91 kilos of soy noodles

All this talk of gardening, compost and all things organic reminded me of a work I saw, (or more accurately "felt") at the Palais de Tokyo a couple of years ago. Part of the exhibition "Nouvelles de Monde Renverse" (News from an Upside-down World?), the work, 'Post Patman' was a room-filled installation by Michel Blazy. Blazy is a French artist who explores the basic physicality of our existence. Using only natural materials, his pieces are multi-sensory and change over the duration of the exhibition. Through decay, he presents the fragile condition that is life.

I enter the room through a layer of plastic strips over the doorway, the kind that you find at a butchery. Already, I think of red flesh, alluding to the cycle of life and death. As soon I pass through these I am hit with that awful stench of food gone bad. Except this isn't just escaping from the container briefly, this fills a room the size of a small field, with no windows. The air is warm and sticky. A bird tweeps. There are birds in here?! Let me try to describe the visual experience. The first thing that jumps out at me is a giant, bright yellow, atomic-mushroom-cloud form. It's made out of 91 kilos of soy noodles. A bird chills at the bottom. One wall is covered with a wallpaper of mashed potatoes and beetroot purree, now all dry and crumbly, flaking off to reveal surprisingly gorgeous patterns. On the floor are chickens made of chocolate, a bunch of rotting carrots and a caramel carpet. From another wall sprouts bacon flowers, and across from those is a tray of orange peels neatly piled up, not so neatly rotting away. Somewhere in between all of this is a collection of large green bins filled with bubbly foam, rising up and over the edges, spilling onto the floor. I'm not sure what he intended to express with these bins (if in fact he did intend to 'express' anything at all), but I find them amusingly ironic, that of all the decaying items in the exhibition, what's in the bin is clean, soapy water.

Apparently Blazy went back every week to check out the evolution of his pieces, sometimes making additions. Definitely a gardener of sorts.