Clouds of sugar
NB: this was mostly written in September, while sick in bed
You don’t expect to run into a portrait of yourself by surprise. Chances are, if you are the type of person who has the wherewithal, spare cash and excess regard to have one commissioned you’ll know exactly what wing of the house or museum it resides in.
I am not that person. So I was taken aback when I turned the corner in the gallery of the sixth floor of Museum aan de Stroom (MAS) in Antwerp, and saw within a vitrine that felt infinite, a shopping trolley adrift in a sea of clouds.
I hadn’t, up until that moment, thought of myself as said vessel sailing through said substance. But the truth was undeniable. What, you think I am a human? What, you think you are a human? Don’t be daft. You’re just in the illusion. It might break soon.
This is the magic of course, the trick that great conceptual art pulls off which no one ever really tells you about. ‘If I get this conceit right you will see yourself within it, without any need for that pesky figurative representation — or abstracted ones, come to that. You will be perfectly realised in a thought — and the physical manifestation of that thought.’
I’ve had shocks of recognition before, in literature, in music (oh so many pop songs, portable pocket epiphanies if ever there were such a thing), in traditional portraits — oh hello sad Rembrandt, you too? But never in front of an idea. Never in front of the crystallisation of an idea.
And never in front of a shopping trolley. Which, of all the items in creation one could suddenly see oneself within — as being — is not the best. Dominic Cummings, former chief aide to former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson: “Nobody could find a way around the problem of the prime minister, just like a shopping trolley, smashing from one side of the aisle to the other.”
But why this association with the trolley? Because of what surrounded it. I stepped closer to the vitrine and discovered that what I had supposed to be clouds were clouds — of sugar. And I wanted to dive right in. Be enveloped the way the trolley was. Swim in the stuff. Drown in it. I am less man, more cake / Skittle / chocolate / tart / danish pastry. You name the treat, I will have it. And another.
It’s at this point I should give you the standard spiel on the role of sugar in getting us to this point in history which is roughly speaking, of “the food that nobody needs, but everyone craves” powering slavery, modern economic development, overindulgence. It even has a role as an artistic medium. Says the British Museum: “The foundations of dessert as we know it were laid in the medieval ‘void’, when fruit, jelly and other sweetmeats were often eaten standing up and away from the dining hall, allowing the room to be cleared for after-dinner activities. This ‘ceremony of the void’ gave dessert a detached quality, setting it apart from other modes of feasting and allowing for a certain creative licence and flamboyance in its presentation.”
Sounds like this vitrine.
Antwerp, of course, has form when it comes to being the inspiration for works of art that happens to nail a moment in civilisations evolving. Somewhere south of MAS, Brueghel painted his ‘Little’ Tower of Babel in 1563, an allegory about the Polyglot Bible yes. But also — potentially — a warning. Here is a city. Here is my city. Here is our future. (Sidenote: MAS feels quite Tower of Babel-ish, from the outside at least.)
And 500-odd years on, we move from conversation to consumption. Is it too much to say this is vitrine is our Tower of Babel? Probably. But it feels — it deserves to be — as iconic. Because of what it says to us, about us, who we are now, and how we live, in the richer parts of the world at least.
Let me level with you. I had glimmers of these thoughts when standing in that gallery. But not all in full. And then on the way back from Antwerp I got Covid. Five days into that, I lost my taste. And I lost it good and proper.
The fever, coughs, shivers I could put up with. But literally having my sweet tooth disappear — having every taste sensation vanish — utterly floored me.
How weird to eat clove after clove of garlic, and adopt the mien of a cow thinking about abstract geometry while chewing cud. To not pucker when biting into a coronation; to crave a square of chocolate after a meal and go, no, there’s no fucking point.
I can’t help but feel I am being punished by a tooth fairy hell bent on some sort weird delayed revenge trip, for seeing this image, of my craving and seeing myself in it.
As of typing my taste still hasn’t returned. And all I can think about is being the trolley. To hell with the fillings, the holes in the enamel in my teeth, the rot. To taste is to feel is to live, and I want to drown in the sweet stuff and the sensations it provides — the anticipation, the longing for, the mastication, satiation, satisfaction, repeating — then repeating.
It’s me. I want me back.
