Title:
Eating pizza while
watching the news
Location: Page-based commission for the Publication
On 8 March 2005 Tony rigorously documented the process of eating his favourite
pizza supper while watching the evening news. For the publication, he has compiled
the two data sets collected (number of bites and news headlines) onto a series
of thirty numbered thumbnail images. These small images run throughout the publication
on the bottom left corner of nearly every other page. The thumbnails can be
viewed in quick succession as a flick book style moving image of his pizza being
demolished. Alternatively they can be studied in detail, with help from the
full-page colour key, to decipher what the sometimes ambiguous headlines might
refer to.
colour detail from Eating pizza while watching
the news
Old habits die hard,
and one of mine over the last 15 years has been eating pizza while watching
the evening news on the TV. There have been various artistic by-products from
this activity, including a series of Leaning towers of pizza collages
and an artist’s book Margherita margereater, the latter leading
a reviewer in Art Monthly to comment that, if nothing else, someone should
save me from my diet (rather unfairly in my view, as I only do it twice a
week, and augment the basic pizza with carefully chosen nutritious extras).
On Tuesday 8 March 2005, a normal day, which also happened
to be my mother’s 75th birthday, I set up a video camera to record the
progress on my plate, and arranged the video recorder to tape the news. This
raw data was painstakingly transcribed and annotated to come up with a series
of sound bites and still frames to document the precise moment when each portion
entered my mouth.
Each bite of the pizza was accompanied by a nugget of news; tomatoes with
an alleged IRA murder, mushrooms meet Michael Jackson, sweet corn and the
seed corn of Chinese democracy, olives and killer blood clots, chillies with
the fiery special effects of the long awaited new series of Dr Who, and extra
cheese for Charles and Camilla.
Georges Perec, the habitual chronicler of the mundane,
died a few days short of his 46th birthday. In his publication Attempt
at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the
Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four, he admits to having
eaten only one pizza. Writing this a few days before my own 46th birthday,
I am comforted by the thought that if Perec’s death was related to the
paucity of pizza in his diet, my 100 per year habit might not be such a bad
thing after all.
Tony Kemplen
April 2005
www.kemplen.co.uk
