INTRODUCTION
Once upon a time, the word fat was a desired condition associated with affluence, fertility, and health. Disparaging associations with poverty, unproductivity, and weakness clustered around its opposite, thin. Fat’s current associations with blubber, flab, and obesity evoke disgust, while it is flattering to be called a beanstalk, featherweight, or scrawny.

Petroleum-based agricultural technologies are often cited as the cause of this reversal. These technologies spurred the unprecedented output of corn whose calorie-laden contents surged through manufactured food products in the form of high fructose corn syrup. Sweet and cheap calories are accumulating in hips, bellies, thighs, and chins of citizens rich and poor. But undesirable excess is not confined to human bodies. Tabulating the consumption of fossil fuels, the generation of waste, and the production of material luxuries reveals that blessed abundance might have crept across the ethical boundary into sinful overabundance.

The artists contributing to “From the Fat of the Land” diverge from the Genesis use of the term to indicate an enticing promise of abundant crops without the need for arduous labor. But they also diverge from its gloomy alternative. Their unorthodox approaches explain the show’s subtitle, “Alchemies, Ecologies, Attractions.”

WEALTH: Homeless Museum
The Homeless Museum, or HoMu, is an ongoing, live-in, independent, unaccredited museum conceived as an art project by Filip Noterdaeme. Noterdaeme has a penchant for flushing foolish assumptions out of two serious cultural institutions that occupy opposite ends of the social spectrum – the art museum and the homeless population. Noterdaeme is not homeless. His small apartment in Brooklyn Heights, New York, serves as the site of the museum which is indeed a homey affair since he sets curatorial policies, arranges the budget, conducts education programs, runs membership campaigns, manages the café, conducts tours, and creates the works of art exhibited in the museum. These functions are allocated to his bed, medicine cabinet, chimney, freezer, etc. Each activity is an opportunity to expose unacknowledged absurdities and skewer them with satirical jibes.

Grand Arts has commissioned Fat Minimalism, a new work in HoMu’s collection, for its exploration of the ‘weighty’ topic. Created out of fat lodged in sedentary and overfed chickens, the elegant sculpture is both a literal and ludicrous interpretation of the theme of excess. Noterdaeme retrieves the chicken’s fat from the waste stream, renders it, forms it into pristine rectangular slabs, freezes it to harden, and then assembles the slabs into sculptures whose spare geometries are the hallmark of Minimal art. Seen through the glass door of a large refrigerator, the work combines the aesthetic of elemental forms with a medium that signals glutinous overindulgence.

Noterdaeme’s ironic wit distorts the idealized image of a land flowing with milk and honey. In his work what flows is the stuff of cellulite, liposuctions, and tummy tucks, suggesting that the privileged may be cursed by abundance just as homeless people are cursed by deprivation. In fact, the work denigrates the cult of excess and elevates temperance by linking the latter to sophistication and purity. Two minorities meet. One is super-advantaged. The other is dis-advantaged. ‘Too much’ collides with ‘too little.’

Filip Noterdaeme
Homeless Museum (HoMu)
Fat Minimalism (Series 1) chicken fat and hardening agent to be stored at 32°F
2007