Robert MacPherson, unfranchised cuisine and national taste
Robert MacPherson's Mayfair Bar series, in addition to other work featuring food, prompts a set of questions about the relationship of painting, or art practice more generally, to cuisine and all that this term implies. While the choice of gustatory subject matter gives these questions a particular inflection, they are nevertheless ones that have animated MacPherson's practice overall: in what way are the processes and procedures of artmaking specific; how is place defined and the national registered; how does the historicity of names and knowledges inscribe itself?
A number of the works in MacPherson's oeuvre that feature food include the word 'Mayfair' in their title. The Mayfair Bar was a Brisbane sandwich shop located on a corner bound by Adelaide and Queen Streets with a short arcade diagonally linking the two. It sold sandwiches, milkshakes, the citrus-based drinks that Australian milkbars used to make inhouse, as well as tea, coffee, etcetera. A donut shop currently occupies the site. In a 1983 text-based piece called I Always Buy My Lunch at the Mayfair Bar, MacPherson set out a Steinian play on narratives of sandwich making. Consisting of a single typed foolscap sheet, this is a long unpunctuated interweaving of customer choices (prawn and tomato or salmon or cheese; white or brown; with salt or without; coffee or no coffee; apple or pear or banana), of the procedures of sandwich making (the arrangement of the bread, the disposition of salmon and tomato, the placement of the final slice, the methods of cutting the diagonal slice, different ways of tallying the bill), and a roster of sandwich bar staff (the server who smiles, the one who doesn't, the server who takes the... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline