BY Annie Millican | February 11, 2010

Rory Gunderson is no longer an artist without a medium

My good friend Rory Gunderson was once described to me as “the greatest artist I know without a medium.”  Recently, his amorphous repertoire was honed and focused in an unlikely atelier: the spacious kitchen of a pre-war Greenpoint duplex.  Mason jars containing specimen of his latest artistic foray line the countertop and converge in a piecemeal spectrum of burnished greens, purples and reds.  These are the savory relics of Brooklyn’s early settlers, and they belong to an era antedating the precepts of high art criticism.  As such, they straddle the classist line separating the beautiful from useful, and enjoy exemption from the staid principles governing ‘Art’.  Thank goodness, because Pickled Vegetables don’t have time for debate!  Beautiful as they are, they are destined to be eaten. 
Although the minutiae of art politics is not applied to the craft of pickling, we still appreciate these objects in the same visual vocabulary.  Their purposeful existence helps to round out the usual list of descriptive adjectives: luxurious, rarefied, genius and gourmet.  The basic idea with pickling is to create a sealed environment that is hostile to microbes, which if not curtailed, will cause spoilage in the jar.  Taste is not arbitrary, but linked to the necessity of consumption.  Aesthetically speaking, pickling keeps edible dead things in suspended animation, makes them appear alive, vibrantly colored and extends a variety of normally perishable foodstuffs beyond their season.  A surprisingly dynamic medium, Rory's pickled vegetables appeal to all senses, and demonstrate that an object can have utility and visual credibility.