‘American Food’ Is on the Menu at Museum

First comes what Julie Bozzi calls “the laugh of recognition,” a giggle at seeing something familiar in an unfamiliar setting. Pieces of breakfast cereal enshrined beneath glass. Miniaturized plates of chow mein, nachos and black-eyed peas in a drawer. Rows and rows of doughnuts, each a different shape and variety, laid out like scientific specimens.

Each of the 12 drawers in Bozzi’s sculptural installation, “American Food,” which goes on view Saturday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, evokes a chuckle--of amazement at the artist’s technical finesse at recreating these edibles in wood, plaster, paint and clay, or simply at finding these staples of the domestic diet not in a restaurant or on a dinner table but in a museum.

“It’s not an elaborate joke,” Bozzi cautions, though “there are parts of it that are funny.” The painted ants crawling up the side of the oak cabinet that houses “American Food,” for instance. Or the ingenuity of using a cube of yellow sponge to denote a chunk of corn bread.

Bozzi’s precise reproduction of such carnival foods as cotton candy and corn dogs or such “classic snack cakes” as Twinkies and Ding Dongs spurs the same amused double-takes as those platters of plastic food in the windows of Japanese restaurants. Other objects in Bozzi’s display aren’t quite as convincing, such as the all-white porcelain remakes of Chinese-American dishes, or the sweet potato pie fashioned cannily from a wedge of wood, with a short twisted rope as a crust. These lift Bozzi’s project out of the realm of the purely imitative and leave it hovering somewhere between the categories of pseudo-science, pop art, folklore and formalism.

Categories are what “American Food” is all about, and yet what it refuses to obey. Bozzi, who lives in Ft. Worth, Tex., with her husband, artist Vernon Fisher, has pared down much of the standard American diet into 12 categories and devoted one drawer of her cabinet to each, labeling them Breakfast Food, Special Occasion Food, Packaged Candy, Soul Food, Donuts. Gouache drawings also on view at the museum are made after the food is sculpted and act as informative keys to the objects in the drawers.

“The information is important,” said Bozzi, 48, who worked various jobs in the field of cell biology while getting her undergraduate and graduate degrees in art at the University of California at Davis. Her scientific approach to food may draw from this experience as much as from the current urge toward taxonomy shared by numerous postmodern artists, who gather and regurgitate images from the mass media, art history and popular culture.

However “American Food” is classified, it is clearly the product of a personal obsession, one that Bozzi readily admits. She has a collector’s sensibility--syndrome, that runs specifically toward things that are not meant to be collected but rather used or consumed.

“I’ve had a cereal collection of my own for 10 years,” she confessed. “I go through boxes and look for 20 of the most perfect pieces.” She then dips them in a specially prepared wax with microcrystals to seal them and stores them in jars. In “American Food,” hundreds of individual cold cereal pieces are attached to numbered tags and pinned to a plastic backing, much like butterflies in an entomologist’s study.

Though the cereal pieces in “American Food” are actual, once-edible examples, the rest of the objects were sculpted after “live” models. For five years she kept a representative sampling of doughnuts in her refrigerator, examples she had gathered during travels around the country. It was a driving trip across the United States that first launched Bozzi on the “American Food” project in 1975. She was driving from Maine, where she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, back to Northern California, where she was in graduate school.

“It was the first time that I had ever been away from Northern California, where I had lived my whole life. It gives a person a perspective on what makes a thing look like a particular thing to get away from it. I saw that the place I lived was a microcosm of the way things were everywhere. Certain things that I thought were Californian were really American in a much larger sense. There really was a kind of national language or style there.”

During the trek she began to make drawings of vernacular architecture, types of clothing and food. She focused in on “commercial, standardized” foods, lowest common denominator foods, things that looked, smelled and tasted like America. Bozzi also paints still-lifes, portraits and especially landscapes with the same intention in mind, of identifying and representing something truly American.

“They are real landscapes, but I’ve tried to find things that, in my mind, look very American. There’s a kind of panoramic quality, an unbroken monotony to certain kinds of American landscape,” she said.

A few years after her fateful drive across country, Bozzi began making display boxes of re-created foods. These, and some of the drawings, have been exhibited before, but the current museum show is the public debut for the completed “American Food,” which Bozzi considers a still-life.

The work also harks back to the centuries-old practice of documenting a territory through images particular to that area.

“It was typical from the early time of the ship explorers, say the 15th Century, to send an artist with the captain to record things that were found,” she said. “I saw one such drawing reproduced somewhere and it interested me. It showed an Indian fishing and it named the tools and the species of fish.”

Bozzi followed this documentary approach in “American Food,” recreating, somewhat dispassionately, the variety of objects consumed by Northerners and Southerners, Easterners and Westerners alike.

“That’s what it’s about, all of these different forms,” she said, only the forms she gravitates toward happen to carry a weighty load of cultural baggage. Some have ethnic derivations, others fulfill the definition of comfort foods, foods that resonate with positive personal memories. Nostalgia, however, played no role in the work, Bozzi said, even in the case of candy bars.

“I’m interested in the relationship of advertising to product. The actual product isn’t that interesting. It’s basically the same materials over and over again. It’s all about packaging, about communicating the idea of a product, with the colors and graphics all together.” What triggers the nostalgic response, she explained, is the fact that the packaging of many of these products hasn’t changed over time.

“If there’s a ‘30s candy bar, the graphics are still the same. That nostalgia has something to do with the time a product was invented.”

Starting in the 1950s with pop art, objects and images from everyday life have become common in contemporary art, and art about American food would seem a natural. But Bozzi’s work is so accessible and familiar that it’s almost disarming.

“I’ve always thought of art, at least historically, as being much more of an involving, less sanctified activity,” Bozzi said. “It’s only been very recently that it’s been put in museums, as a serious subject, almost a religious substitute. Because of this high-altar quality that’s come to be expected of art more recently, I’ve found people to be surprised by this work. It’s the familiarity of it that strikes a lot of people as hilarious, but it reaches me on a number of levels.”

Julie Bozzi’s “American Food” opens Saturday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, (700 Prospect St., La Jolla) and continues through Sept. 26. Hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday, until 9 p.m. Wednesday. 454-3541.