Foot – Bread Relationship
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"The Foot - Bread Relationship" belongs to a group of works that the artist performed himself. He is at once the object and the subject – the artist in the first person – as it was said at the time. It is possible to see them only through photographic documentation, for they were not performances, put on in front of an audience. In "Foot Bread - Relationship" the artist kicks a loaf of bread at the wall. The photographic sequences show the phases in which the bread is smashed to pieces. It is a drastic act. Rough, aggressive, blasphemous. It seems that the actor is insensitive to the needs and feelings of others. Bread is the symbol of food itself, sustenance, the strongest symbol of economic and social relations, religious symbol. Bread is also used to signify the spiritual food of man. It is practically prohibited to use it from any negative aspect. Symbols, of course, have many aspects. In his essay on the Marquis de Sade, Barthes cites Sade’s negative attitude to the symbol: “On the one hand, bread has all the features of virtue and as moral object has to be despised, on the other hand it is means of coercion: tyrants subjugate the nation threatening to deprive it of bread; here, then, bread is a symbol of oppression. Thus, in Sade, bread is a contradictory sign: moral and immoral.”1 It is this contradiction of the strong symbol and the power of the coercive element contained in it that interested the artist, and upon it he based many other works of his in which he developed stories about the cynicism of government and its manifestation in language. He demonstrated the power of government, which he symbolically adopted.B.S.
1 Barthes, R. Sade, Fourier, Loyola, Biblioteka Zodijak, Kultura, Beograd, 1979.
1 Barthes, R. Sade, Fourier, Loyola, Biblioteka Zodijak, Kultura, Beograd, 1979.