Underfoot: Cooking with Paprika

For the past year, I have been creating work centered on multitasking; multitasking as a full-time graduate student, an artist, a mother, wife, household manager, and, due to the pandemic, a second-grade homeschool facilitator. I am not alone. Many people are in similar situations. Women are disproportionately tasked with household and childcare duties, while in the outside-of-home workplace, women bring in only 82 cents for every dollar that men bring in, on average. Women have made significant achievements in the past 50 years. The first female Vice-President of the United States currently sits in office. It is an exciting time. Nevertheless, many things have remained unchanged or little changed for women in the past five decades. Women have not freed themselves of gender roles but instead have taken on additional roles.

In my “long short” video entitled Underfoot: Cooking with Paprika, I make marks on paper with my feet using charcoal, graphite, and paprika while making a traditional Hungarian meal that also incorporates the red spice. While I set the stage for a meditative durational performance piece, it almost immediately fails as such because the reality of my home life disrupts it. First, my cat walks into the charcoal and needs to have his feet cleaned. This catches my daughter’s attention. Upon discovering the setup, she has her own performative interaction with it. I continue to make dinner as the piece I intended to make disintegrates. My husband is flummoxed by my nonchalance as he tries to intervene and corral our daughter. Through the conversation we have in the kitchen, prompted by my husband’s asking whether or not I would like him to intervene, the piece becomes a meditation on when art becomes art. Is it in the conception, or is it in the process? Can life itself be art?