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Embedded is a series of writings on the moving image. Artists, musicians, and writers choose a piece of media—embeddable on a web page—and elaborate on why it has lodged itself in their psyche.

“Hunger” is part of Embedded, a series of writings on the moving image. Artists, musicians, and writers choose a piece of media—embeddable on a web page—and elaborate on why it has lodged itself in their psyche.

Red Dragon (2002) - Eating the Painting Scene

, a serial killer named Francis Dolarhyde, played by Ralph Fiennes, leans over a table in a private viewing room at the Brooklyn Museum. An older woman in reading glasses looks over his shoulder. In close-up we see a drawing of a broad-winged creature—it’s William Blake’s 

The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun

, one in a series of watercolors Blake made from 1805 to 1810 based on the 

 Dolarhyde inches closer to it, his eyes widening.

“He almost looks alive, doesn’t he?” the woman whispers. Dolarhyde twitches slightly, removes a blunt object from his jacket, and strikes her over the head, knocking her unconscious.

He then caresses the painting with both hands, tears it into large sections, and frantically crams the pieces into his widening jaws, gnashing his teeth. He chews and swallows each fragment like a hyena with a stolen carcass. When another woman opens the door, Dolarhyde lunges for her—she screams—and the camera cuts to him exiting the museum lobby, as anonymously as any regular visitor.

All my life I’ve wanted to physically consume art. Since age six I have daydreamed about placing Georgia O’Keeffe’s poppies on my tongue and swallowing them whole. As a preteen I wanted to absorb Michael Stipe’s propulsive arm movements into my own awkward body. Currently, I would chew on Missy Elliott’s cadence, Rosemarie Trockel’s ceramic thumbprints, and Donika Kelly’s bestiary lines. Each encounter with these works ignites in me a covetous feeling: I want to devour them and hoard their unique powers like a maniacal villain. Yet admitting—on paper and in public—my extreme desire for these works feels as mortifying as divulging a sexual fantasy.

 once described the suppression of bodily desires. In the late fourteenth century, 

meant an “act of subduing the passions and appetites” in Middle English; it later evolved into a kind of death, a killing “of one part of the body while the rest is still alive.” Our current use of 

, as a verb signaling abject feelings of humiliation, arrived in the seventeenth century and stuck around like the paralysis it implies. Mortification is now synonymous with shame: an embarrassment that freezes you beyond speech, as though your body, and maybe your entire being, has become stuck in your throat.

All my life I’ve wanted to physically consume art.

I want to know more about our human impulse to hide what we most desire, but I don’t want to ask my friends about their sexual fantasies. So, I’ve been prompting them on whether they long to eat an artwork. And by art I mean almost anything: music, sculpture, literature, graffiti, graphic novels—anything anywhere that makes your bones sing. Have you ever longed to swallow a song or an image?

“Yes. Yes, absolutely,” my friends say to me. But most can’t—or won’t—tell me which specific works have aroused such yearnings. And then there are the few who, glancing away, shake their heads and declare, “No. No, I have never felt that way about anything,” so emphatically that I know at once they are lying. I was grateful for my friend, writer Nate Lippens, who was the first to answer my question honestly:

 by Jean Rhys,” Nate told me. “I read it twice in a row and it sat beside my bed for months, as a kind of touchstone. I had to merge with the book’s voice; it had to become part of me. I wouldn't be complete until it did. And I feel it with live performance. Karen Finley’s trance-rants, Ron Athey’s blood rites, and Penny Arcade’s characters and monologues put me in a heightened state, outside myself. These are primal experiences. They are rituals. I know those voices have imprinted on me. They’ve expanded my idea of what’s possible. I'm always searching for the feeling of being in those rooms.”

To those of us who are consciously secular, ritual is mainly confined to the passages of marriage, birth, and death. But existing outside the rites of organized religion does not lessen our human need for ceremony and fellowship. An encounter with art that moves us may be like a brush with nature, or god, or anything that brings us out of ourselves and into existential awe. When I asked the artist Nyeema Morgan about this feeling, she immediately recalled the rites she witnessed as a child:

“When I was a kid, we went to a Lutheran church for a very short time, and I was fascinated by the Eucharist, the consumption of the flesh and blood of Christ through transubstantiation. I thought it was absolutely horrifying—participating in this symbolic cannibalism where I would absorb Christ’s powers by consuming his 

! But with art, it’s like being wholly porous, of losing oneself within an experience.”

Art intended for literal consumption often leans on metaphors of bodily exchange. Felix Gonzalez-Torres blanketed floors with thousands of wrapped candies—enough to represent the physical weight of someone who had died from AIDS-related illness—for viewers to take away and consume. Sissel Tolaas cultivated bacteria from viewers’ toes to produce farmhouse cheddar, while Toi Sennhauser took yeast from her own vagina and baked bread for viewers to eat. Rirkrit Tiravanija regularly cooks Thai meals to consume in his recreated domestic spaces. But wanting to eat a work not specifically meant for consumption—to transform it—carries with it a violent impulse. A kind of destruction is necessary to take anything and make it your own.

This ability to unabashedly pick something up and change it is a skill I have envied in my musician friends. They can transmute qualities from other performers and are often far more willing to reveal their influences, because their craft is rooted in an oral tradition of give and take. “This is how I learn songs,” Rob Millis told me. “I am driven to it. Like scratching a maddening itch. I have to figure the song out, play it over and over again, make it a part of me. Often I stop listening to the original, and a different process begins. A chord might be forgotten or substituted, the melody might change, lyrics get misheard, tempos vary. This is how folk music—really, all music—develops. New songs emerge that owe everything to that original—but now, nearly forgotten—unscratchable itch.”

I long for the directness of this exchange, to sing for an audience the words of others, to expose this secret part of myself and not feel mortified. I am no performer. But before I experienced a desire for art, I had intense cravings for certain film characters. They consumed all my fantasies. I did not want to become them; I wanted to absorb them until they became part of myself, until they so strongly influenced the way I moved and spoke that my friends and classmates could think I was just like the character.

I called my brother, Dale Simpson, who is not an artist, though he is a maker of things—a survey engineer who used to map unbuilt roads in Alaska and now does the same for elevated train lines in the Pacific Northwest. I asked if he remembered the untold hours of our childhood spent playing Star Wars in the Alaska woods, and whether it was like swallowing those characters until they merged with us. “If we could’ve eaten Princess Leia and Han Solo to take on their powers, yeah, of course we would have,” he said. “I had a very active imagination as a kid, like a constant dopamine drip. I could eat breakfast and go to school, but another part of my brain was tracking what this other character was doing, how they would react to all the scenarios I encountered throughout my day.”

Being as open as a child to fantasy is something my adult brain must work hard to do. The language of capitalism makes me flinch from words like 

. But I do not think we can be artists—or humans with open and creative minds—without consuming and producing. Creativity relies more on practice than talent. And my practice is bereft without an almost carnal exchange. Not that I want to fuck every painting that moves me. Rather, 

 implies a broader desire to take in the peculiar quality of an object I’m obsessed with in a fleshly, open, meaty way. It is of the body.

I want to draw a map now of a raging river and stupidly name it Pleasure, then branch three little tributaries feeding into it: Art, Desire, God. Pleasure is what we are talking about here, the rushing heart of all three forces, the driving momentum buoying us along. Are we reduced to pleasure? If you want to reduce it, then, yes, an animal lust is where we settle. We want things. We crave those abstract encounters that bring us more, that expand our understanding and our ability to make things by literally bringing the outside in.

When I asked the novelist Emily Hall if she ever felt a desire to eat the images she’d tacked up on her mood board, she corrected me and called it her “serial killer wall.” Our compulsion to consume could really be like that scene in 

, propelling us toward a future version of ourselves, one who embodies all the qualities of the things that we crave.

I want to swallow an artwork so that I can feel a radical shift. Maybe you’ve felt this impulse too. Maybe it’s similar to other transcendental experiences you’ve had: orgasms, drugs, moments with your god. I want that from art. To be penetrated so completely that the work radiates back out of me like swallowed sunlight.

If poet Fanny Howe is correct when she writes, “You are not made by yourself, but by the thing that you want,” then there’s no point in keeping these desires hidden. What we want is already who we are. ♦

Mary Simpson is a writer and artist from Anchorage, Alaska living in Brooklyn, New York.

Hunger

“Frank's Lake” is part of Embedded, a series of writings on the moving image. Artists, musicians, and writers choose a piece of media—embeddable on a web page—and elaborate on why it has lodged itself in their psyche.

Frank's Lake

A fish with a telephone in a mountain lake taught me to not leave the faucet on if I’m not using water. It’s hard to know when I first saw 

’s “Water Conservation” since it premiered when I was two years old, but it left a lasting impression. In the video, a fish named Frank lives in a reservoir next to a house where a boy named Carl is brushing his teeth and getting ready for bed in the bathroom. As Carl absentmindedly lets the faucet run, water drains directly from Frank’s lake to Carl’s sink. Frank phones Carl, who picks up and says, “How are you?” “A little dry actually,” Frank replies. “Could you turn off that water when you wash and brush your teeth?” To this day, seeing water run without purpose gives me acute anxiety. I still imagine Frank nervously watching his life-source drain away around him.

Frank the fish’s plea feels all the more urgent today, but when it first aired, in 1990, it spoke to a specific moment of environmental consciousness in America. The animation of the early ’90s also brought my generation 

, both of which warned against environmental impacts of rapacious global capitalism (not that they called it that.) These cartoons raised awareness of international issues like deforestation and pollution but didn’t necessarily include a critique of larger economic systems decried by turn-of-the-millennium movements such as the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle. 

 also targeted a slightly older audience than 

, incorporating popular pre-teen tropes like superheroes and magic. Klasky Csupo, the animation studio responsible for “Water Conservation,” also made the popular ’90s cartoons 

, which are recognizable for their mildly grotesque style of clashing color schemes and bulbous-headed characters. Peter Chung, the director of “Water Conservation,” also worked on the 

 shorts. While the style—and the landline telephone—dates the video, there’s a simplicity to the scene and narration that keeps it from feeling stuck in time.

To this day, seeing water run without purpose gives me acute anxiety. I still imagine Frank nervously watching his life-source drain away around him.

In 2023, Frank’s lake could be one of the many Western reservoirs fed by the Colorado River that have seen a visible drop in water levels from increasing usage and decreasing replenishment. Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, and parts of Mexico all depend on Colorado River water; as snowpack in the Rockies becomes less abundant and predictable due to climate change, the lowering water line becomes a concrete measurement of crisis. Despite negotiations between these seven states and federal government to temporarily reduce usage, long-term regulations have now been delayed to 2026. Until then, untangling the one-hundred-year-old “Law of the River,” which legally could see Arizona receiving almost zero allotments before California gives up any, will be no less of an uncomfortable task.

Frank could also represent any number of fish species that are feeling the effects of careless water management. For fish, reservoirs themselves have been a huge problem, even before their water lines started dropping. Legal battles to restore rivers to their wild state by removing dams have been an ongoing imperative by Native American tribes like the Klamath Basin Tribes and Upper Skagit Indian Tribe in Oregon and Washington. Not only has the widespread damming of America’s rivers impeded and interrupted ancient cultural and spiritual connections to water and animals, the practice has also devastated the rivers’ ability to support a sustaining supply of fish. Factors such as sudden changes in flow, lack of shifting debris, temperature increase from stagnation, and adaptations in predator behavior all greatly affect fish that have evolved over millennia in water that freely moves.

Rewatching “Water Conservation” as an adult, I recognize that the issues around this topic are much more complicated than the video’s simple moral. Combatting environmental ruin is more complex than “don’t waste water.” Yet the messaging of the video—and its emphasis on water as a tangible and finite resource—remains effective. Unlike global climate change, which can be hard to see or pin to specific events, crises related to water are extremely local, specific, and easily measurable. Access, abundance, and threats to freshwater also vary greatly. Especially for rural regions dependent on direct access to groundwater—like many of those near me in the Mojave Desert—choices by individuals and communities can have a direct impact on the lives of other people who share the same watershed or aquifer.

Effective water conservation requires large-scale political action and policy, but animations like this are still successful at furthering important concepts. “Water Conservation” was part of 

’s large breadth of educational shorts, which commissioned artists to make stop-motion, claymation, hand-drawn, and early computer-graphic animations to playfully teach children simple lessons about themselves and the world around them. It’s also key to mention that 

 was founded by Joan Ganz Cooney to try to mimic the style and impact of TV ads on children. “Water Conservation” was just one of the ecologically oriented animations that influenced me when I was young. Hayao Miyazaki’s 

 all had a profound impact on my interpretation of how humans could relate to other species and the natural world. Yet, nothing’s stuck with me quite like the image of Frank’s lake draining down the sink.

Although it is difficult to calculate the larger cultural and societal impacts of environmental art and education, the ways artists have shaped my own thinking assures me they are crucial.