Artists Explore Chocolate's Unsettling Role in Contemporary Art Practices

Chocolate serves as a provocative medium for numerous contemporary artists, often yielding unsettling results. Janine Antoni's 1993–4 work 'Lick & Lather' features self-portrait busts in chocolate that viewers sometimes bite, requiring the artist to reshape them. Dieter Roth created putrefying chocolate-based artworks, including the 1968 multiple 'Easterish Bunny Dropping Bunny' molded from rabbit dung. Paul McCarthy's 'Chocolate Nose' multiple, a simple chocolate bar, carries disturbing undertones typical of his practice. Guillaume Bijl's 2014 'Sorry' multiple, produced for More Publishing, includes plaster chocolate models that critique clichés of celebration. Adam McEwen's 2012 'Chocolate Bar' is crafted from milled graphite, referencing both tombstones and confectionery. Renzo Martens's Institute for Human Activities collaborates with the Congolese Plantation Workers Art League to produce chocolate self-portrait sculptures from local cocoa, part of a gentrification project aiming for a post-Fordist economy. These works were discussed in an ArtReview online column published on 31 March 2015, which also mentions Rococo's edible hand-painted Easter eggs and the 1982 Bow Wow Wow song 'I Want Candy'. The column notes that chocolate in art often becomes inedible or conceptually charged, moving beyond mere confectionery.