The Toaster |
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| Bread and food in all forms and
meanings are recurrent themes in the work of Falk and
Aguerre. They reoccur throughout the years in different
projects, prepared, tasted and eaten in different ways,
taking advantage of the subconsciously symbolic tension
which most people associate with food. The confrontation
which is found within the unexpected uses of this symbol,
food, causes unease, anguish or revulsion. Examples are
found in Lucia's bleeding bread, or when the artists
encourage the public to walk on the bread in Reliquias,
and even in the aggression that brought La Donna's
demise. The Toaster, is another work where bread is used
and its symbolism is questioned. .
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The Toaster is a large picture, 5 meter wide and 4.5 meter high, totally made from slices of bread toasted in different lengths of time to reach the nuances between black and white, ochre and rust. It took several days of work and several friends and their toasters to prepare the 2.500 pieces of toast necessary to build the gigantic mosaic, which reproduce a photograph of a toaster. The Toaster was among public and press the most popular work at the Buenos Aires Biennial , a "public magnet" as an art critic called it, having an unusual big impact in the news papers and TV. After the Biennial was acquired by the Modern Art Museum of Buenos Aires, being now a part of it's permanent collection. |
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In this piece of
work, we break down the daily pattern of this piece of
kitchen machinery. The toaster toasts and when it does
this it reproduces itself. The use of the object and the
responsibility that we give to the material (in this case
the bread) to change, transforms the pictures and the
area of representation within them. But yet still, this
transformation does not guarantee a representational
figure in the traditional sense: the viewer moves between
the instability of physical closeness, where the picture
is erased but the individual pieces of bread are
identifiable, and distance, where it is possible to
reconstruct the picture at the expense of the image of
the bread. As in all the work by FA+, there are many
things happening on many levels, at the same time. The reproduction of the photograph is an example of this in this work. The original work was digitized in 3.053 pixels where every pixel corresponds to a piece of bread which is roasted using analogues. This usage means that the digital picture can be recreated. |
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