Food as social ritual, personal liberation and spiritual alchemy: from Alison Knowles and Adrian Piper to Agnes Denes and Andy Warhol

“De Wachter’s style is impeccably clean and consummate”
—The World of Interiors

“In her beautiful, highly stimulating new book … De Wachter makes the case that, in a world where sight is prioritized above our other senses, it’s innately expansive, enlivening, and mind-expanding to work with mediums that can also be smelled, tasted, and touched.”
—The Slowdown

In More Than the Eyes, writer Ellen Mara De Wachter considers the ways in which food, when used as a material in contemporary art, confronts, subverts and ultimately brings us to our senses. Focusing on artists working between 1960 and 2000, the book shows how we have become restricted by a hierarchy that values sight and reason above other senses, and how encounters with food in art can help us break this bind. By putting food at the center of the highly visual art world, the artists in this book quicken a range of sensations beyond visual perception, helping us access and liberate aspects of our experience that have been ignored or suppressed. Topics include Carolee Schneemann’s performance pieces using meat; the way in which Hannah Wilke rejects the imperative for women to be “sweet”; Zoe Leonard’s exploration of decomposition as process; Adrian Piper’s conceptual work incorporating hamburgers; the SoHo artists’ restaurant FOOD; Agnes Denes’ wheat field near Wall Street; and how other artists, such as Sarah Lucas and Andy Warhol, introduce the iconography, foods and desires of the working class into the rarefied environment of the gallery and museum.

Published in January 2025 by Atelier Éditions / D.A.P.

Distributed worldwide by D.A.P.

R.R.P. £32.99 / $39.95

Press for More Than the Eyes – Art, Food and the Senses

The World of Interiors
Annabel Bai Jackson writes: “As De Wachter makes clear, much of this gastronomic/artistic activity took place outside the museum: food, with its bathetic capacity to rot, smell and be ingested, makes squeamish the institution’s logic of preservation and display. […] What De Wachter is really hoping for is a paradigm shift. The selected works express a route towards an ‘integrated, fleshly knowledge’, where sight is dethroned in the hierarchy of the senses and Cartesian dualism is no more. … De Wachter’s style is impeccably clean and consummate – a text written more with the crispness of a palette cleanser than the sensory messiness of a feast.”

Art Review
Chris Fite-Wassilak writes: “More Than the Eyes: Art, Food and the Senses positions food’s use in art as part of a shift away from the primacy of sight.”

PRINT Magazine
Steve Heller writes: “Set between 1960 and 2000, this savory volume addresses how artists put food at the center of the highly visual art world.”

The Slowdown
Spencer Bailey writes: “In her beautiful, highly stimulating new book, De Wachter explores artistic food interventions in works by artists such as Agnes Denes, Sarah Lucas, Carolee Schneemann, and Andy Warhol, delving into their oeuvres through the angle of food. Ultimately, De Wachter makes the case that, in a world where sight is prioritized above our other senses, it’s innately expansive, enlivening, and mind-expanding to work with mediums that can also be smelled, tasted, and touched.”