Dinner is served
The fluctuation between realities, which creates objects that have many associations but little concrete substance, tempts the observer to creative personal contribution: Marie-Luise Meyer does not deliver effigies but similes. And even the similes are chimaeras that dissolve as you approach them. Nothing is as it appears. Everything is a multitude. This is also true for the installation „Es ist angerichtet“ (Dinner is served), which consists of dishes and plates and has grown into a veritable banquet since 2006. The centrepieces resemble presentation dishes used at the courts of the baroque and rococo, so-called Trompe l’oeil-Fayences, plates and dishes decorated with naturalistically shaped and arranged vegetables or fruits that were very popular in the 1750s. Many a guest, reaching out greedily to the offered delicacies will have withdrawn his hand irritated by the ensuing public hilarity.
In their technical perfection, their finely honed details and their imaginative arrangement Marie-Luise Meyer’s dishes make reference to these historic models. They are deceptive in a dual sense: not only do we mistake “false” for “real” dishes, but the alleged edible only pretends to be food. There are no vegetables on the vegetable dish, we prefer not to think about what she placed on the meat platter and the ingredients of the pates are not less suspect, the dessert also is just also sadly an illusion. “Dinner is served” is not a call to a sumptuous feast. With its reduced forms and restrained colours, that leave space for interpretation, Marie-Luise Meyer’s dishes are rather appetizers for mental discourse about what happens to us culturally when we eat and what has happened to our food in turn. How does food design change our nutrition, what does genetic manipulation do to our dishes? The play with food still irritates today, even though in a very different way.
Marie-Luise Meyer’s work can be considered a commentary on current topics. Primarily, however, her strangely distorted and simultaneously playful objects are independent artistic statements which draw on the world but carry autonomous meaning – committed exclusively to serve as the rich artistic expression of the artist that make us marvel and delights.
Susanne Längle, Wien 2008