A Collection of Reviews

Elisa Oliver

Blanch and Shock are Mike Knowlden and Josh Pollen. Named from cooking techniques listed and described in chef Thomas Keller’s cookery book Ad Hoc at Home (2009) the duo take food, and the concept of the meal on an imaginative journey in a variety of interpretive and thematic projects, the origin of their name however foregrounds their concern to stay close to the act of cooking and the integrity of food. Central to their practice is the caveat that it should always be possible to eat the food they ‘design’ suggesting that while their work may have its own particular form of theatre, the integrity of the role of food within daily life, and where that can take us, remains the primary motivation for their activity. The manner in which this motivation operates treads an interesting route through the current maze of food based cultural activity.

Based in South London Blanch and Shock work nationally and internationally in an impressive variety of formats and approaches.2 Collaboration is at the foundation of what they do and has taken them from the re-imagining of historical art food events such as: Gordon Matta Clarke’s infamous 1971 Bone Dinner (2010) for Companis at Eastside Projects Birmingham, to product development for Dalston’s cola (2016) experimenting with new, non-chemical sweeteners, to and interpretative events for the Wellcome Collection, London where their Feast for Melancholy (2011) saw them create a menu in response to Robert Burton’s 1621 text Anatomy of Melancholy.

The variety of their projects reflects the curiosity that initiated their collaboration. Trained respectively in Philosophy and Photography, rather than in more traditional routes to food production, they saw little distinction between these interests and those that pertain to their work with food. Their equally diverse work experiences post university, in areas such as music production and the wine trade, continued to foster the pair’s curiosity making them comfortable with a mode of working that is inherently interdisciplinary and exploratory.  Food simply provided another platform from which to explore an eclectic range of interests. A dialogue with these interests is maintained in the multiple points of reference that are brought into focus by their approach of plotting a route through a subject via food or using it as a core medium of articulation. This can be seen in their 2015 collaboration with Lemonade and Laughing Gas, The Owl’s Are Not What They Seem, a homage to David Lynch’s TV serial Twin Peaks. In this project food makes visceral the experience of Lynch’s world linking atmosphere, place and narrative in tangible form? The cherry pie and cup of joe provide the most direct access we can have to the world of Double Pineview as Twin Peaks is renamed for the evening.

The potential to enliven and extend an historical text or fictional world through the tactile and bodily experience of food was first made evident to the pair when developing an event with illustrator Mimi Leung in 2009 at Tenderpixel Gallery in London. Wanting to make food that did not just compliment Leung’s work but resonated with her practice and the event itself they asked the question what would be the most appropriate food to use in this context? They decided upon canapés, a traditional amuse bouche for a gallery opening yet the pair made them in the form of small ice cream cones with savoury fillings, colour matching the ice creams to the artists’ book illustrations. From the curiosity of pursuing the question of context, the first food themed event for Blanch and Shock emerged and released the potential of their implicit, on-going conversation between food and event. Identifying ‘when …and how much’ in relation to a given context or theme becomes the key balancing act in their projects reflecting the their individual strengths — Mike being mostly the more abstract thinker, Josh mostly the more practical, 3 the combination providing maximum flavour for each project.

The creative process for a Blanch and Shock project begins with a lot of conversations with the client. They then test stuff out separately, bringing it together to refine and shape into the final outcome; gently ‘poaching’ it into existence. This method undoubtedly contributes to the diversity of the work they produce, encompassing what appears to be more traditional restaurant based work such as a collaboration with Woolf and Social in Norwich in 2016, to much more overtly performative pieces like the previously mentioned The Owls Are Not What They Seem. Food design is frequently associated with corporate advertising with an emphasis on product placement and aesthetics beyond all else. While food design as a term describes what Blanch and Shock do, it does not reflect the collaborative and creative nature of both their relationship with clients and their engagement with produce that primarily has the act of ‘cooking’ at its heart as opposed to pure design. They chose not to work corporately and are always concerned with ethically sourcing the food they use, emphasizing sustainability.

In the current moment the food blog reigns supreme and within it food styling to create atmosphere, often undertaken in an effort to appeal to the possibility of a printed publication. Many excellent blogs and instagram pages exist, such as Madmoisellepoirot and Baking Fiction but as Carole Poirot of Madmoisellepoirot recently expressed there is a danger of such blogs stifling creativity through a desire for ‘likes’ rather than a genuine engagement and dialogue with the subject.4 In responding to an anonymous online audience, sameness rather than creative difference becomes the point of attainment. We are all aware of the spiralling nature of the aspirational instagram post. In relation to food this takes us back to the territory of the traditional cookery or recipe book, where the hand of the cook and the labour of making all but disappears in the seamless production of faultlessly presented food. It is Blanch and Shock’s emphasis on cooking, and hence the sense of a meal to consume rather than just view, that maintains the visibility of the chef and of the food in their work.  Their projects prioritise an engagement with process in relation to flavours and food combinations that often lock into personal experiences allowing their identity to persist in the projects. For example, the development of soda flavours for Dalstons stemmed from their memory of soda enjoyed as children and sought to tap into those flavours. Soda was eventually chosen over root beer for Dalstons because neither of them had a history of drinking it, hence a trace of self through the linking of food and memory manages to surface and is integral the working process

In art practice food is often employed because of the manner in which it allows the ‘art’ to disappear foregrounding instead the various social structures with which art interfaces. Works such as Alison Knowles Identical Lunch (1969) for example, through the repeated taking of the same lunch, at the same time, in the same place, brought to the fore notions of collaboration, routine and labour in art practice through the fact that Knowles needed to structure her day to enable a dedicated time to making that would work around her childcare needs. Lunch marked out a creative space in the day for Knowles with food and the routines around it an affordable and readymade tool for creativity. It is however the food that becomes present enabling the art, almost despite itself, to be seamlessly accessible and to quietly emerge. In allowing for the visibility of cooking Blanch and Shock maintain a focus for their food in which it can remain co-extensive with the process of making and part of the context from which it emerges. Their forthcoming Fresh: Adventures in the Art of Refrigeration, in response to the Wellcome Collection’s exhibition Electricity: The Spark of life in June, demonstrates this approach, constructing a menu responding to the use of artificial refrigeration and its impact on ingredients and cooking techniques that places process and context centrally in its conception. The ‘menu’ is never lost in Blanch and Shock’s work always taking us back to the meal and its function, the ‘art’ then remains part of what food does rather than being itself styled into an idea of 'art'.5 The total bodily experience of eating rather than the purely visual, are the particular tools of food as art practice. The upholding of food as a ‘meal’, as something to eat, underlines these corporeal and sensory resonances.

As has been discussed above, Blanch and Shock maintain a critical relationship with the immersive dining trend cutting through its proliferation by adding a few drops of their own flavour. In so doing they identify a dialogue with this contemporary trend, giving a sense of its ‘effects’, rather than total empathy. For Knowlden, the ‘immersive’ is most directly located in the transaction between audience, food and chef,6

 This presents not so much an immersive experience, but a kind of theatre that remains co-extensive with its environment and is led by the particular context of food and the ritual of the meal and its preparation. Even in Sean Rogg’s heavily immersive Waldorf Project, Blanch and Shock’s contribution for Chapter One centres on an exploration of value in terms of ingredients and produce and the value that the ‘human hand’ brings, for example in the hand of the chef or the skills of the winemaker.7 Chapter One’s meal was comprised of a progression of courses that demonstrated the increased manipulation of ingredients from their raw form.

A bit like Knowles in reverse, the process around food in Blanch and Shock brings into focus other discourses such as labour, the political, and the historical. While the food does not recede, as with the art in Knowles, Blanch and Shock’s work makes clear what it can encapsulate and the manner in which the history of food can define a range of discourses. Like all forms of ‘expanded’ practice there is a sense of testing the boundaries of the discipline that you are working with.8 In the case of Blanch and Shock it is establishing what the very nature of that discipline is; art, cooking, design, theatre, research, asking in fact ‘does food have to always be seen primarily in relation to the corporeal and sensory?’ and in asking that question the pair begin to establish a shifting ground around what ‘cooking’ can be and what in fact, we are all engaging in when we prepare our evening meal.

Elisa Oliveris an editor of Feast.