Welcome to my new Blog Design and Concept, Not Wholesome. Not Wholesome is a category of multi-purpose means and ends and I hope, despite the glaringly shocking image associatied with Not Wholesome, you will start to journey with me in the land of NW. It can take us many interesting places…
The ironies of Life guide this concept: how and in what ways are things construced, washed, perceived, tagged, convoluted to become wholesome or not? Why do some things strike us as utterly wrong and others pleasant and comforting? I am interested in that always shifting interface which is so potentially productive and destructive at the same time. For some, one thing might be wholesome for another not. And I am sure you will hear about my own personal opinions about the Not Wholesome especially when I think it has been sheathed into the Wholesome.
When you decontexualize, the meaning of purity and disgust can radically shift. This new project is ultimately about the aesthetics of taste and its intermingling with morality, and the who, how, and when with the power and wherewithal to stablize the thrust of meaning that can enliven, disgust, inspire, and degrade.
The great ironies of purity and disgust, wholesome and the not wholsome, derive from the image showcased in this entry (inspiring the pink image) which *actually* derives from what I think of as a very, innocent and wholesome endeavor-> My mom cooking her favorite dish, chicken-on-a-bottle. She coooks it every Sunday even currently with her visual impairments. And she gets really pissed if you deviate from her ritual recipe.
It is some arcane Russian recipe (so she claims) where you stick a chicken on a bottle filled with water and then put it in a pan with water and bake in the oven at 450 F for 1.25 hrs. You season with some salt and pepper after a short ablution with fresh lime juice. It is quite delicious in fact, the outer skin of the chicken baking into just the perfect crisp, the meat inside reamaining moisty thanks to the hot steam of all that water. I wholeheartedly recommend it for you meat eaters out there.
But in the mean time, I can’t offer your meat and flesh only a virtual welcome. I hope not to offend only to see how and what and why things offend or don’t