HAPPY EATER
JULY 15- AUGUST 19
OPENING JULY 14
Happy Eater was a family roadside restaurant chain, ubiquitous in the 1980’s with its 75 diners around the UK. All-Day Breakfast, Scampi and Chips,Knickerbocker Glory and Fizzy Drinks. One could simply drive up, enjoy and then well fed, drive home.
For all intents and purposes, Happy Eater offered no difference in edible fair than Little Chef. Despite being gobbled up by its said rival in 1993, Happy Eater is still remembered, principally for its distinct logo - a simple visual representation of a happy rounded face in profile, finger pointing expectantly into an open gaping mouth, a single eye fixing you in a jolly stare, as if to say – “We put food here! We make you happy!”
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Herman Makkink made sculpture for over 50 years until his death in 2013, aged 76. Herman’s sculptures were funny, figurative, physically self-conscious, a bit odd, surreal. He was made famous by his work Rocking Machine (1970), the large white glossy wobbly phallus that was used as a symbolically comic murder weapon in Stanley Kubrick’s cult film A Clockwork Orange (1971). But he made other sculpture too, such as Antipodes (1999), a pair of thick, cumbersome clay figures on their backs each holding aloft a singular leg or Pioner (1990) a public sculpture of a giant anatomically correct heart made from baked clay and concrete.
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Herman Makkink lived on and off between the UK and Holland throughout his artistic life. While here he undoubtedly experienced Happy Eater’s ubiquity. Maybe he ate there. The logo must have appealed, for strangely he remembered it, drew it and included its happy demeanour in a work on paper nearly 10 years after Happy Eater had ceased to be. Herman’s Happy Eater is framed by Aztec characters and symbols, and four black contorted figure like blobs, it stares back at us like some ancient esoteric glyph.
Except Herman’s Happy Eater might be saying something else, something more than just a satisfaction of want. Coloured green and orally fixated, its stubby finger pointing to gaping Pac-Man mouth, a knowing glint in its singular eye, it might well be saying - “inside here, this way, through your mouth into that hollow vessel you call your body. That body your restless wandering mind is trapped in.”
Or maybe this Happy Eater is a taunt, a humorus jab directed at the throat cancer that tried to consume Herman in his later life, his food intake restricted as liquid through a tube.
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Beth Collar, Benedict Drew and James Prevett sit down in a roadside diner with Herman Makkink. It’s an odd, comic, and sometimes philosophical conversation over Ice Cream Sundaes about things they have in common, shared things that might be present. In their exchange they talk about interiority, consciousness, physicality, their bodies, and almost certainly death. There is food and digestion, pathos and humour. And when its finished they will drive home well fed.