The Power of Chocolate in Art

My final year degree thesis. Published at last!

This has been 25 years in the making!
Originally written as a final year thesis for my Design for Communication degree at the University of Wolverhampton, "The Power of Chocolate in Art" was written in 1996 and looked at the use of chocolate in contemporary art and in particular the work of 3 female artists, Helen Chadwick, Anya Gallaccio and Janine Antoni.

As the course was essentially a graphic design degree, I decided to package the work like a box of chocolates, with a few sample paragraphs typewritten (yes, with a typewriter) onto Cadbury's purple foil which was used to wrap real Dairy Milk chocolate melted into hearts.
I did a massive amount of research and looked into the history of chocolate as well as what it meant to modern society in order to contextualise its potency in art and importantly the differences in approach between female and male artists. 
I hope people find it interesting. It was written a long time ago and as such is very much of its time (please read it with forgiving eyes). However, it's always been close to my own (chocolate) heart: it contributed heavily to getting a first class degree and my tutor at the time said I should publish it. Now, all these years later, I finally have!

If you'd like to read the full work, click the 'Issuu' link below:

https://issuu.com/alexvann/docs/the_power_of_chocolate_alex_vann 
​

Extract:

The Lighter Way to Enjoy Chocolate :
​Chocolate as Art

‘Chocolate Room’ by Ed Ruscha. Photo https://www.moca.org/ via Pinterest

Montezuma served his XOCOATL (XOC —cacao, ATLE — water) in finely crafted goblets of precious metals. It was an important celebrated drink, given as reward to valiant soldiers, an energy giving potion, and reportedly a highly potent aphrodisiac. ​

The presentation of chocolate has continued to be important and this is reiterated by the elaborately designed serving pots and drinking cups of 18th century England.
Richard Cadbury began the vogue for art in 1868 with his painting of a young girl with a kitten on the lid of one of his boxes. Many Victorian chocolate boxes had important uses after the contents had been consumed. Nowadays, millions of pounds are spent by huge companies on designing and manufacturing chocolate boxes, not to mention advertisements offering the product to the consumer in brightly coloured packages of gold, silver, red, yellow and orange etc. 
Because of its nature as a gift, the packaging has traditionally been aesthetically attractive and alluring.

In its use as an artist’s medium, it has been stripped of its packaging and delivered in galleries through means of repetition, layering and bulk. ​

Edward Ruscha, known for his use of words as image rather than pictures, experimented in the late 1960s with unconventional substances with which to paint. This included fruit juices, lettuce, egg yolk, spinach, blood, gunpowder, tobacco and rose petals. At the 35th Venice Bienalle in 1970 he created the ‘Chocolate Room’. Made up Of 360 sheets of paper silkscreened all over with Nestle’s chocolate, visitors found they could write messages into it with damp fingers. 
Dieter Roth often used chocolate and cocoa powder mixed with acrylic paint and glue as a medium. Like Ruscha, he had experimented with foodstuffs for paints. Claes Oldenburg and Joseph Beuys and more recently Paul McCarthy have also used chocolate as paint, usually mixed with something else and as part of a ‘larger picture.’
What Chadwick, Gallaccio and Antoni have in common (and how they differ from the above, male artists) is that chocolate forms the entirety of the piece - the be all and end all. It is not only the medium but also the concept that is on show. I believe that they have considered carefully its history, its use, its potent influence on today’s society and its metaphorical importance.

You Are What You Eat 
The ad-man’s view of the female body

From the time of Madame Sevigne (1600s), we have been bombarded by mixed reports on the ‘pros and cons’ of consuming chocolate. It seems that as soon as one point of view becomes over-expounded so another contrary way of thinking begins. 
Society is fickle and one of the things it is fickle about is the shape of the female body. (Men have somehow remained untouched by hype/public opinion and popular convention on size and appearance or at least to a lesser, negligible effect.) 
Since the 1960s with Jean ‘The Shrimp’ Shrimpton and Twiggy, fashion has had a lot answer for. In breaking new ground, designers are literally shaping the world through its promotion of the ‘perfect body.’ There is of course no such thing but there are certain ‘ideals.’
All this places an incredible pressure on impressionable young women and magazine and television images contribute to this pressure. One of the symptoms of this pressure has been the relatively new phenomenon of eating disorders. 

‘Gnaw’ Janine Antoni ©http://www.janineantoni.net/

“Twill make old women young and fresh create new motions of flesh”

In ‘Gnaw’ (1992), the American artist Janine Antoni (b. 1964) takes a 600lb block of chocolate and nibbles away at it for 45 days. She then spits out the pulp and it to create 45 heart shaped boxes for holding chocolates. She says she is referring to eating disorders and how society can pressurise young girls into such activity. 
Bulimia Nervosa is where a person (usually a young woman) binges on exceptionally large amounts of food (usually high calorie foods like chocolate). She then goes through a process of purging the food (usually by vomiting or starvation). 
Constant vomiting causes the stomach acids to eventually eat away the enamel on teeth, causes ulcers and stomach/bowel disorders. This lifestyle governs her every waking hour. Disgust and hatred of food are substitutes for disgust and hatred of the self.
Anorexia Nervosa is far more common in females than males and usually occurs in girls from families where high achievement and scholastic success are highly valued. It is this pressure from family, friends, media, everywhere which leads people to find solace elsewhere. The fear of failure to be accepted dominates her life. The calorie is one escape route. If a girl can control the calorie, and in turn the way she looks - her physical presence in the world, then she has at least succeeded in one thing and her body shape is the only thing that really matters to her at that time. 

‘Lick and Lather’ Janine Antoni ©http://www.janineantoni.net/

Antoni is shaping. She paints, draws, sculpts, molds and models with her body. By using a 600lb block of chocolate she is blowing out of all proportion an everyday foodstuff in the same way that the media blows out of all proportion the importance of body shape as opposed to inner beauty. The body is an easy target because it is tangible. Antoni has also done a series of busts, self portraits in chocolate and soap (‘Lick and Lather’ 1993) in which she eats and washes away parts of the sculptures - parts of her own self image. 
Her regurgitation of the chocolate from the ‘Gnaw’ block mirrors the bulimic’s purging activities. The act of modelling 45 heart shaped boxes from the spat is a comment on packaging (of chocolates and the inner ‘self’). The boxes look like well produced packaging trays - only when we know the truth behind their construction does the stomach turn.
Chocolate is a luxury item but has many positive and practical functions. It is a valuable portable snack food providing quick replenishment of energy (used by sportsmen and mountain climbers etc). And lastly, and most importantly perhaps, it is a gift. That is the double irony being dealt with in ‘Gnaw’. Antoni, the artist, through her processes, is providing heart shaped gift boxes for us, the gallery goer, the consumer. 

‘Gnaw’ Janine Antoni ©http://www.janineantoni.net/

Of course, eating is enjoyable, a pleasurable experience but 6001bs of it becomes a nightmare. Antoni answers this by doing exactly the same thing to a 600lb block of lard, this time the regurgitation becomes moulded into 400 lipsticks - again their beautiful production and packaging belies the vulgarity of their construction. 
In ‘Stroke’ (1994), Anya Gallaccio (b.1963) painted the walls of the Karsten Schubert Gallery in London with dark chocolate. In previous work she has left arrangements of flowers to wither and die. It is this transition from beauty to ugliness, growth to decomposition, life to death that is echoed in ‘Stroke.’ 

In all my work so far, the work only exists for a certain period of time and in a sense it only exists when it is being looked at.”

Photograph © Ruth Clark / https://www.jupiterartland.org/

The ‘paint’ was made by melting 315 bars of Bournville plain chocolate to 63 kilos of liquid and mixed with vegetable fat for adherence to the consistency of household paint. Like Antoni (and Helen Chadwick) the amount of chocolate is taken to excess to be able to use it as a medium with which to create a public exhibition. 
“Excess is expression.” Gallaccio says: 
“I’m completely addicted to chocolate, the idea of making a chocolate room should be something really heavenly and excessive...it has particularly female connotations of binging and desire.”
Its prime associations are with mortality, deterioration and putrefaction. Like Antoni, who literally eats away the chocolate herself, Gallaccio lets light, oxygen, water vapour and mold eat at the chocolate. 
‘Stroke’ is essentially a light room made dark - subversive use of materials turns a familiar substance with all its associations with childhood and vibrancy into an excremental lament for loss. Gallaccio is using flowers and chocolate as triggers for associations such as love/ romance/sensuality/greed and satisfaction. 
The notion of self disgust/self loathing is perpetuated by advertisers who are responsible for creating a generation of Kate Moss wannabes who are bombarded with the paradoxical image of the young beautiful slim girl tucking into a bar of pure indulgence and sin. The irony here is that neither is correct. 
It’s like saying 

Lipsticks make you beautiful and chocolates make you fat.”

Read the whole thesis here: ​https://issuu.com/alexvann/docs/the_power_of_chocolate_alex_vann

About the author

Alex Vann is a multi disciplinary artist and graduated with a first class degree in Design for Communication from the University of Wolverhampton in 1996. 
He went on to work as a graphic designer at various leading agencies across the West Midlands and later on worked in secondary education for many years. 

He runs his own graphic design business in Wolverhampton.

As a musician and song writer his music has been used in plays, films and on radio, TV and online. He has performed at gigs and festivals as a solo artist and in duets and rock bands and has supported Paul Young, All About Eve among many others.

As a portrait artist he has been commissioned to create highly detailed paintings and pencil drawings for many years and painted a portrait of the 2016 Wolverhampton Mayor and his wife. He was a key artist on the ‘Wolves in Wolves’ public art project in 2017. He designed and painted two of the 30 5ft tall wolf sculptures: ‘Support Life’ and ‘Old Gold’. Support Life is now situated at University of Wolverhampton and Old Gold is located inside the Wolverhampton Wanderers FC Museum at Molineux Stadium.

He founded the company Real Arts Workshops (RAW) in the late 1990s following a final year university project and self publishing his own environmentally themed children’s book ‘Joseph The Useful Cardboard Box’ which went on sale in Waterstones bookstores across the country. RAW went on hold for many years as he explored other careers and was ‘re-booted’ in 2018 with his partner Gary to provide high quality and immersive arts experiences to various community groups; many of whom experience barriers to the Arts. 

Gary is profoundly Deaf and Alex is qualified to level 6 in British Sign Language (BSL) and BSL is integrated into a lot of RAW’s work. They use the Arts to break down barriers, build confidence and encourage self esteem and well being. 

Alex has a grown up daughter, Olivia.

Contact: [email protected]
Websites: www.alexvann.net
www.alexvanndesign.co.uk
www.realartsworkshops.co.uk