Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5

_Unlike Iowans, many urbanites from outside the Midwest see the Buttercow as kitschy folk craft rather than true art.  Some who are unaccustomed to rural life find quaintness in the Buttercow, rather than seeing it as the manifestation of highly skilled ability.  As fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi ironically quipped after seeing the Buttercow, “You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a life-sized cow sculpted out of butter…its fabulous.” 

Though it would be easy to assume that the dismissal of butter is a product of its medium (butter) or form (cattle), both have been featured in highly regarded art installations. In 1999 the city of Chicago launched its famous “Cows on Parade” exhibit, in which local artists designed fiberglass cow statues, and exhibited them in the city. Eventually, the cows were auctioned, raising more than $20 million of charitable organizations. That same year, Margin, a Chicago art gallery, housed works of 35 local artists all related to butter in an exhibition appropriately titled Butter.Similarly, in 2003, Matthew Barney launched his Guggenheim exhibit in New York, which incorporated a number of sculptures in butter and Vaseline.

_ Instead, the display area rather than medium or form of the art is what contextualizes the works as craft rather than art. As Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Coco Fusco demonstrated in their series of “Two Undiscovered Amerindians” performances, the context of art is integral to the ways in which audiences interpret. In these performances Fusco and Gomez-Peña place themselves, dressed in a hybrid of modern flashy attire and pseudo-indigenous garments, in a cage with props such as televisions, plants, and a hammock. Presented as “undiscovered Amerindians,” in public plazas, natural history museums, and art galleries, they interacted with audiences through the bars of their room-sized cage. As Fusco later wrote, “We did not anticipate that our self-conscious commentary…could be believable. We underestimated public faith in museums as bastions of truth and institutional investment in that role.” She continued:

Consistently from city to city, more than half of our visitors believed our fiction and thought we were “real,” with the exception of the Whitney, where we experienced the art world equivalent of such misperceptions: some assumed that we were not the artists, but rather actors who had been hired by another artist.

Thus, their work confirmed the ways the context of the natural history museum they were taken to be “real” specimens of “undiscovered Amerindians” and in art galleries they were assumed to be performance art.

_So it is not a far stretch to suggest then, that the buttercow, amidst prize-winning squashes and anamatronic milk cartons singing about the health benefits of dairy products, butter sculpture presents itself and is interpreted as a craft, rather than high art.  

But, like Fusco and Gomez-Peña, Duffy works “within disciplines that blur distinctions.” If placed in the Guggenheim, her sculptures may be described as avant-garde. But in the Dairy Building, the sculptures are “pure Americana,” as 2003 Presidential hopeful Bob Graham described it.   

_ Fusco, Coco
1994  The Other History of Intercultural Performance. The Drama Review 38(1):143-167.

My guest post has now appeared on Food Culture Index. Its a much shortened version of this series on butter art: Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

_ Butter sculpture made its premiere in the United States in 1911 at the Iowa State Fair with the first Buttercow [ed note: I stated 1908 incorrectly in the Food Culture Index post]. The sculpture was sponsored by the Beatrice Creamery, who wished to display the success of the local dairy industry and promote local products. The buttercow as advertisment worked, with a six percent increase in sales the next year, but it also came to occupy an iconic position for locals. In essence, the Buttercow came to symbolize enthusiasts see as Midwestern values. When 2010 Minnesota Dairy Princess (Princess Kay of the Milky Way) Katie Miron speaks of the Dairy industry she uses words like “hardwork,” “dedication,” “wholesome” and “nutritious.” She connects these concepts to longstanding “American Values” and suggests that dairy farming, in many ways, represents the long held ideal of hard work leading to success. Butter art for her is a way to both promote these values within the community, and communicate the values to outsiders.

_
And, like all icons, the Buttercow adapts to symbolize prevailing social issues and political perspectives. What was once a symbol of progress, now has come to be a nostalgic representation of a disappearing way of life. As family farms disappear and Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations replace them, the Buttercow stands as a testament to the idealization of the past and the values associated with it.

With intimate knowledge of dairy farming and cows declining, those with the expertise to sculpt accurate likenesses in butter are disappearing as well. Duffy sculpted a buttercow for the Illinois State Fair as well, from 1969-2001. In 2003, many people felt the new sculptor’s work did not live up to the standard Duffy had set. I overheard numerous dairy farmers and others experienced in bovine anatomy talk of the sculpture;s shortcomings. Duffy, who had earned a degree in Animal Science from Iowa State University, had an intimate knowledge of bovine anatomy. She sculpted specific breeds, and even the veins on her sculpted udders were anatomically correct. However, when the new sculptor’s cow was unveiled, a long time Dairy Association employee scoffed: “This one just looks like a mule with tits!” As lifeways change, old customs become endowed with new meaning. Butter sculptures may act as a reflector of the agricultural community.  As knowledge of small family farms disappears in the wake of the rise of factory farms, these artworks lose part of their realism.  However, as contexts change, art and tradition take on new implications and their relevance becomes increasingly valuable as symbols for examining the past and considering the future.

I will shortly be writing a post for the blog, Food Culture Index on Midwestern US butter sculpture. As such, I've been thinking through a lot of the issues associated with Buttercows and Butterheads: the transition from factory farming to CAFOs, women's role in agriculture, iconicity and nostalgia, tensions between popular culture, folk crafts, and high art--thus class, distinction, authenticity. I should be writing a dissertation right now, but I thought I would work through some of these issues in Fieldnotes as well. Here is Part 1. For more, read Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

On Monday, 27 June 2011, I was riding in the passenger seat while my new friend Alejandro gave me evening tour of La Paz, Bolivia. My Viva cell phone rang and it was a number from the U.S. When I answered, my mother had bad news. I braced myself, and she told me “Duffy died.” 

Duffy, or Norma Duffield Lyon was “The Buttercow Lady,” who sculpted life-sized cows from butter for forty six years at several Midwestern state fairs. As one could imagine, describing this phenomenon to Alé was a challenge.

I first met Duffy in the summer of 2003, when I was a recent college graduate. With few job prospects on the horizon for a reasonably good student with Bachelors degrees in anthropology and performance studies, I joined up with a team of recent film Bachelors and MFA students and headed to the Iowa State Fair.

Duffy, “The Buttercow Lady” was a legend in her own right. For decades she had been sculpting life-sized cows out of butter. She starts with choosing a dairy cattle breed (Holstein, Guernsey, Jersey, Brown Swiss, Ayershire, and Milking Shorthorn), then works from sketches or photographs. She places 500-600 pounds of butter (about 2,400 sticks) on a wooden and chicken wire armature. At first, Duffy adds large handfuls to the frame to approximate the shape of the cow, and eventually fine-tunes the form with smaller additions of butter. Working both with her hands and sculpting tools in a refrigerated display case, the process can take between two days and two weeks.

Duffy would usually schedule her work to be finished in the first days of the fair, so that attendees could see her in process.  Many fairgoers consider the Buttercow to be the definitive fair experience. Information booth volunteers told us that the most common questions they are asked are, “Where are the bathrooms? and Where’s the Buttercow?” (in the dairy building, of course). Some life-long devotees of the buttercow travel from the west coast, or will pay hundreds of dollars to assist with sculpting the tail through the fair’s Blue Ribbon Foundation. When the film crew stopped at a local sandwich shop for lunch, the twenty-year-old cashier told us, “Oh the buttercow. That thing used to make me so happy when I was a kid.”