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			americans and apricots american apricots apricots americans apricots and americans -Eugen Gomringer Originally, I was working with fruit because I wanted to make sculptures that would not last, that had to be photographed. I was trying to consider the space between the object and the photograph. Then I became interested in how the organic element gave the sculptures duration. I was using old furniture and building materials and fruit and all three have certain similarities as sculptural material. A brick and a lemon, for example, are both universally recognizable forms that read as a unit from a category of objects (‘a brick’ or ‘a lemon’) rather than as a specific or unique object (‘that brick’ or ‘that lemon’). In other words, you can find either almost anywhere and, though no two are alike, all are fairly similar. In much the same way that a person will immediately understand the physicality of a chair, he will understand the color, mass, texture and value (that is important), of both the brick and the lemon. I had a studio visit with a sculptor whom I like very much and he got mad at me for wasting fruit because I used a lemon in a sculpture. I had tons of wood and hardware and paint and equipment in my studio, but he got mad about the lemon. Figure: Fischli + Weiss, Quiet Afternoon Figure: Giovanni Anselmo, Untitled Figure: Urs Fischer, Rotten Foundation There is an obvious reference in this organic/industrial pairing to Arte Povera, specifically to Giovanni Anselmo’s Untitled or to more contemporary work such as Urs Fischer’s Rotten Foundation. In both cases, the juxtaposition of organic matter with building material invites two distinct, but not necessarily contradictory, discussions—the organic as a stand-in for the human in relation to the built environment and the relationship of the organic to the durable in a larger economic value-structure (Dieter Roth’s use of fruit might be an example of the former and Gabriel Orozco’s of the latter). I mentioned that chairs have a history in sculpture, so does produce. The introduction of organic material as a stand in for the human follows naturally from a hackneyed critique of modern design’s denial of the human need to eat, digest, shit, etc. Untitled (Grapefruit Table), for example, inverts the still life by taking the fruit off the surface of the table and placing it within its structure. This also has a relationship to architecture. Though the violence of the cut in the fruit is tempered slightly by the fact that the act of cutting becomes nearly banal when applied to produce, the fruit is a stand-in for a human body—the fruit is to the sculpture as the human is to the building. The mold, the drips, the flies, etc., illustrate the inevitable awkwardness of containing a human organism within a structure made of glass and steel and sheetrock. This idea is carried to its logical extreme with the cucumber in Greenhouse/Goldfinger. Figure: Untitled (Grapefruit Table) Figure: Eggplant, Plexiglas, Aluminum (Aubergine, Perspex, Aluminium) Figure: Greenhouse/Goldfinger In the case of the Untitled (Grapefruit Table), the pressure of the glass accelerates the process of decay. Ultimately, the functionality of the object will win because even when the grapefruit is gone, the table remains. In contrast, Eggplant, Plexiglas, Aluminum (Aubergine, Perspex, Aluminium) relies structurally on the organic material; the vegetable holds the poles in tension until it deteriorates and gives way. There are a lot of plays on language and translation in this work too—for example, the idea that lemon is an anagram of melon. The title of Eggplant, Plexiglas, Aluminum (Aubergine, Perspex, Aluminium) is a play on the fact that the sculptures’ three materials can be listed differently in American English or British English. I was thinking at that time about the following quote from George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier: As you can see by looking at any greengrocer's shop, what the majority of English people mean by an apple is a lump of highly-coloured cotton wool from America or Australia; they will devour these things, apparently with pleasure, and let the English apples rot under the trees. It is the shiny, standardized, machine-made look of the American apple that appeals to them; the superior taste of the English apple is something they simply do not notice. Figure: United States Department of Agriculture Victory Garden Poster (c. 1945) In Orwell’s case, the apple symbolizes the product of American mass production, which is another way of thinking about fruit (produce/production). Jules Dassin’s film, Thieves' Highway, also from the late forties, is another allegory for American capitalism. The film came out during a period when Victory Garden posters produced by the United States Department of Agriculture were being distributed with slogans like, “food is a weapon… don’t waste it!” and “can all you can… it’s a real war job”. Thieves' Highway is a film about a WWII veteran-turned-truck driver who attempts to avenge the death of his father at the hands of a corrupt fruit-dealer by racing to get the first apples of the season from Fresno to the produce market in San Francisco. In one scene, a truck rolls off the road in Altamont and crashes at the bottom of a hill. Crates of apples fall from the bed of the truck and continue to roll down the hill for an impossibly long time after the truck has come to a stop. In an interview recorded years later, Dassin explains that they could only shoot that scene once and that the apples just continued to roll and everyone was amazed. The film is a dark portrayal of American commerce. Theives Highway was also the last film Dassin made in the United States before being blacklisted by the House Unamerican Activities Committee. In an effort to keep themselves out of trouble, or perhaps just to save patriotic face, the studio tacked a completely incongruous and moralistic “you can’t take the law into your own hands, son” speech to the final scene without Dassin’s consent. Something about how fruit is an everyday material that is imbued with a political meaning – fruit is a symbol, a politicized material .