On more than one occasion in the last few months, I’ve picked up the phone and listened to a woman babble—excitedly and intelligently—about the intersections of meat and art.
Her name is Alisoun Meehan. She’s an artist, living in New York City. The sort of artist who sees beauty in the duck carcasses that hang in the windows in Chinatown. The sort of artist who stages shows (and hangs sides of beef) in repurposed reefer trucks. The sort of artist who says, “My favorite food paintings are the Dutch and Flemish stuff, the 16th- and 17th-century market scenes. They’re totally wild.”
In addition to being a painter—that’s one of her pieces, above—Meehan is a provocateur and stager of tableaux. Speaking to a reporter about a recent New York City installation, she promised, “There will be performers doing Butu dancing, wrestling in coleslaw—they’ll be either naked or topless, or painted white and in slow motion, like Tai Chi. There will be people doing stuff with salad bars ….”
On January 17, she’s bringing her carnal carnival to New Orleans. When we first talked, she was planning a “crazy food-themed soccer game with pig roasting and marching bands.” Since then, her vision has evolved.
Meehan is now calling her meat-meets-art happening “The Cochon Ball: A Pig Field Folly.”
She is leveraging the success of Prospect One, the site-specific New Orleans art biennial, which will close that weekend, after a successful first run. And she has found a space, the perfect space really, called the Brickyard, set amid the ruins of what was once a Bywater neighborhood molasses warehouse.
Taking into account the talent she’s enlisted—the likes of Donald Link, chef of Cochon, and writer Sara Roahen, author of Gumbo Tales—this event is skewing more toward food than art. But rest assured it’s still skewed.
If I understand Meehan correctly, Link will be cooking a pig or three, with his grill set up behind one of the goals of a mock foosball game, laid out on a green at the center of the Brickyard. While Link cooks, 26 foosball players will, taking their inspiration from the tabletop game, slide and summersault while kicking a green, inflatable ball—representing the apple commonly stuck in the mouth of a roasted suckling pig—around the field, trying to score points.
After a couple hours of kicking, everyone will eat pig. Along the way, Meehan hopes to catalyze conversations about how food events engender community and about how local foods matter to local people.
Sound completely outlandish to you? It does to me, too. By which I mean that I can’t imagine any place I would rather be.
Details
Location: The Brickyard, Bywater, 3000 block of Chartres St., New Orleans
Foosball starts at noon or so
Feed starts at 3:00 or so
Admission is $5 or so
Questions: alisounm@gmail.com
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