social space | discourse by julian jason haladyn
transportation travel agriculture farming networks
ethics and politics Ron Benner’s Transend: Meeting Room
Throughout his practice, London Ontario-based artist Ron Benner consistently engages with the social as both a space and a discourse on the everyday. Rather than a series of objects or images, his projects are performative events whose audiences are invited to participate in various ways – from relaxing in a garden to eating corn to browsing through cultural and political material. These relational activities represent a continued dialogue that Benner stages with his environment. His work often poses key questions about our understanding of the ethics and politics of our everyday experiences. One of the most powerful aspects of Benner’s artwork is its overt politicality. Yet, the obvious political content often covers the more subtle ethical challenges posed by his practice. Behind his food- based installations looms the question, what do we know about the food we eat? This is a far-reaching and complex realm of inquiry that we as a society often try our best to avoid, a form of cultural repression that agriculture or agribusiness is more than happy to oblige. Part of the problem is the general lack of distinction between agriculture and farming, particularly in terms of their material and ideological differences. As Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin state in The Dialectical Biologist : The basic problem in analysing capitalist developments in agriculture is the confusion between farming and agriculture . Farming is the process of turning seed, fertilizer, pesticides, and water into cattle, potatoes, corn, and cotton by using land and machinery, and human labor on the farm. Agriculture includes farming, but it also includes all those processes that go into making, transporting, and selling the seed, machinery, and chemicals used by the farmer and all of the transportation, food processing, and selling that go on from the moment a potato leaves the farm until the moment it enters the consumer’s mouth as a potato chip. Farming is growing peanuts; agriculture is turning petroleum into peanut butter. 1
When approaching Benner’s work, especially his choice of texts and images related to food, this distinction must be kept in mind. Who are the people that pick the cacao beans used to make the chocolate we eat? In Grandmother Smith and Cacao, Ghana, W. Africa (2001) Benner presents us with an answer to this question: a black and white photograph of a woman standing among cacao trees ( theobroma cacao ), mounted on a black board with the work’s title written in silver ink under the image, presented in a deep wooden frame the bottom of which is covered with a layer of cocoa-powder – which moves, even sticking slightly to the glass, when the work is handled. Seeing the image of Grandmother Smith and Cacao, Ghana, W. Africa with the physical cacao piled underneath, gathered through the processes she engages in, reminds us that there is a human element involved in producing our food. Grandmother Smith and Cacao, Ghana, W. Africa is one of the many images contained within Benner’s Transend: Meeting Room (2012), a project in which the artist turned an existing meeting room at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto into an interactive cultural space. Benner’s installation was up from September 2012 to August 2013 as part of the exhibition Bread and Butter , curated by Sandy Saad in collaboration with Barbara Fischer, during which time people were able to use it – conducting meetings or holding university classes. However, unlike typical meeting rooms that function as neutral backgrounds for discussion, Transend: Meeting Room was filled with a library of visual stimuli, making it not just a place for dialogue but also a space that actively participated in processes of dialogue that took place within its walls. Filling the room with objects that directly or indirectly deal with food including dried corn, fruit, flowers, photographs, books, cardboard boxes, Benner critiques the very idea of a purely intellectual space by drawing attention to the networks of food that exist in and around our everyday lives.
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1 Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin. The Dialectical Biologist . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985. p210
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