Food For Thought: Aki Sasamoto
Over three evenings in late July, a new vendor appeared on the High Line at the Rail Yards offering a selection of micro performances (rather than morsels of food) from a custom-made food cart.
Commissioned and produced by High Line Art, Japanese artist Aki Sasamoto presented a new work titled Food Rental. From her post inside the food cart, Sasamoto shared personal observations, lectured on budding theories, and mused about childhood memories. What resulted was something like an off-kilter life hacking workshop, replete with odd objects used in unconventional ways.
Sasamoto’s sets often appear as limbo spaces where miscellaneous objects are strung about in odd constellations. Objects for Sasamoto are not simply material things; they are sets, props, costumes, interlocutors, vessels for meaning. If the artist’s sets are arenas inside the mind, then the objects she encounters function like frozen thoughts or feelings. For a performance on the High Line at the Rail Yards, Sasamoto was stripped bare of her sparsely sketched sets, left only with her food cart and the objects it stored. Nonetheless, the artist was able to communicate her ideas with unruly objects and an athletic body—slithering through, perching on, and wandering around her food cart. In one piece titled “X * Y = 1,” the artist stuck her legs through a hidden trap door inside the food cart to put the cart in motion.
Sasamoto’s performances are like lectures, anecdotes or monologues. Although the subjects of her monologues may be grim, she charms her audiences with a petulant speaking voice and an absurd sense of humor. (Airport bathroom? Or maybe Bully?) For the performance “Diseases with Complications,” Sasamoto outlines two diseases that can create art: charismatic syndrome and strategy. In the piece “Cliché of Romance,” Sasamoto mused about her own romantic experiences while pouring piping hot espresso through the lens of trick glasses she wore, perhaps a commentary on how love blinds.
On the High Line at the Rail Yards, Food Rental is particularly well-suited. While Sasamoto’s performances are known to be piecey, they are more unresolved as mini performances that can be chosen in random order. The whole of her performance achieves no narrative structure or emotional arc; it is a mish-mash of erratic thoughts and feelings. Just as the High Line unfolds in various, ever-changing scenes, Food Rental does so too, and it leaves the visitor the task of putting the pieces together.
-Keagan Sitompul
Photos by Liz Ligon.