The Association of Imaginary Schools is sponsoring a show at the Museum of Imaginary Art, The Cupcake Dialectic, which features the art of elusive photographer Deiter Reichstag.
According to his extremely long and hard-to-read artist’s statement, the show deals with the American dialectic between the fetishization of the appearance of food and the simultaneous failure to enjoy it along with the intensely gendered relationship to sugar in US culture.
The work grew out of his experience as a parent at the trendy alternative Burning Badger Waldorf School his six children attend. At the eco-friendly school, refined sugar and commercialism are central negative preoccupations that paradoxically shape and control the community’s relationship to nature.
In his video promo for the show, Reichstag revealed that the slightly out-of-focus/off-center cupcake that appears on the publicity for the show was one made by his wife for a kindergarten class birthday party at the Burning Badger School.
The catalog explains in greater detail that Burning Badger kindergarten parents are asked to prepare a special sugar-free undelicious cupcake recipe for class birthdays and that the recipe calls for a whipped coconut oil frosting. While Reichstag’s wife went to some trouble to follow the recipe, and in fact commented that the coconut oil frosting was the only good part, she was accused by the teacher, in an unpleasant public email, of cheating with a “plastic” Chrisco/sugar mix.
In an incendiary reply-all email to the kindergarten parents, Reichstag commented on the intense artificiality of the culty/hippie school aesthetic and the way Waldorf mothers were forced into a restrictive mold of predetermined maternal roles, albeit organic and locally sourced. Having pressed “send” on an email Reichstag would later regret, and which he had not OK’d with his wife, he went into the woods behind his studio and tossed the last cupcake under a tree.
An art project was born.
The spotlight photo is displayed in a glass case in the center of the main exhibit room so that it is possible to read the words that Reichstag’s wife has scrawled on the backside of the photo: COCONUT OIL.
Note
A previous version of this press release referred to Reichstag as “Eurotrash,” he has made it very clear that he does not want to be associated with the 1990’s moniker, and prefers to call himself “Eurofash.”
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