Los Angeles–based artist Annetta Kapon and Berlin artist Sabine Dehnel participated in a performance where both artists ate a Carl’s Jr. hamburger while seated atop a sheet of primed poster board, allowing drips from the hamburger condiments—mayonnaise, mustard, and ketchup—to fall freely onto the surface.
The performance functioned as a parody of a Carl’s Jr. television commercial that aired in the late 1990s, which depicted construction workers eating hamburgers while standing on scaffolding. As the workers bit into their burgers, the condiments dripped onto plywood below, unintentionally mimicking the visual language of drip painting.
The Carl’s Jr. Drip performance serves as a commentary on authorship, authenticity, and originality within the history of action painting, by such artists as Hans Hofmann, Francis Picabia, Max Ernst, Janet Sobel, Jackson Pollock, as well as contemporaries, Miles Regis, Stephanie Smiedt, and Aaron Parazette.
