Slices of Lemon
from Sian
2024.4
0
Lemon is a topic of this text.
It was Y who asked me to write something about lemon months ago, following my initial request for Y to review a recent writing of mine–we exchanged labour.
1
Lemon is a component of a group show in which Y took part.
Y’s first proposal for me was to write something about the show. It is named after a disease, Spring Fever, for which lemon was said to be the cure. There are seven installation artworks, each with lemon as a component in one way or another. One is a Buddha’s hand–a biological relative of lemon–somehow fixed on a wall. The plaster layer of the wall was carved away, exposing the concrete in the shape of the Buddha’s hand. Another is a sink and a tap. Surrounding the tap on the wall, there are pieces of skin of lemon, like tiles, forming a rectangle with an irregular gradient of colour, for different extents of dryness or the pieces appear so from the first place…
I told Y that I neither knew much about lemon, nor felt much through the screen. The former was true but the latter was a disguise, as if the medium is an obstacle to access the installations. In most cases, it is not, at least not the main one.
In general, I can hardly feel anything seeing installations. I attribute the inability to my lack of aesthetic sensibility, or not being able to bracket cognitive or ethical concerns in front of installations1, or that I am immune to the seduction of this type of art because I am too weak, too “decadent” to seduce or be seduced2. I take the inability as a little shame.
But at the same time, I try to justify my feeling-nothing, like that I took the medium as an excuse. More importantly, my ideal of art has always differed from these installations (as I understand them). Instead of “art for art’s sake,” I am more on the side of “everyone is an artist.” Instead of experiencing beauty in institutions of art, I prefer to take everyday stuff as aesthetic objects, or even better, merge myself with everyday stuff aesthetically.
Later I confessed my inability to Y. Y was open enough and proposed that I could write something, anything about lemon.
1. This is what Kant believed to be the condition for the judgement of taste, and this summary is borrowed from Kojin Karatani. See: Karatani, Kojin, and Sabu Kohso. “Uses of Aesthetics: After Orientalism”. Boundary 2, vol. 25, no. 2, 1998.
2. This is what Nietzche condemned philosophers to be, and the summary is borrowed from Boris Groys. See: Boris Groys. “Under the Gaze of Theory.” In the Flow. New York: Verso, 2016.
2
Lemon is a MacGuffin in an essay by an art curator.3
Starting with a variety of lemon that is native to China and was introduced to the US, where it became popular, the essay juxtaposes different textual materials around the flows of information, matters, capital, and migrants between East and West. It touches upon the relation between colonialism and the scientific research by western biologists in China in history, the etymology of yellow as a skin colour, the history of opium trading in China, the history of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the US, the spreading of the epidemic along with international tradings, the history of US protectionism, the economic liberalisation of East Asian countries, etc. It draws the conclusion that the material motivations for the flows are “capital, biopolitical control, and national economic interests.”4
I came across the essay and sent it to Y, thinking it might help with Y’s research. Y and I discussed the essay and shared similar opinions. On one hand, the essay is informative with its collection of textual materials. On the other hand, the materials are expansive and discrete, only loosely connected by the string of colonialism, which makes one doubt the relation between the materials and the conclusion–do the materials naturally lead to the conclusion, or did the author first have the conclusion then select the materials from history?
Moreover, lemon appears in the essay only as a MacGuffin, a symbolic object that is attractive but is irrelevant in itself, neither explained further nor mentioned later in the essay. Even in the starting introduction, lemon seems to be passive in relation to human interventions, which is different from how the Spring Fever treated lemon as something that also changes on its own.
Reading from this perspective, this essay, like most essays if not all, is a reflection of not only the objects touched upon but also the subject-author, how the latter thinks of the objects. In the essay lemon becomes a symbol associated with the textual materials and colonialism–it is the essay that constructed and performed the relation.
3. You Mi. “Transnational Movements: Meyer Lemon, Chinese Exclusion Act, and Yellow Peril.” Yellow Book. Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2019.
4. Ibid.
3
Lemon is a concept in my talk with Z.
Z was an art curator at a museum where I interned. Later we both left the museum and it had been a while since I met Z last time.
I visited Z on a summer afternoon in Suzhou, wandering along the alleys in the city and talking about trivia. Z was all the same in the way Z intellectually but jokingly thematizes things that we came across or talked about. It seems that Z can write an essay on anything. Sometimes what Z says is fun. Sometimes it makes me frown.
It was not long after I started the essay, so I mentioned Spring Fever, the essay to write about lemon, and my confusion to Z.
Z replied:
“Buddha’s hand! Interesting…”
“This stack of things reminds me of [an artist name I never heard of and have now forgotten]...”
“[The art school Y was in] is famous for its apolitical stance and the general high market price of the works that its graduates produce...”
“Ever since conceptualism, contemporary art has been about creating new forms…”
I did not take Z’s words seriously as it was casual talk. But they still show that Z was not interested in Buddha’s hand or the installations, but in the concept of lemon manifested by the installations. It was among a network of other concepts like the ones of the art school and the art movement, that lemon gained its own meaning. Z did not seem to care much about lemon either.
4
Lemon is an energy source in a sculpture by another artist.
The sculpture is called Capri Battery5, of which a multiple happened to be in the collection of the art museum where Z and I worked. It is a yellow-painted light bulb in a socket plugged into a lemon. The similarity between the bulb and lemon in terms of colour and shape implies that the energy to light the bulb is from the lemon, or to extrapolate it in symbolism, the energy that enables the civilization to have an organic source. The bulb can not really shine because the electrodes of the socket are made of the same material, so that could not form the voltage to drive the electric current through the bulb. In this sense, the implication is intuitive rather than derived from its pragmatic function.
But what if one takes the dysfunction into consideration? Examining the sculpture closely, one can find the corrosion on the electrodes and the lemon decaying slowly as it would shrink in size and have mould on its surface, like the artist already noted, “After 1000 hours, change the battery6.” So behind the composition of lemon, socket, and bulb, their material truth is that they would all go to an end, while the composition only accelerates the process. The seeming transmission of energy to generate light is actually a mutual loss.
Interestingly, the initial sculpture was made during the artist’s stay on the island of Capri in Italy7. The Mediterranean climate there is suitable for citrus trees and lemon plays an important role in the food culture of the Mediterranean area. This is probably where the artist drew the inspiration and name of the sculpture from.
In the examples mentioned, artists treat lemon differently from curators. The former is more concerned about the materiality of lemon rather than its relation with other things. Maybe this is the speciality of artists.
5. To see the sculpture and description: “Capri Battery.” Accessed 9 February 2024, https://pinakothek-beuys-multiples.de/product/capri-battery/?lang=en.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
5
Lemon is a species in the genus Citrus.
On a winter day, I visited the Museum of Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean in Marseille–another Mediterranean city–and came across an installation which explains the relationship among different species of citrus8. The wax models mimicking different citrus fruits are fixed on top of an infographic. The infographic shows that lemon (Citrus x limon) is a hybrid between the female parent bitter orange (Citrus x aurantium) and the male parent citron (Citrus medica). The fruit of their first filial generation is bigger than the lemon often seen in the market now and the former could mutate to the latter throughout time.
The smell, taste, shape, colour, and size of the diversity of citrus fruits allude to their biological relationship. Taking lemon as a starting point and tracing back, its female parent bitter orange is the hybrid of pomelo (Citrus maxima) and mandarin orange (Citrus reticulata). Downward, lemon can hybridise with bitter orange to get bergamot (Citrus x bergamia) along with other possible hybridisations. Overall, pomelo, mandarin orange, and citron are thought to be among the “pure species” and others mentioned before are hybrids9. The citrus taxonomy is drawn from morphological and genetic studies while it remains controversial nowadays, as “citrus plants hybridise easily between species with completely different morphologies, and similar-looking citrus fruits may have quite different ancestries. Some differ only in disease resistance. Conversely, different-looking varieties may be nearly genetically identical, and differ only by a bud mutation.”10
Does the hybridization of citrus challenge the definition of species? I learned in high school biology that two individual organisms belong to the same species if they can mate and produce fertile offspring. While this definition itself turns out to be porous. As a counterexample, the hybridization also happens between different groups of crows or between different lineages of oak–“the idea of a species is something that we humans invented for our own convenience.”11
Therefore, lemon has a complex biological relationship with other citrus, while it seemed more indifferent to the relationship than humans.
8. I did not find the picture of the work and its name is simply the names of the cultivars. To see the artist’s page: “Atelier Louis de Torhout.” Accessed 9 February 2024, https://atelier-torhout.com. To see the page of the exhibition: “The grand Meze.” Accessed 9 February 2024, https://www.mucem.org/en/grand-meze.
9. Wu, G. Albert; et al. “Sequencing of diverse mandarin, pomelo and orange genomes reveals complex history of admixture during citrus domestication.” Nature Biotechnology 32 (2018): 656–662. Accessed 9 February 2024.
10. “Citrus taxonomy.” Accessed 9 February 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrus_taxonomy.
11. “Defining a species.” Accessed 9 February 2024, https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolution-101/speciation/defining-a-species/.
6
Lemon is a new ingredient in my cooking.
I finally had a lemon in my hand as Y suggested me to interact with the lemon directly in the first place. It is 154g in weight, 8.08cm in height, and 6.05cm in width. Its skin is smooth and glossy with graininess. Its colour is bright and vivid yellow. Its smell is fruity and pleasant. The package says it was produced in Spain.
I checked a cookbook with a lemon on its cover and found the recipe for “Aromatic olive oil mash.”12 I executed the recipe with some modifications according to my taste. Half of the lemon was peeled and divided into five segments–it was easier than my expectation to separate the skin from the pulp and to separate different segments. The pulp was simmered with potato and some herbs. While the other half of the lemon was zested and juiced. Taking olive oil as the base, the zest and juice were mixed with other seasonings to make the topping. Later I mashed the potato and lemon pulp, then drizzled the topping over the mash and finished it.
Having a spoonful of mash, the sour taste of lemon did not stand out but balanced the starchy taste of potato, making it refreshing. Accompanied by an egg and some asparagus fried, it made up a light main dish for dinner.
12. Ottolenghi, Yotam. Ottolenghi Simple. London: Ebury Publishing, 2018.
7
Lemon is a multiplicity of meanings and matters.