Performance Art Using Food

Food has been a subject and medium in performance art as long as and wherever the genre has existed. Performance artists use food to celebrate and/or critique a culture’s notions of art, food, the food system, gender and sexuality, and other aspects of society. Food events and activities can also be looked at as a form of performance art, sometimes conducted unintentionally. Performance art, itself, raises issues concerning the role of the artist in society and the definitions and purposes of art. Performance art using food raises those issues as well as ones surrounding the expense and wastefulness that accompanies many such performances, the exoticization and eroticization of food, and the performances’ effectiveness in having their messages understood.