Contemporary art museums have the extraordinary ability of making mundane, day-to-day objects seem important and unique. They typically require us, as viewers of art, to adopt a new perspective on what we see and interact with everyday. For example, a chair in the office does not have the same meaning as a chair put on display in a museum. Likewise, a human body exhibit in a natural history museum does not have the same significance as that placed in an art museum. We are required to gain a second level of understanding of things we usually take for granted or of objects we understand only for their utilitarian function. This realization becomes apparent to us only after a brief analysis of an art piece, an understanding of its place in society, and finally, introspection.
Yasuhiro Ishimoto, a Japanese-American from California, is an artist that takes provocative photographs and labels them as art. In a Polaroid photograph taken in 1984 and titled “Wrapped Food,” he shows us an image of four red apples covered with clear plastic wrap viewed from the top. A sticker on the apples tells us the price—¥512—as if they were ready to be sold in Japan. The white reflection from the light is most prominent, and the background is black. The photograph is realistic and does not appear distorted in any way. The artist’s signature is at the bottom right of the work.
A first glimpse of the photograph makes us think that the piece on display is not actually a work of art, but merely a picture of something we might see everyday, in the grocery store or supermarket. But the fact that the photograph hangs on a wall in a museum suggests that it is important to society in some way and important to the artist when he took the photograph in 1984. It is our job as viewers to understand Ishimoto’s meaning in “Wrapped Food.” There is a superficial beauty about the photograph, in that the black background focuses our attention solely on the apples themselves. There is also a kind of symmetry in the photograph of the four apples, and because of it, our eyes are not specifically attracted to any particular part of the image. A more careful look, however, shows that the apple at the top right is most illuminated of the four, which makes it seem larger than the other three; the other three fade into the black background, where the ‘black’ depicts a feeling of isolation. The fact that the fruit is wrapped further adds to this mood by creating a layer between the object and the viewer. The photograph takes live and organic objects—the apples, or “food,” as in the title—and makes them cold and distant (as in, food that is just out of reach).
Ishimoto’s photograph, like most art, reflects on the culture in which it exists. The image of food wrapped in plastic speaks to the mass cultivation, production, and packaging of food in cellophane. The concept of mass production was relatively new during the 1980s, when “Wrapped Food” was conceived. The photograph intends for us to realize the significance of mass production in our lives and how the mass packaging of food has led to an artificial quality in the way food is prepared and how we consume it. In addition, the ¥512 sticker price on the four apples wrapped in cellophane plastic speaks to the consumerism that is now so prominent in our culture and our individual lives. For example, we take for granted that we can go to virtually any supermarket and buy all that we want to eat, from fish and chicken to vegetables and desserts. Even the meat we buy is becoming increasingly amorphous, where the original cow, pig, or lamb has become an unidentifiable chunk of meat. Only the label tells us what it is and how much it costs. Ishimoto’s “Wrapped Food” forces us to realize that food is hardly an organic process anymore, where anyone can pick the apple straight of the tree. Instead, food is now a factory process involving plastic wrapping and artificial marketing.
As we continue to visit art museums, it behooves us to gain more than a merely superficial understanding of a work of art. Each work of art speaks to one aspect of everyday life, such as how food is made readily available in “Wrapped Food.” It has the inherent goal of making us, as the viewers of art, reflect on how society functions over a period of time, as well as react to the message that is being conveyed.
