Untitled from Spirit Cooking

Spirit Cooking was the first project Jacob Samuel produced with his portable aquatint box, working with Abramović—a performance artist with little printmaking experience—in her Amsterdam studio. The artist chose to make a cookbook,writing a series of "aphrodisiac recipes" that serve as evocative instructions for actions or thoughts. To allow the artist to create the accompanying etchings in a manner consistent with her body-oriented practice, Samuel prepared the plates with soft ground so she could scratch directly onto the surface with her fingernails and encouraged her to work with spitbite, using her own saliva with nitric acid to paint on the plate.

Credit: Monroe Wheeler Fund