Eat 1/10 was part of a project called It's Been Done: A Performance Medley in which I recreate (on a smaller scale) performances or artworks by others that I find interesting or important to recreate, for whatever reason.
This piece was a recreation of Ellie Harrison's Eat 22, in which she photographed everything she ate for an entire year. I will be photographing everything I eat for the duration of January 2010. I aimed to follow the same rules used by Ellie Harrison. I used my mobile phone to email the photos to this website, along with information. The website then posted the photos to Facebook.
I have posthumously assembled a viewer for all of the photographs generated over the month. Controls are along the bottom. Click to zoom in, click-drag to move around.
I found this project raised interesting questions about role of the words 'all' and 'every' in rule-based performance. Many people feel compelled to religiously stick to these terms, as if any performance that does not adhere to them is somehow compromised. Often, it seems that we require inconvenience, tedium, and extensive length to validate our art. This bears a worrying resemblance to a puritan work-ethic, in which work is seen as a moral good.
Another interesting feature was the aestheticisation of eating. We are accustomed to this in western cultures, where food is marketed intensely visually, and has a strong relationship over images of the body. In this project, everything I ate was implanted into my body. The notion of my food becoming a part of me through eating was achieved visually, through my food becoming part of my image.
Relating to that last point, I ended up receiving an uncomfortable amount of commentary on my consumption. This was facilitated by the posts on Facebook, allowing comment by my Facebook friends. After only a couple of days, I began modifying my eating habits to placate my 'audience'. I avoided snacking as I normally would, just eating whenever the thought came to me, and grouped my snacks into lots, meaning I ate less frequently but each snack or meal was larger in volume. The way being observed can affect someone on such a sensitive thing as eating, I found particularly revealing.