Eating Regular 8 minutes 2004
Eating Regular, commissioned by Trinity Square Video in conjunction with the Eat residency, is a videotape about eating as ritual, performance, and habit.
This videotape essays 'regular' or plain eaters, and how they may or may not adapt to social mores and expectations. Eating Regular references modernism, in its deployment of my own rather mathematical Photoshop drawings, its original soundtrack, and its portrait of the artist as a solitary man. Art is social, when exhibited or performed. But many artists themselves, and also a great deal of art-making, are not social. Eating Regular focuses on wallpaper-its consistency and its dissonant undertones. This tape also highlights balances and tensions between digital landscapes and analogue leftovers. Eating Regular riffs on history, how artists and indeed humans, like so many other animals, are incessantly digesting and regurgitating their own histories.
Eating Regular is divided into seven monologues. Two of them contain no video-source material, and all the others frame video self-documentation against both my original Photoshop drawings and resized bitmap computer screen backdrops.
This videotape could be encapsulated as also pertaining to structural tensions between foregrounds and backgrounds - how backgrounds are always threatening to push their way through to the front. Eating Regular's sixth sequence revisits a mock-commercial that I originally made in 1983 , a work created specifically for an art exhibition with a better modern living theme. Histories are not only re-consumed, but also re-framed-not unlike food.
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