Conor Harrington and the hunger for excess

 

What’s the story behind "Eat and Delete"​?
It’s a continuation of my work over the last four years. I’m interested in systems of power and excess, and that’s where the eat aspect comes from—the excess and unrelenting desire for power and control. The delete aspect comes from what happens after that unrelenting desire for control.
It’s a story of power and colonialism and empires that build up and fall. It’s about the rise of power and the fall of power. The eat is the excess, and the delete is the drop. I don’t remember the exact line, but it’s actually from a track on the Nas and Damian Marley collaboration album. Nas says, “Eat, sleep, delete,” or something like that. I was like “Ah! Ok.” So I took the eat and delete. It makes sense with the rises and falls I’m interested in.
The prequel to "Eat and Delete" was called "Dead Meat." Why the food obsession?
I suppose it’s just the hunger and the idea of hunger in general. You’re hungry for food or you’re hungry for power—it’s the same motion. The same kind of feeling. I’m looking at the powerful people and what they’re hungry for. They’re hungry for power, hungry for excess, hungry for everything. Eating is just that general sense of nonstop hunger, nonstop feeding themselves. - (Conor Harrington, intervju om utställningen "Eat and delete")

“Coke [Coca Cola] functions as the direct embodiment of “IT,” of the pure surplus of enjoyment over standard satisfactions, of the mysterious and elusive X we are all after in our compulsive consumption of merchandise. The unexpected result of this feature is not that, since Coke does not satisfy any concrete need, we drink it only as a supplement, after some other drink has satisfied our substantial need – it is rather this very superfluous character that makes our thirst for Coke all the more insatiable: as Jacques-Alain Miller put it succinctly, Coke has the paradoxical property that, the more you drink it, the more you get thirsty, the greater the need to drink more of it – with its strange bittersweet taste, our thirst is never effectively quenched. So, when, some years ago, the publicity motto for Coke was “Coke, that’s IT!” we should discern in it the entire ambiguity: “that’s it” precisely insofar as that’s NEVER effectively IT, precisely insofar as every satisfaction opens up a gap of “I want MORE!” - (Slavoj Zizek, "Surplus-enjoyment between the sublime and the trash")