This issue of Condiment has reminded us of the simple truth that we are living with food, not living for food. In this context, the aim shifts from accomplishment to a need for further exploration. Ideas and approaches to food have never seemed so evolved and exaggerated. Yet, as the focus on the meal continues to increase, we risk forgetting about all the hours of living that exist in between. Rather than only being an object of desire, food needs also to be a subject of discussion—approached not as a statement about politics, provenance or proficiency, but as an open-ended question mark. In some form or another, we hope that each page of this issue raises questions —not just about what food is, but about what it can be. After all, each meal is both an outcome and a new beginning.

Produced in collaboration with BLESS. Images from their collection BLESS N° 42, Plädoyer der Jetztzeit appear on each page of the publication.

Born last century. Based in Melbourne, Australia. Misha Hollenbach lives and works in many languages, times and places. Hollenbach is one half of the brand Perks and Mini (P.A.M.) a multi media excursion encompassing art, design, fashion, and publishing. He is also part of The Changes, music and art collective.

Hollenbach is influenced by energy, as his work moves through various mediums including sculpture and painting, printed media and collage. Rather than shy away from objects deemed useless, or unwanted, he embraces their meaningless meanings to create an unfamiliar language containing familiar objects. By employing found objects and pairing them with wit and humor, he continues the narrative of the Dada and Pop artists.

In a lineage that extends through Jim Shaw, Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp, the rallying around the already readymade repositions things for freer symbolic enterprises. In the re-presentation of shit, Misha touches upon the etymological origins of faeces, which derives from faex, the Latin for dregs. He is using the dregs, things humans have casted away; shit becomes a metaphor for the unwanted.

By putting these outcasts back together with ready mix, the images of the objects do not return to us as they normally should; they lose their original function. With this method, he is breaking our own need to put the image back together in a fixed or familiar way. He strips back the structure of meaning — and this brings about a danger: the readymades return as phantasms and representations of abstract ideas. A Hush Puppy becomes a Push Poopy. Doodoo becomes Dada.

—Timothy Moore