Let me share a moment of bite-the-back-of-hand wonderment I experienced several months ago at The New Art Gallery in Walsall, during their food themed exhibition Pot Luck. Karen Tam installed a life sized hyperrealistic canadian/chinese restruant right the middle of the exhibition space. The details were staggering. Right from the kitschy decor, a toy panda bluetacked to the till, cute Zodiac mascots of the menus, stereotypical laughing Buddhas sat beside Pikachu and Hello Kitty figurines on a shelf, ceramic soup ladels carelessly mixed with plastic forks in utensil service trays, the strangely misplaced and very western bag of Walkers crisps in the kitchen, etc.
Minus the action and inhabitants it became a palpably spectral sensation. As if i'd stumbled into a place I ought not to have been, like i'd made a wrong turn in the gallery and ended up in the staff room. Despite its purposeful banality Karen has taken a ordinary event (going to a restruant that is) and transferred its geo-psychological context in an alien place - thus jumbling the viewers ability to appropiately select a mode of public behaviour. I'm conciously in a muesuem and thus in full on 'art mode' but my eyes insist i'm not. Rothko might make people cry but his art never made people feel hungry.
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