Word: tomatoes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Tomato Fancier...
...canned tomato symbolizes the artificial split which man has created between "nature" and "culture." Man cooked meat, for example, because it stayed edible longer; the process had a rational benefit...
Canning the tomato is the triumph of the ego, the suppression of the natural, the inexorable advance of civilization. Technology has found a way to "cook" the tomato without shriveling it to an inedible rind. One simply puts the dangerous natural tomato into a can. Magically it is civilized, it is cooked. Now take it out of the can and it is "safe" to eat the tomato...
...perhaps the canning of the tomato represents an even more basic need. Perhaps man must simply be continually manipulating his environment, rearranging things, transferring them from one state to another. In this way man receives feedback. It is his way of talking to himself. As we push our carts down the colorful supermarket aisles the products are whispering to us, mumbling the messages we have instructed them...
...Krapp, we are constantly talking to ourselves, trying to convince ourselves we are still alive. We feel monumentally guilty about a crime we cannot even name. And we hold ourselves under a continual sentence of disappearance. Deep within we know that the sentence is a just one. Canning a tomato is our reassurance that the sentence hasn't yet been carried...