South Coast Plaza Exhibit Is the Toast of the Art World

I love art. That portrait of the dogs playing cards is awesome. The texture, the phrasing, the raw--dare I say it-- anthropomorphism . That and Gainsborough’s “The Blue Boy” are my two favorite works.

I also love toast, but for totally different reasons. I just like the way it tastes with orange juice and a big bowl of Rice Krispies.

Until this week, I had never thought of toast as art. I had thought of it as something I always send back in a coffee shop. Then came news of an exhibit running through Aug. 4 at the Laguna Art Museum’s South Coast Plaza site.

The untitled work is by San Francisco multimedia artist Dawn Fryling. It’s about, well . . . toast .

The exhibit is as follows: In the first room are three sets of 10 shelves mounted on the walls. Each shelf has a mound of flour on it. In a corner of the room is a pallet with five unopened sacks of flour.

In a second room are shelves of toast--a veritable lawyer’s library of toast. Some pieces are standing upright, others are stacked on top of each other. All appear to be white bread, with some pieces lightly browned, some medium, some burned. I counted at least 543 individual pieces of toast, although some were so tightly packed in it was hard to count them.

Standing guard against another wall in that room are three nearly 6-foot-tall containers, each with flour in them spilling out the bottom onto the concrete floor.

In an alcove is, I believe, the centerpiece of the exhibit, although I suspect there is a totality to the work that I may not be grasping. On the walls are three framed photographs of, you guessed it, toast --blown up to jumbo-size. Two of the pieces in the photos are medium brown; the third is burned.

In a third room, stacked neatly on the floor, is a mound with hundreds of pieces of--you’re way ahead of me, aren’t you?-- toast .

That is the exhibit. It is a visual experience, to be sure, one designed to elicit whatever thoughts you may have about--here I go again-- toast .

Let me quote from a text about Fryling’s work, prepared by an admiring free-lance art writer named Kevin Ford. After mentioned previous Fryling works that involved only actual toast, Ford adds:

“Here, she has made an important further step. By photographing toast, she deprives us of the direct interaction experienced with the earlier pieces. Toast is now perceived through the framework of the intellect rather than through the senses, such as smell, touch or the ‘aliveness’ of the real object. By distancing us from the subject (as well as enlarging a piece of toast to greater-than-life size), she enables us to scrutinize the peculiar physical qualities of toast as a real phenomenon.”

I graduated from college and I have no idea what that means.

Susan Shadwick, the Laguna museum’s site manager at South Coast, says there has been a mixed reaction to the exhibit. “Some people loved the texture and feeling and the appreciation of everyday things. Other people assume art should be more paintings on a wall, more traditional. They can’t really get into it.”

Since the assemblage of toast in the back room is such a lovely grouping, I asked Shadwick what would happen if some philistine dislodged some of the toast and the whole thing collapsed like dominoes. Shadwick said she’d probably just rearrange the toast.

“Early in the exhibit,” she said, “somebody took a couple bites out of the toast on the shelves. I imagine it was some high school kids. We also had a flour fight that broke out, also involving some high school kids.”

Dawn Fryling had something in mind when she put together this exhibit. I hope I am not lessened by saying I can’t possibly imagine what it could have been. Fryling told a Times reporter recently: “I’m just interested in the sensuous qualities of the flour, not any meaning or what it stands for, not even as a food item. With the bread, the texture of it is what’s really interesting, and the way you can take one piece of toast and lay it together with another piece to create different textures.”

Wow.

I think I did what you’re supposed to do with art. I gazed upon it. I reflected, I mused, I walked around and thought some more. I thought about toast and all it had meant to me. I thought about the origin of toast, from the time it’s only flour in a mound, up until the time it pops out of the toaster and I begin to take a bite.

I thought about all these things, and still nothing. All I could come up with was, you know, toast .

All I saw were 543 pieces of toast on shelves and some flour on the floor and three photos of pieces of toast. Then I flashed for a second on how entertaining Dawn Fryling must be in person.

I have a reverence for all art, and yet it kind of bugs me that others will insist they now understand the secrets of the moon and stars after seeing the toast exhibit.

But, hey, that’s the beauty of art.

Perhaps that’s the beauty of toast.