Let us be very clear – “chocolate is both subject, medium and object …” said Mr Clay to me prior to my talk – and this is in no way an exhaustive study.  Let us first define terms.  What is chocolate and what do we mean by contemporary art?

Chocolate comprises a number of foods produced from the seed of the cacao tree which has been cultivated for at least three millennia in Mexico, Central and South America.  Cocoa beans are processed into two components: cocoa solids and cocoa butter.

Pure, unsweetened chocolate contains primarily cocoa solids and cocoa butter. Much of the chocolate consumed today is in the form of sweet chocolate, combining chocolate with sugar. Milk chocolate is sweet chocolate that additionally contains milk powder or condensed milk.  White chocolate contains cocoa butter, sugar, and milk but no cocoa solids (and thus does not qualify to be considered true chocolate).

Chocolate contains alkaloids such as theobromine and phenethylamine, which have physiological effects on the body.

Chocolate has been found in burial chambers dating from 500 AD and first introduced to Spain in 1544. The first chocolate factory opened in 1615 in Bayonne France. In 1657 the first chocolate house was opened in London. Boston Apothecaries were advertising chocolate in 1712.  The first chocolate company opened in Germany in 1756. In 1832 Franz Sacher invented the Sacher torte. In 1898 Ganong introduces the 5 cent chocolate bar. In 1930 Ruth Wakefield invents the chocolate chip cookie.

What happens to chocolate?  Well, we eat it.  We spend almost 75 billion US a year on chocolate. The average US citizen consumes 6 kg of chocolate a year while the average German consumes 11 kg a year, which might sound a lot but is really only a couple of kit-kats a day.

However, there is a dark side to chocolate. In 2001, the U.S. State Department, the International Labor Organization and others reported child slavery on many cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast, source of 43% of the world’s cocoa.  Subsequent research by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture revealed some 284,000 women and children working in hazardous conditions on West African cocoa farms.

This issue is being addressed by many chocolate companies, and fair trade chocolate is becoming a force in the marketplace.

Chocolate is exclusive, festive, exotic and erotic, but it is a double edged sword.

It has both positive and negative attributes – on the plus side there is the imagery of sanctuary, home, safety, luxury, childhood and love - while the negative attributes of chocolate include sin, gluttony, sex, and myriad health and political issues.

The ad world cunningly uses chocolate, like many luxury products, to frequently convey and to perpetuate the social myths and stereotypes of advertising - to play on our desires.

Chocolate is a part of modern history, our consumer culture, chocolate crosses borders - it is in our home and our offices. Chocolate is irresistible - as made famous in the award winning 2008 axe deodorant advertising campaign featuring the chocolate man.

What about Art?  The purpose of art, according to one school of thought, is to take us out of our every day –to refresh and uplift us.  But this is a very individual process. Our acceptance of art is very much like our faith and dependant on our expectations, tolerance and our acceptance.

For example, how do we feel about a green stop sign? Or a traffic light with the green light on the top? How do we feel when we see a perfectly formed solid chocolate gun?  Or Cosimo Cavallaro's My Sweet Lord from 2008?

What is Art? When we talk about contemporary art, art since the Second World War – this includes schools of art from expressionism and pop art to computer and media art.  And Art – even when we talk about chocolate - is all around us. Art is reflected in our food, fashion, advertising, graphic design, sculpture, installation and performance art. 

Karen Finley (“Chocolate Smeared Woman”  “We Keep Our Victims Ready”  1998) smears herself in chocolate  as being symbolic of fecal matter and then covers herself in tinsel to draw attention to the abuse of women.  "no matter how bad a woman is  treated, she still knows how to get  dressed for dinner"   Finley in 1998 was one of four plaintiffs in the "National Endowment  for the Arts v. Karen Finley“ to uphold a congressional "decency" test for federal funding in the arts. 

When we talk about chocolate we can talk about its break, its shine, its smoothness – we can critique it like wine.  But chocolate as an artistic medium can also be communicative, ephemeral, relative, paradoxical, connotative, critical, ironic and banal.

Chocolate has been integral in the works of many great contemporary artists.  Joseph Beuys saw chocolate’s positive communicative value. On July 20, 1964 in the Technischen Hochschule Aachen, Joseph Beuys sets the non verbal energy potential of chocolate both real and symbolic into motion by tossing fistfuls of blood smeared chocolate blocks into the crowd as an example of the traditional Christian offering. Chocolate symbolises here the bread, representing the body, and reinforced through the blood. Beuys often used chocolate in tablet or block form in his works -  such as in his Tierdenkmal 1961. He saw that chocolate is sacramental in nature.

Dieter Roth sought to address the inherent demand in Art for the eternal.  With chocolate’s deterioration over time, the outcome of the work is affected by the element of change that is in all organic things and that is out of the influence of the artist. He used chocolate to assist in “the self degradation of the artist”.  This was very obvious in his Self portrait, bust with bird food mixed with chocolate from1969.  Roth saw that chocolate is ephemeral and changing.

Sonja Alhäuser sees the intrinsic paradox and ironic value in the use of chocolate, focusing on the communicative processes surrounding eating in her art.  For her art is sensual – so how does interaction with the audience change the work?  The audience is required to effectively complete the works when presented with a room filled with chocolate wall hangings, tables, or in her Tuin der Lust or Pyramid (2006) installations with 24 centimeter diameter chocolate balls. The size of the chocolates are placed in relation to our every day experiences with chocolate truffles.  This touches the nerve of our fantasy of chocolate.  There lies the dissonance.

Janine Antoni expores social and consumer criticism in her works. In “Gnaw”. 1992, for example,  a 300 kilo block of chocolate and one of similar weight of lard are gnawed by the artist.  The rendered lard is made into lipstick and the chocolate into heart shaped chocolate containers. Her work is about a process, about the meaning of the making - having a love-hate relationship with the object.
Bringing the viewer back to the making of the thing - by residue, by touch, by these processes that are basic to all of our lives ... that can be related to in terms of process, everyday activities - bathing, eating, etc.  At the same time, The Eucharist, the most sacred of Christian rites, is simply about eating the body.

Yvonne Lee Schultz. A Toy with Awful Connotations. 2sweet2kill / Schoko Kids Berlin 2008.  The artist entered a playground and handed out to the children, with the permission of their parents, solid molded chocolate hand guns.  She filmed and photographed the resulting play by the children.  How do we feel when faced with a chocolate hand gun?  The guns melt, the hands become smeared with chocolate and again the association with blood.  The children hold the guns in their mouths.  How do we react? The average life span of a chocolate gun is about 10 minutes.

Stephen J. Shanbrook  It is exactly the banality of chocolate that makes the works of this artist so powerful – the viewer is caught off guard.  “Chocolate and blood have come down through history as offerings to the gods or at least as remedies for curing some inner melancholy.” Says the artist.  He casts torn body parts and death scenes in chocolate such as Remnants of a suicide bomber. 2008.. The familiarity, smell and the hidden psychological effects of chocolate. How is it that we desire to eat the representation of another’s pain? In his Battle of Lovers and Losers. 2009 - an installation of chocolate covered toy soldiers - the artist relates the memoirs of a medic in the Vietnam war who carried M&Ms in his medical bag for those too badly wounded to survive.  The chocolate was for them a solace and association of the home they would never return to.

My work with chocolate entails taking chocolate as an organic product back outside and photographing them - creating impressions of those emotions not usually associated with chocolate: death, waste, loneliness, sickness, old age.  As an artist I find that chocolate captures the dilemma.  The signifier is chocolate. The signified is food. I ask the audience to step away from the expected, the probable, to see the possible and thereby to create new meaning. Chocolate as a material captures the moment when the decision to be has not yet been made and anything is possible. The Audience accepts chocolate and is asked to accept a sculpture in chocolate – is asked to redefine chocolate and in doing so redefine their expectations of art and sculpture.

Via the many schools of contemporary art, chocolate as a medium has been emancipated.  It has shown its artistic flexibility like few other materials.  The history of chocolate, its production, packaging, marketing and consumption, re all points of reference in its use as a medium in contemporary art – and by virtue of its history chocolate offers us levels of reference both personal and collective.

Artists present chocolate in many forms, in connection with other materials, in individual ways, infusing it with new meaning.

David Lodge, in his new novel Deaf Sentence, posits that contemporary art is held up by a scaffolding of discourse.  If it were not for that discourse then it would simply fall because it has no body but the discourse which supports it.  That chocolate is being raised up on its own scaffold of discourse is obvious.  However, if this structure is removed it retains the benefit of being, still and simply, chocolate.

In conclusion, we turn to our mother’s chicken soup for comfort - to the warmth and security of the familiar, to our childhood when for most of us we were safe – perhaps to a simple bottle of red wine or a hamburger and chips.  Our enjoyment of chocolate is often a similar process.  We turn to a simple chocolate bar, often not even noticing the wrapper – perhaps we purchase it from a machine at the train station or shake it into our mouth in the darkness of a movie theater.

At the other end of the spectrum, when we want to spoil ourselves we spend a lot of money at a nice restaurant on food that is not really the point - the point is to go out and experience that which is exotic and expensive – that which for the most of us is apart from the everyday and lifts us out of our every day.  A treat if you will. 

Chocolate is also reaching these extremes – today ateliers, designer chocolates, and grand cru cocoa are a staple of the marketplace.  But it is just chocolate – the same as the soup is just a soup.  It is the point of reference that is different.  We don’t give out the money for the product – we give out the money for the exclusivity factor.  Like a logo on a purse or a celebrity endorsed running shoe – often we think:  if it’s that expensive it must be good!   We only need to compare the price of main street chocolate with French chocolatier Patrick Roger's €9 single truffles or the €60 single chocolate eggs of Spanish chocolate artists Enric Rovira or Oriol Balaguer to understand where the exclusivity factor is taking us.

We have come full circle with chocolate.  It was used in religious ceremony in ancient Central American culture; it was sold in drug stores for hundreds of years. We distanced ourselves from its magical properties.  Now the packaging and stores of much of today’s chocolates again distance us. The packaging is elegant – reminiscent of the jewelry or cosmetic counter –  clerks are styled and suited, we purchase bespoke chocolate designed in ateliers advised by chocolate consultants and referencing critiques reminiscent of the world of fine art and wine – and like that world we have craftsmen going back to the roots of chocolate with handmade products.  The sacramental value of chocolate has increased – it has become again a sacramental unguent for our tongue.  But it is still just the product of a simple cocoa bean.