mindedness, bigotry, pomposity and po-facedness.

Yeadon’s second exhibition, Carnis, as the name suggests, is closer to the carnal realm of Rabelais than the Jesuit induced irony of Joyce. In both Yeadon’s major pieces, Congeries Carnis Magnus and Congeries Carnis Cum Orbe, there is an obsessive delight in collecting and grouping, creating a visual list and feast of erect penises. It is partly a wish to be inclusive, to be democratic, to delight in small differences, similarities and contrasts, in size, shape, colour, proportion, disposition, in the particular and the exceptional. A pleasure in diversity and individuality, in the cocksure, the bold and the brazen, the erect, bull-necked, as well as the shrinking violet; a wish to record everything, to leave nothing out. Seen altogether, however, each of the individual specimens are absorbed into a genital mass which forces the viewer to recognise the reality of his or her own flesh, free from myths and the metaphysical. This preoccupation and exhibition of erect penises is not degenerate or degrading, it is the reverse, it is regenerative. It is a celebration of the flesh and of the regenerative organ. An organ that plays an essential role in the continuous repeated cycle of life and death.

Yeadon’s pleasure in word games and the association of words with images is found in the group of smaller works at Wagdas. In Van Dick, a box of Italian ‘Van Dick’ oil paints (a reference to Sir Antony van Dyck (1599-1641), the famous portrait painter and Old Master), is framed by aesthetically and humorously arranged digital images of erect penises. In Union Jack II, there is a photograph of a man exercising, his legs wide apart, bent forward at the waist and with his arms outstretched and raised to form the emblematic cross of the Union Jack. Set against a background of erect penises, these erections, this hoisting of the Union Jack, and the other word associations, ‘Jack-off’ and ‘Jolly Jack Tar’ are irreverent, joyous and quintessential Rabelais.

It is impossible not to respond to Yeadon’s affectionate, playful but often ironic sense of humour. It is what makes his work memorable and liberating, and free from being either preachy or sanctimonious.

Impossible or not, some people, probably the great majority, will find Yeadon’s work grotesque and certainly visceral. Much of his latest work is, to a greater or lesser extent, difficult to look at. At the Carnis exhibition a young woman came in, walked around, and almost immediately left in a hurry. Perhaps she was embarrassed or found the show objectionable or even worse. The Irish writer Flann O’Brien, whom Yeadon is fond of quoting, wrote in one of his sketches: “The brother can’t look at an egg…..can’t stand the sight of an egg at all…… he can’t go the egg. Thanks very much all the same but no eggs. The egg is barred.” Perhaps, like ‘the brother’, the young woman could not stand the sight of erect penises. An example, Yeadon suggests, of the “baggage people bring to the work.”

Nick Smale, January 2006