And When You Add It All Up, This Is What Our Lives Will Have Been, an Accumulation of Small, Seemingly Unimportant Choices, 2004
Dissidence and Cake
consists of an early moving image work and customised cake boxes for Soho patisserie Maison Bertaux. The work juxtaposes the conditions for revolution with the gently contraband nature of patisserie:
The importance of the café as a place for talk, as a safe place for rebellion or subversion, fed with cake, good coffee, a kind of sly encouragement to subversion as all cake is a sly encouragement to test the edges, to be tempted, to transgress.
The artwork was originated in Adobe's Flash format, which is now defunct. Part of the edit was completed in versions of Apple's quicktime which are similarly obsolete. Only fragments of the original work exist in a readable format so it is impossible to be entirely certain of the extent of the original text and the order in which is was presented.
A best estimate of the complete text reads:
The importance of the cafe as a place for talk, as a safe space for rebellion or subversion, fed with cake, good coffee, a kind of sly encouragement to subversion as all cake is a sly encouragement to test the edges, to be tempted, to transgress.
There’s more than a hint of vocation about patisserie: presiding over a corner of wanting that never changes. Salt butter, pate sucre, fruit glazes, whipped cream, and conjecture, truth, gossip, temptations to sedition, to wrong thinking.
All the paraphernalia of the patisserie. And its sexual possibilities: wrapping and unwrapping, the sweet forbidden inside, typing up, cutting free.
There’s something irresistible in the connection between dissidence and cake: creme patisserie, bitter chocolate, powered sugar, vanilla, eggs, butter, cream and the devil’s in the ‘right butter’. Chocolate has its obvious appeals, its obvious sinfulness, but it’s the butter that subverts and ruins; with eggs, flour, free thought, mix it all up.
And isn’t memory like a shadow at your back? All those ghosts, unsteady pictures, the dark collapse of your lashes, the years, the house, and all this will pass, this room, our lives, our creative force, all of I will be swept away.
And when you add it all up, this is what our lives will have been, an accumulation of small, seemingly unimportant choices.
