There's a place in our collective imagination that we reserve for our cruelest fantasies. Vengeance and criminality, taboos best breached within blockbuster movies and cable TV dramas, are delightful flights of the imagination that, once made vivid, leave our pulse racing and our temples damp with sweat.
In the Land of the Infidels, Los Angeles, California where my good friend David Schoffman resides, there's a special place in hell for those considered omnivores. Status is regularly conferred upon those who most militantly demur.
Vegans are the vicars of nutrition. Their list of forbidden foods would make a Hasidic Passover shopping list look like a Caligulian bachannal. Denial is the realm of the elected and every day a new edible allergy is announced to an increasingly credulous yet eager public.
One could easily feed a small nation with the interdicted table scraps of your average L.A. yoga fiend.
And it is from this unfortunate backdrop that Schoffman has entered into the fray with the latest of his remedial artworks.
With his paintings long since dismissed as hopelessly hermetic, David has retired his brushes and has tossed his beret into the already cramped arena of performance art. Part reprisal, part farce Schoffman has set his wry eye on those digestive ascetics who eschew all things wheat.
In The Gluten Glutton, David, with the generous support of the Sydney Twa-Shaine Foundation and the avant-garde, new genre collective Amastar, has planted himself at the window table of Benny's Bagels in Sherman Oaks, "enjoying" shmear after shmear after shmear hoping, in his words, "to deconstruct the sitophobic discourse into new morsels of unanticipated meaning."
He's hoping the critics will soon stop by for coffee.
One could easily feed a small nation with the interdicted table scraps of your average L.A. yoga fiend.
And it is from this unfortunate backdrop that Schoffman has entered into the fray with the latest of his remedial artworks.
With his paintings long since dismissed as hopelessly hermetic, David has retired his brushes and has tossed his beret into the already cramped arena of performance art. Part reprisal, part farce Schoffman has set his wry eye on those digestive ascetics who eschew all things wheat.
He's hoping the critics will soon stop by for coffee.
