It’s a medium that has been used for centuries. Now, a new generation is challenging the way we play with this essential material.

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In the photo, 16 raw egg yolks are piled high in a plastic ice cube tray. Each compartment is bursting with albumen. Broken eggshells are scattered on the surface of the tray. It’s a simple composition with vibrant colors of Jolly Rancher, the type of image you see on Instagram. It doesn’t convey the message we’ve come to expect from social media food photos: there’s no hint of deliciousness or even edibility. The yolks, while bright yellow, are eerily rectangle-shaped and fill their ice cube cells. This reflects the dimensions of the photo. Nature has given in to the artifice. The yolk has been separated, as has the shell, and form has been separated, as has food from its function. It’s not possible to eat anything here.

Josie Keefe, Phyllis Ma, and their 31-year-old partner, Josie Ma, have been creating stop motion videos, zines, and photographs under the name “Lazy Mom” since 2014. The image is a reference to the cultural boogeyman, the “bad mother,” whose Lazy mom takes close-ups instead of making a healthy snack for after school. The light catches on the plastic and creases in a Vermeer-like way. Keefe says that by working with food, which involves playing with it – something we’re not supposed to do -, the women belong to a group of American artists who use food as both a medium and a subject. This tradition dates back centuries but has grown in scope and complexity in recent decades.

The sculptor Antony Gormley’s 1980-81 ” bed” made of 600 loaves featured depressions that looked like sleeping bodies left them. In 1991, the Cuban/American artist Felix Gonzalez Torres poured gray candy onto a gallery’s floor to evoke a hail of bullets. In Sarah Lucas’s 1997 work ” Chicken Knickers,” she posed holding a raw chicken that had been disemboweled and was strapped on the front of her pants. Other artists have used chewing gum instead of paint in their early 21st-century paintings. For He Xiangyu’s 2009 ” Cola Project,” he boiled down 127 tonnes of Coca-Cola to create an oil-dark residue he then used as

Fallen Fruit’s “A Portrait of Atlanta” wallpaper (2013), a composite of photographs of orchards throughout Georgia.Credit…Fallen Fruit (David Allen Burns and Austin Young), “Peach Wallpaper Pattern/A portrait of Atlanta,” 2013, from the exhibition “The Fruit Doesn’t Fall Far From the Tree,” commissioned by the Atlanta Contemporary

The artists of today are different because their work was born from a culture which has made food a fetish. Food is a visual medium in the virtual world of social media. It’s a fetishized, over-processed food with highly styled pictures but no real physical counterpart. The food is in a suspended state of imagined delicacy, which will never be tasted by the majority of viewers. It’s a totem for eternally unfulfilled desire. It is an extraordinary privilege to have food so readily available that we don’t see it as a necessity for survival but rather as entertainment. Keefe Ma and Keefe are both wary of this kind of frivolity. According to a United Nations Report, 821 million people in the world were undernourished last year.

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Advertisement – SkipKeefe explains that Lazy Mom’s goal is to mock modern food culture and the elitism of food styling. They also want to ridicule professionals who “tweezer every dish on the plate.” Their satirical pictures still attract some of the same audiences as Instagram feeds that are more celebratory. They’ve also been hired to style the food for the Ace Hotel and the now-defunct culinary magazine Lucky Peach. The dilemma for Lazy mom and their peers is to subvert and question society’s obsession with food without getting swallowed by it.

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Long before it became an ironic object, food was used as a figurative element in still lives. These were not so popular in Europe’s Low Countries during the early modern era. Critics disdained this genre at first, claiming it was merely decorative and lacked the moral weight of narrative art. Food has always been a part of a narrative. It’s ephemeral and destined to be eaten or spoiled. In a still-life subgenre called vanitas, it is used as a reminder that we are mortal. Food has a cultural significance, as it helps to define social strata. Amsterdam flourished in the early 17th century due to trade. Dutch still-lifes evolved into lavish mise-en scenes featuring lemons imported from the Mediterranean and mince pies with Indian spices. They were just as carefully staged as Instagram photos today, and they were meant to convey the wealth of the bourgeois merchants that commissioned them.

This idea of food as a symbol of wealth and status is still valid today. In ” Palate” (2012), American-Greek artist Gina Beavers turns online photos of food — oysters, waffles, and chicken — into reliefs with smacked acrylic paint and thickened surfaces contoured and thickened by pumice. The resultant image objects are stylized in a way that is opposite of the glossy social media. They emphasize the pockmarks and ooze of reality. The Canadian artist Chloe Wise put Chanel and Prada logos onto purses that looked like bagels and challah, as well as toast with jam on it. They became as popular as the designer items they mocked. However, the fact that they were made of urethane and not dough took away from the 

Fallen Fruit: Courtesy David Allen Burns & Austin Young

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Advertisement SKIPFood can bring a texture and a sensuality that are not necessarily related to food. For example, the American sculptor Andy Yoder‘s 2003 executive wingtips made of shining licorice, or the French/Algerian Kader Attia‘s scale-model Conservators were asked not to rebuild the work if it fell apart. The speed at which these works degrade is critical. Rot is not just inevitable; it is also the aim, as with the Swiss artist Urs Fisher‘s 1998 work ” Feules Fondament (Rotten Foundation!)!“, in which brick walls are built on a foundation of decaying fruits. The instability of this type of art can be alarming and even dangerous. The smell of rotting fish adorned in sequins, beads, and other embellishments was so overwhelming that the Museum of Modern Art had to remove them from its Manhattan exhibition of Leebul’s “Majestic Splendor” (1997). A new version, doused in potassium permanganate, to neutralize the odor,