Banana Monk

Late in 2019, the artist Maurizio Cattelan arrived at Art Basel Miami Beach and duct-taped a banana to a gallery wall. The fair opened, and news of the fabulous fruit quickly swept the globe. In Oslo, Cattelan’s viral sensation caught the eye of the Norwegian performance artist Jan Hakon Erichsen. “My initial thought was, oh no, he ruined it for me!” Erichsen recalled. “Now I can’t use my bananas anymore.”

Erichsen hopped on Instagram and re-uploaded a video that he had originally posted the previous year, to assure his legion of 700 thousand-plus followers that his interest in bananas was authentic. In this video, which was originally inspired by Cattelan, he rigged a baseball bat as a slingshot and sent it flying into a banana that he had duct-taped to the wall of his studio. In truth, the 41-year-old artist has been destroying bananas with homemade torture devices on Instagram since he began posting to the app in late 2017. Sometimes, he turns his banana into a weapon. Other times, as with his exquisite “Dolce Banana” turtleneck, and his old Instagram avatar, in which he wears a pair of overripe bananas as earrings, the world’s most popular fruit becomes a fashion piece. Like Cattelan’s duct-taped banana, which satirized the prestige and pretension of Art Basel, Erichsen’s bananas are site-specific: they are native to the internet. But unlike most food posts on Instagram and social media, Erichsen’s are not designed to entertain, educate, or induce salivation (or envy). Within an ecosystem grimly premised on users’ compulsion to self-project, Erichsen, through force of creative repetition, has forged a world of his own, energized by a novel and particular set of rules, imperatives, and possibilities.

Balloons and food are the principal subjects of the GIF-length snippets that Erichsen uploads to Twitter and Instagram each day. When not terrorizing bananas, he might be stomping out a grapefruit with a hatchet duct-taped to his shoe or crushing a wheel of Pringles with his bald head. Other foodstuffs featured in Erichsen’s videos include spaghetti, taco shells, cucumbers, watermelons, and crackers; more recently he’s experimented with almonds, kiwis, and rice cakes. “Whatever surrounds me is what I use,” he said in a phone interview in February 2020. “I eat a lot of bananas. What I’m often trying to do with the objects I use is find an untapped potential in them.”

Erichsen said that he is drawn to danger and destruction as themes. His first internet performance project came in 2006, when he and a friend “pretended to be a black metal band who thrashed homemade pinatas” on MySpace. Today, his videos often make use of his collection of over 500 knives, which he acquired in 2003 for an art school installation that invited visitors to walk below a sea of blades dangling by strings from the gallery ceiling. In one two-minute compilation that has amassed 19 million views since he posted it to Twitter two years ago, he pops balloons with a creativity and determination that brings to mind the suicide montage from Groundhog Day; his array of jury-rigged, gravity-assisted contrivances evokes the burglar defenses of Home Alone.

Balloons and Erichsen’s preferred foods share certain traits: they are ubiquitous, tactile, contain the potential for humor, and are innocent victims. However, balloons have few connotations in the context of Instagram, Erichsen’s main platform. By contrast, food lies at the heart of Instagram’s aspirational ethos. On Instagram, in a 21st-century update on the still lifes of the Dutch Golden Age, food and its mode of presentation serve as an efficient shorthand for wealth, taste, and lifestyle. As a gastronomic hub where cooking tutorials and restaurant ads appear alongside everyday people’s brunch adventures, Instagram encourages users to curate and compose their culinary snapshots with the care of a sous-chef plating a dish at a Michelin star bistro.

Erichsen’s work diverges sharply from mainstream internet food culture as well as the curatorial and performative nature of Instagram. And yet, by playing with the language, aesthetics, and forms that frame our social media posts and interactions, he makes videos that could not plausibly exist anywhere outside the internet.

Erichsen is not merely echoing social media conventions, but also operating in the traditions of video performance art and food art. “I’m very interested in how people use video,” he said. “That sparks a lot of the interest in what I do. That’s also kind of what I’m investigating online. I see similarities to how performance artists that did that in the beginning, like Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden, when the camcorder artist came onto the market. They didn’t know how to use the camera, they just turned it on and started filming themselves. And nowadays, people are doing the same with the smartphones and posting it online.”

Erichsen wears many of his influences on his sleeve. The abiding sense of danger in his videos is an open tribute to Burden. He cites Ernest Wurm’s one-minute sculptures as a key influence, and he invoked Wurm’s “self-portrait as a pickle” directly in one cucumber-smashing video in March 2018. Six weeks later, he attempted a banana plank stunt as an homage to his “lifelong obsession with Charles Ray’s ‘Plank Piece I-II’.”

The ‘60s produced a handful of Iconic works of food art, like Warhol’s Velvet Underground & Niko album cover, Yoko Ono’s apple, and Claes Oldenburg’s larger-than-life comfort food sculptures. Since then, food art has become more referential and eager to use food as a material: like Jana Sterbak’s 1987 Vanitas, a 50-pound dress made of raw flank steak; David Wojnarowicz’s 1992 broken, stale baguette stitched together with red yarn, a reference to his more famous “Stitch in Time”; Kara Walker’s 2014 Marvelous Sugar Baby; and Chloe Wise’s “designer” handbags made of bread crafted out of urethane and sesame seeds. 

Online, food is reduced to a visual medium, which means that various corporate interests and friends fishing for likes must go further to convince the viewer of its deliciousness. (Mukbangs, the popular Korean ASMR feasts, constitute one notable, intersensory exception.) 

Erichsen does not carry this burden. His videos are bathed in fluorescent light and staged in the bland nowhere space of his unfurnished, seemingly doorless studio. His visual style, his character’s neutral affect, his standard-issue dad fashion, and his choices of foods to destroy and wear all seem purposefully generic. He seldom acknowledges that his materials are actually edible. He is a radical anti-gourmand who divorces food not only from its most basic functions, but also from its cultural associations. 

In stripping his work of reference points, Erichsen diverges from other Instagram-famous food artists. Nicole McLaughlin’s wearable “upcycled” vests made out of microwavable popcorn packets and sugary cereals are rooted in the world of streetwear. David Henry Nobody Jr. references household brands like Hellman’s, Chef Boyardee, and Campbell’s in grotesque self-portraits that split the difference between Arcimboldo’s 16^th-century fruit portraits and Warhol’s soup cans. By contrast, Erichsen’s videos suggest that he is some kind of artist-monk who knows of no world beyond his studio.

Still, Erichsen’s short, informal videos clearly demonstrate his fluency in prevailing languages and aesthetics of social media culture. He often uses social media tropes such as #OOTD fit pics, skincare routines, and weekly rituals. He said that in 2018, he became serious about posting to Instagram and changed his work habits accordingly, adapting his approach so that he could churn out 2-3 videos per day rather than toil over months-long projects. Eager to proliferate his work across social media, he made his TikTok debut by “vibing to Rick Ross’s Bustin with [his] kiwi hat.” “I don’t understand TikTok at all and I intend to use that to my advantage,” he tweeted. 

In some ways, Erichsen’s most kindred spirits are internet figures who use food as a means of absurdist comedy. Beginning in the early 2010s, the YouTube channel EpicMealTime presented food on an inhuman scale in videos that featured lots of liquor, yelling, calories, and a guy named Muscles Glasses. Similar displays of masculinity-infused maximalist cooking can now be found on TikTok. Another YouTube channel, HowToBasic, makes disturbing and violent food tutorials. The Twitter user Pangzai periodically goes viral from his home in rural China for downing disgusting mixed drinks in one gulp.

Erichsen’s indifference toward food’s most fundamental appeal is striking and engineered for virality, but it becomes mundane as it plays out over the course of his hundreds of videos of oddball performance art. While Cattelan’s duct-taped banana struck like a lightning bolt, Erichsen’s Instagram project has come into focus over months and years. Scroll through his feed and witness a man stuck in purgatory. The boring reliability with which he uploads a new post each day is offset by the tension of not knowing what deranged stunt he’ll dream up next, and the mild concern that he’ll run out of ways to tinker with food, balloons, knives, and carpentry equipment.

The most tired critique of social media is that people share the most boring aspects of their life—the cereal they eat for breakfast, the selfies they take when they’re idling at work and school. Through his loose, diaristic approach to his food experiments, Erichsen has located the point where the banal loops around and meets the absurd.

“I felt a great sense of creative freedom when I started posting videos every day,” he said. ”My creativity can go a little haywire sometimes, and I finally found a way to get every little thing I make out in the world.” ▩