Lucas Brahme Wants to Eat Himself
Lucas Brahme Wants to Eat Himself
Lucas Brahme Wants to Eat Himself. And He Wants You To, Too.
Actor, Musician, Performance Artist Lucas Brahme talks grossing out his audience, immortalization and preservation, and paying homage in the many pieces he has on display in Food Show.
May 5, Stevenson Blanche Gallery at California Institute of the Arts.
Lucas Brahme is stuck in traffic.
I can barely hear it, but every once in a while there’s a honk and an, “Alright!” a mild reprimand from Brahme. I ask if this is a good time to talk, and he says it’s a perfect time. He’ll be stuck in traffic for 45 minutes. He’s calm yet alert and animated while we chat. Being his sister, there’s sibling housekeeping at the top of our call. What are we getting our mom for Mother’s Day, who is sending flowers, how have things been since we last talked? But then it’s business. “I can talk about this ad nauseam,” he says more than once.
There are obvious perks to interviewing your own brother. I know everything he’s talking about, although occasionally he takes great care in explaining to me things I already know. He refers to old pieces of his in two-word sound bits, Birthday Boy (2021) and Rat Catchers, both come up without explanation. But the job he had in 2015? Working at the ice cream shop Milk Bar in Williamsburg? He explains this to me in minute detail as if I didn’t visit him at work for free milkshakes.
It's what he doesn’t explain that feels juiciest. Take Birthday Boy for example. For his birthday in 2021, Brahme debuted a performance art piece in which he sat on the floor in a wooden contraption that is best described as the house Alice from Alice in Wonderland outgrows. Instead of his legs exploding out of the first-floor windows, Brahme’s legs protrude from a birthday cake. A real, person-sized, birthday cake that he baked, iced, and sat in for several hours while viewers circled around him. Some saw him, laughed, and took a picture while others sliced themselves a piece of cake and grabbed a beer from a nearby cooler. Some sang him happy birthday, many posted him on Instagram. The piece makes a reappearance in this exhibit, Food Show, as it is projected onto the blank white icing of a sheet cake.
BIRTHDAY BOY
A film by Brahme that documents the live performance of his piece, Birthday Boy.
The aftermath of Birthday Boy, October 14th, 2021.
Our phone calls about Food Show resemble our phone calls back in October during the inception of Birthday Boy. How was he going to fit all the cakes he’d baked into the refrigerator that he shared with two roommates? Would the icing melt on the hot drive from Santa Monica to Santa Clarita? These food performance pieces Brahme has been drawn to producing lately require a lot of logistics. One of the pieces in Food Show is a display of several gelatins, all of which have been set in a mold made from Brahme’s face. When I ask him about storing these pieces for the show he says, “There are five of me in the fridge right now.”
Each face pays homage to a time, trait, or person in Brahme’s life. There’s the Cereal Milk face, which invokes the Milk Bar job Brahme had in his early twenties while living in New York. There’s the Key Lime Pie Face, affectionately known as the KLP Face, that honors his longtime girlfriend Natasha Bluth, and a dessert that has become known to our family as her specialty. Other faces include ones made from sugar glass, a Dirt Cup Face, and what Brahme calls a Memory Aspic.
“The whole series was preconceived as a memory piece,” Brahme says of the origins of the faces exhibit. The first idea he had when making a mold out of his face was to use it for gelatin. “Like aspic,” he says. His interest in aspic was two-fold. There was an element of disgust that appealed to him, “You’ll have an aspic, and it will have cubed cheese and hot dog and other just horrible, disgusting things that you would never want while you’re eating Jell-O.” Brahme sounds delighted as he describes this. “I was attracted to that as a grotesque thing.”
His second reason for fascination with aspic has more to do with memory. “I was interested in the idea of memory and obfuscation and preservation.”
Two examples of Brahme’s Memory Aspics. One, intact, features an indiscernible polaroid while the second, destroyed, reveals the contents of another photograph.
“The past four years have a been a huge exercise in memory retrieval, especially with Ryden.” Like Birthday Boy, here is another moment where Brahme alludes but does not expand. Ryden, I know from being Brahme’s sister, is his childhood friend who suffered an aneurysm near his brainstem in 2019. As a result, Ryden cannot communicate verbally. While Ryden was recovering in the hospital in Philadelphia, Brahme and other near-by friends made several visits to be with him. Brahme recalls one visit and says, “Grant and I were driving home from Philadelphia back to New York and we were talking about how we are the keepers of Ryden’s memories. And Ryden is the keeper of some of ours. Whatever we can’t remember that Ryden remembers, we don’t know. That memory is basically unretrievable.”
Brahme explains tying this motif into his work. “The real intention of the piece was to have a memory aspic where you can’t really see what’s going on in the liquid because it becomes murky. You see remnants of a memory, but you never get the full picture.” There is something comforting about this image. Insisting that the memory is not lost, but instead is contained within something, or someone, one simply does not have access to. It affirms the existence of the memory, even if we cannot see it ourselves. “Casting something in gelatin is a form of immortalization.” It is the homage itself, casting the honor in a physical form. Brahme adds, “If there’s anything to be said for it, the process of making these gelatin molds is as frustrating as trying to recall a memory. You can get so close, but it’s very difficult to discern things and craft detail.”
“Casting something in gelatin is a form of immortalization.”
If the piece was initially going to be about memory, I ask how Brahme got to food as a medium and he recalls a comment I don’t remember making. “Yesterday, I was eating an apple in traffic, and I would take breaks from looking at the road to look at the apple, and I remembered what you said a long time ago about how I eat a sandwich. I look at every bite before I take it.” Though I have no recollection of saying this, it’s true. My brother has a heightened reverence for food and watching him eat proves that. “I’m someone who is really transfixed by food,” he says. “I think it’s a fascinating and beautiful thing.”
My brother’s intimate relationship with food spans as far back as his infancy. When he was a baby, my mother often recalls, he loved Swedish sausages. She talks about this specific kind of sausage—what it looked like, where it was from, how old Brahme was when he ate them—and he remembers. He couldn’t have been older than two-years-old and the sausages are somehow indelible in his memory.
What Brahme doesn’t mention, but I’m happy to, is that he’s also an excellent chef. And someone who takes as much joy in cooking as he does in eating. “When you cook a dish,” he says, “it’s not just a representation of you. It’s your family history, your childhood history, a personal anecdote. Or it’s a tip you got from another chef along your cooking journey. And every time you make a meal for someone else, you’re giving them a piece of yourself.”
Brahme turns our focus back to food as art. “I’ve always wanted to explore food-based theater.” He credits his mentor at CalArts, Janie Geiser, with allowing him the space to explore his relationship with food and to play with it as a medium.
“One of my first ideas was the human charcuterie board.” I have a hard time imagining what Brahme means until he explains covering himself in cold cuts. “I thought it would be disgusting, but also funny, if I covered my body in cured meats and had a little puddle of honey in my hairy collar bone with brie running over my nipple.”
“Clearly no one would want to eat off of my hairy body, so I thought I would just start self-cannibalizing.” Self-cannibalizing led to making food that looked like himself, which led to the gelatin heads. Brahme describes serving one of the heads to a classmate who said, “I can feel how your skin feels on my tongue, and it’s disgusting.” I can hear Brahme grinning through the phone. “It was exactly what I wanted,” he says. “It should feel like you’re eating a face.”
“I can feel how your skin feels on my tongue, and it’s disgusting.”
Though this show did not feature the human charcuterie board, which Brahme plans to execute “at some point in my life,” it does feature disgust. Including the gelatin faces, there are several pieces in the show that involve grotesqueries. In one work, similar to Birthday Boy in mechanical execution, an actor (Adam Peltier) sits naked in a bathtub full of spaghetti and tomato sauce, which he eats while watching the film Gummo and recites the lines aloud. In Calvin Heinz, another actor (Henry Winship) models underwear, crafted by Brahme, that is made entirely of ketchup packets. He carries a tray of pigs in a blanket and offers guests to “dress their wienies.”
Aside from being gross, the defining characteristic of these pieces is humor. A mockery of the piece, Comedian (a banana, duct taped to a wall, that sold for $120,000 at Art Basel in 2019) featured an actor in a banana costume being duct taped to one of the walls in the gallery. Another piece, The Best Beer Fridge in the World, is a vintage 1930’s refrigerator that Brahme refurbished and painted in Miller High Life’s signature colors. When the fridge opens, audio from old Miller High Life commercials plays and the viewer discovers mirrors and amber-colored LED lights installed in the fridge. “The mirrors create an illusion that the beers go on forever. Along with the lights inside, it creates this lovely idea that this is the best beer fridge in the world because the beer never runs out.”
The humor, though, is undercut throughout the exhibit. First, we talk about the fridge. The never-ending supply of beer? “That’s a fallacy,” Brahme says. He imagines himself as the person discovering this treasure and says, “For the next 8 beers, I’m going to believe in that fantasy. And that’s not funny.” One gallery attendee said of watching the actor being taped to the wall, “It was funny, but also surprisingly emotional.” This is exactly what Brahme is after.
“I don’t have to do this,” Brahme says. “I’m an actor. I’m not supposed to do a visual arts exhibit at the end of the year. I’m doing this because I want to and I think it’s funny. I think grotesqueness is funny. But more importantly, making people feel things is what brings me joy.”
He thinks of the gallery experience like he thinks of acting. “I like telling a story that’s going to make someone feel something, whether that’s laughter or joy or fear or disgust. That’s not funny to me, but it does give me a lot of joy.”
“Making people feel things is what brings me joy.”
I ask Brahme what has been the most rewarding experience of putting this show together and he spits out a sigh. “Just knowing that I can do it,” he says. He becomes quiet and contemplative. “I’ve been thinking a lot about why this matters. For the most part, none of this stuff matters. It’s fun and creative and playful. And it will give people joy and, like I’ve said, I do think that matters. But I’m not unaware of the fact that I’m getting high on my own supply.”
“It feels good!” he says of creating pieces for the show. “It feels as good as when you make a dish, and you think, this is my special twist on whatever. And you know that when people eat it, they’re going to say, ‘Wow, that’s a fucking good xyz.’ You already know it as the chef, but it gives you joy to give it to someone else. I can cook however many meals by myself that are incredible, but they’re not going to mean anything. It only means something when you give it away and you share it. That’s when it matters.”
This emphasis on community makes Brahme buzz and it becomes clear that this is the crux of the show. Not humor, not disgust, not memory. Earlier in our conversation, Brahme mentioned a conversation he had with another artist in the exhibit, Pheobe Jane Hart. Hart was talking to Brahme about how many pieces were already in the show and how there was limited space. “Is there going to be enough room for my piece?” she asked Brahme. To which Brahme said, “Pheobe, we’ll make room.”
Later, when Hart was in the studio installing her piece for the show, Brahme was having a conversation with Henry Winship, who would be modeling the ketchup underwear for Calvin Heinz. When Brahme introduced Winship to Hart, Winship said, “Oh, this is a group show?” Brahme confirmed and mentioned the other artists who would also be showing their work. According to Brahme, Winship lit up and said, “Oh! I’m in a group show!”
Winship in Calvin Heinz
“This is what art school is about!” Brahme beams through the phone. “It’s about making a group show because you’re a bunch of artists and you want to make art, so you put it in the same room!”
“I want people to see, don’t just hang out with your actors or just your animators, because that’s boring. It’s so much more fun to get these different people together and do something together. And it’s so easy! It’s not that hard! It is not that hard to get together with some of your friends and make something beautiful.”
“It is not that hard to get together with some of your friends and make something beautiful.”
I’m drawn back to the faces piece in Food Show. A piece that contains upwards of 10 faces, all Brahme’s, that on the surface seem like they’re about one person. But they’re not. They all pay homage to other people. The Key Lime Pie face honors Brahme’s girlfriend as the Cereal Milk face honors anyone that worked that shitty job with him. The memory aspic honors Ryden. And, according to a text from Brahme, buried in one of the gelatins is a polaroid picture of me.
Despite what he says, Brahme is not getting high on his own supply. He’s getting high on what makes every host giddy. Their guests.