SHIMSHON OBADIA MAKES AND EATS A SANDWICH (A three-part sustainable video response to Andy Warhol eating a hamburger)

This piece is a structuralist film based on Andy Warhol’s eating a hamburger, titled, ‘Shimshon Obadia Makes and Eats a Sandwich: A three-part sustainable response to Andy Warhol eating a hamburger.’ This was done similarly to his work but done with the attempt of filling in the gaps of what was not as pressing in his time and extending his work into a contemporary context. I have done this in three parts instead of one because it should be revealed that we cannot go the way of the pre-packaged lunch bag. Instead, we need to invest in our own lunch bag to be sustainable. Illustrating this, I have set up a split screen showing, with each of these three parts, the complex and sometimes disturbing reality of our relationship with even the simplest of “home-cooked meals.” At the end of the series, after consuming one of the two sandwiches I have made in front of them, I give the viewer the second sandwich with a gesture and even take the time to me making it for them. This is because I should not be just buying for myself, it is my responsibility to do some for myself and then give some to another, its not all about me as consumer on the top of the food chain, it is about my community and the rest of my world at the same time. Making this piece, each section was done in one take, much to the style of Warhol’s video and its production. Instead of getting someone to buy me a burger to eat on camera however, I make the whole thing myself without the capitalist fetishization of the american hamburger. I tried to do this in a much more realistic setting with what is sustainable and manageable for the environment, my body, and my budget. And yet, I am taking cue from Warhol here in the way he mocks this capitalist culture by my use of the Costco-sized jumbo mayo, extra large cheese, enormous mustard, and unthinkable tub of salmon-mayo-mix. Here I have attempted to address this issue from both sides but in the context of my own demographic, university student-artists, by the performance of my actual lunch making practice. This eco-art piece in responding to Warhol’s simplistic piece by basing itself off of the same style but in the same moment, revealing the complexities of the issue that cannot remain neatly packaged in a Burger King paper lunch bag. In this, I am also trying to make a point against the isolation of the art world from the rest of the world. I have tried here to focus on an equal balance of a system benefiting and giving to and from all other parts of the system (a fundamental theory of eco-art practice) as this video is set up to be by being a more balanced, actualizable version of Warhol’s video but in the same structuralist approach which is trying to show things as they are. This is more of an extension as response in its critique of Warhol than an attack, I have attempted here expand his concern 50 years into the future.