Jude Griebel: Elegy for the Consumed

In his keenly detailed sculptures, ceramics, and drawings, Jude Griebel examines our complicated relationship with the creatures we consume. 

Griebel presents us with a variety of non-human animals in their prepared-food states, ready to eat. A prawn wields its lemon garnish and a giant roasted chicken bears a sprig of rosemary like a banner, confronting us with the uncomfortable reality of our appetites. In the series “Revenants,” these beasts also appear as harbingers of doom or reckoning, bearing dire warnings, and raising the alarm about the disastrous effects that humans’ overconsumption has caused and is sure to perpetuate.

Elegy for the Consumed plays on our strange relationship with animals and the ways we have reconciled how we use them. We surround ourselves with animals as pets, ascribe them personality traits and emotions, dress them up, and treat them like family.  Some of us—most of us—also consume animals in some form or another: their flesh, fat, milk, and skin. We breed them, raise them, and harvest them. The realization that our fate is tied to theirs and to the health of our natural environment is a lesson that some of us are still learning. It’s one that some of us are actively choosing to avoid.

Griebel’s work puts this idea front and center, but with an uncanny humor and pathos that urges us to empathize with the creatures we see before us, in spite of their often grotesque appearance and their implied critique of our selfish human behavior. Griebel’s creations nod to our instinct to anthropomorphize animals, specifically referencing traditional decorative dinnerware, and bringing to mind other artists whose work focuses on the animal realm.

The animals in Griebel’s drawings and sculptures are not the sweet bonneted hedgehogs and dapper frogs of Beatrix Potter books. Those animals inhabit a world almost entirely free of humans but filled with the trappings of a world recognizable as our own. Griebel’s creatures are simply themselves—no fancy clothes, no household tasks. They have agency and language, even in their processed-for-consumption forms. I see them as more akin to the animals in Charlotte’s Web. They share our world but have minds and interior lives of their own—and they can write. 

Griebel’s work plays with our historical unease around eating and consuming animals. It is not intended as a manifesto against meat eating, yet it calls us to question our unthinking acceptance of a world order that puts humans at the top of the pyramid, perhaps at our own peril.

— Sarah Freeman, curator

This exhibition considers the animal body in relation to human consumption. The sculptures and drawings mine visual material from popular culture to negotiate the fraught relationship between the consumer and the consumed. The anthropomorphic animal has historically played an important role in this material, as a tool for creating psychological ease for consumers, encouraging them to be carnivorous. From smiling fast-food mascots masking the reality of lives within the factory-food system to cartoon advertisements, imbuing other species with human attributes can both facilitate and complexify meat eating. My works draw attention to and subvert these visual and emotional tactics, exposing the veneering of individual lives and realities deeply independent of our own.

In the series “Revenants,” commonly consumed species in their gastronomically prepared states are bestowed with agency and individuality, walking away from the table. Drawing on animated foods from popular culture and history, these animals have been inflated in scale, demanding to be recognized as bodies rather than parts or ingredients. Tragic, frightening, and sympathetic, the work embodies the psychology of meat consumption that is suppressed by the corporate food industry through mascots and advertising. 

The porcelain works were created during a recent residency at Kohler Co. in Wisconsin. They build on expressive European dinnerware craft traditions from the 17th and 18th centuries that depicted the animal species served upon them, celebrating the bounty of the natural world. My own works update this tradition, representing species that are factory- and aquaculture-farmed, connecting their bodies to this historical dining material. As a functional ceramic, porcelain is entwined with cycles of consumption through its constant use and cleaning. Using porcelain to represent industrially raised species becomes charged in this respect, tying the stark circumstances of the animals’ lives to the surfaces from which we consume them.

The works in Elegy for the Consumed generate myriad questions surrounding lives that often remain hidden from us even as they impact us on an individual, daily basis. While the work does not condemn meat eating, it imagines a system that prioritizes transparency, dignity, and reverence regarding the species that sustain us. 

— Jude Griebel

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