Food and the Social Body in US Performance Art, 1962-1980

In the early 1960s, food suddenly began appearing as a literal material—not just as an image—in U.S. art. In an age of sit-ins and new food countercultures, food was political, and it allowed artists to connect economic, political, and social conditions with biological reality.

Situated at the intersection of food studies and art history, this dissertation is the first to theorize and historicize the material use of food in this period’s art production. Bringing case studies from food history into conversation with performance and body art works by Alison Knowles, Suzanne Lacy, and Adrian Piper, this dissertation argues that artists in this period used food in performance to articulate a “social body”: an experience of the physical body as entangled with, interpellated by, and sustained by its social and political roles.