Breaking the Mold
Breaking the Mold
Shivering, Quivering Tofu Represents Human Biodegradability
11.00 a.m. ET (1500 GMT) October 12, 1999
| By Tracey Middlekauff |  |
NEW YORK — With all the flap over the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s controversial “Sensation” exhibit, isn’t it time to find some art we all can love?
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And what could be more lovable, more innocent, more squeezably soft, than … tofu?
At New York City’s Liebman Magnan Gallery, patrons can take in an eyeful of the sculpted bean curd as part of the Control Freak exhibition, by installation artist David Shapiro.
Shapiro, a 36-year-old Brooklyn resident, has been creating tofu casts of heads for the past three years. His inspiration came, he says, when he was eating some of the stuff: “I stuck a chopstick in a piece of tofu and I had that moment.”
Part of the attraction of casting heads in tofu is the appealing lack of clutter they leave behind, the artist says. “It’s a relief there’s nothing left at the end.”
Also, the tofu heads mimic real life, according to Shapiro: “You live in a human body. You’re gonna rot and die.”
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Plus, they make an amusing party treat. At the show’s opening, tofu heads were served to guests.
Shapiro’s current tofu work, at Liebman Magnan until Oct. 16, is entitled Tofu Couples. In this work, a pair of quivering tofu heads each occupies a vat of water. The vats are then stacked in a large, industrial refrigerator. The heads are those of couples, both current and defunct. Some of the faces are pristine; some have begun to crack. A piece of nose on one of the heads floats peacefully on the top of the water.
“I tried to represent,” Shapiro explains. “There’s your white breeder couple, interracial couples, a divorced couple.”
One fun aspect of the show, he says, is when the couples come to look at themselves. “They want to see who will rot first, who’ll stick around. “There’s something tacitly creepy and sexy about the whole thing,” he says.
But don’t get the idea that any old store-bought tofu is good enough to be art. Shapiro worked with David Eng, a tofu manufacturer in New York’s Chinatown, to get the formula just right. According to Shapiro, Eng thought he was nuts at first, but he soon became interested in the whole idea. “I spent every Saturday for six months hanging out in a tofu plant,” Shapiro laughs.
Besides, he explains, “Tofu is just edible plaster of Paris and calcium sulfate.”
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The tofu art isn’t the only non-traditional piece in Shapiro’s current exhibition. Hallucinate is an arcade video game produced through Jed Brain Pictures. The player must navigate a bad acid trip through New York City. The piece is based on Shapiro’s own life: When the artist was 15, he endured an LSD trip gone bad and woke up naked on the Long Island Railroad. His mother was understandably worried when he didn’t come home for three days, and the video game includes an image of her, carrying a plate of chicken, pleading, “David, come home.”
Shapiro says that when he found himself sans clothing, he happened upon a group of boys who told him he should go sleep in the subway conductor’s shack. He broke into the shack, which he says was “filled with newspapers and packets of ketchup.”
Shapiro fashioned a nifty newspaper suit for himself, and proceeded to eat the packets of ketchup. “The ketchup ended up all over the newspaper suit, and it looked like dried blood,” he says. But that served as the inspiration for yet another piece in his current show: Collapsible Self-Portrait. The sculpted figure is wearing — you guessed it — newspaper. The floor is strewn with packets of ketchup.
Another piece in the Control Freaks show reflects what Shapiro likes to do when he’s depressed: pick up objects on the street. He says this helps him get out of himself. “I try to pick up three objects from the street a day,” Shapiro says. “Or I’ll look through the trash.” He places the objects in individual drug bags and hangs them on the wall, resulting in a sort of mosaic.
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It’s the tofu, though, that’s getting all the write-ups in periodicals like The New Yorker and ARTNews. But all the attention in the world isn’t going to make people buy art that decomposes in about three weeks. So, for now, Shapiro will continue to be a freelance film editor, in order to, as he says, “keep the wolf at the door.”
So, how do you top tofu sculpture? Well, Shapiro’s next project is a documentary he just completed shooting with his sister, novelist Laurie Shapiro. It’s about Tobias Schneebaum, an artist and author who was once a cannibal, among other things. Shapiro contracted malaria in Indonesia while working on the film.
But as long as he gets to keep making art, he’ll be happy. Tired, maybe, but happy. It’s funny, he says, “After 20 years of school, you end up picking up s— on the street and hanging out in a tofu plant.”
| Tags: art