the humble egg in art, literature, design, and theory

Gabriel Orozco's sculptures ✦ Clarice Lispector's essays ✦ egg-themed goods for the home ✦ and the "egg" in trans theory

For no particular reason, today I’m thinking about egg motifs in art, literature, design, and philosophy.

The egg in contemporary art

I spent the first week of the year in Mexico City, walking from taqueria to taqueria, with the occasional museum visit. At the Museo Jumex, a private art collection housed in a David Chipperfield Architects–designed building, I came across Gabriel Orozco’s Kiss of the Egg sculpture (1998).

Orozco is a Mexican artist who has produced sculptures, paintings, photographs, and installations. Throughout all these mediums, “he deliberately blurs the boundaries between the art object and the everyday environment,” according to the curators of a 2010 exhibition. I wrote a few weeks ago, in my post encounters with the everyday, about how fundamentally interesting I think the everyday is: everyday life, interactions, objects, materials. Orozco’s sculptures elevate humble objects into a state of beauty and fascination.

Here’s the Kiss of the Egg as I saw it: suspended between two rooms, the egg nearly at eye level:

Gabriel Orozco, Kiss of the Egg (1998) at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City

There’s something so immediately charming about the sculpture. I instinctively wanted to approach it, duck under and put my head inside, and observe the egg. It’s so remarkable and exciting to come across a sculpture that immediately creates that invitation, that desire to interact with it.

And I love how the sculpture invites not just interaction with the work, but interaction with others within and in the context of the work. As the wall text noted:

This installation creates a moment of intimacy between gallery visitors. Its steel form is the mathematical symbol for infinity and is made for the heads of two people to pass inside and kiss the egg simultaneously. Fragility, permanence, affection and reproduction are all intimated in this piece.

This seems to be a broader theme of Orozco’s work. A brief bio on the Guggenheim website suggests that “The fragile relationship of everyday objects to one another and to human beings is Orozco’s principal subject.”

Orozco’s sculptures often begin with some very ordinary object, which is then reinterpreted, re-presented to us as something enticing and strange. Here, it’s the egg delicately placed on a little egg cup (but it feels more like a plinth), in the center of a curving steel infinity sign. In an earlier sculpture, Recaptured Nature (1990), he used the vulcanized rubber inner tubes of two truck tires to create an almost organic, softly rounded sphere.

And of course the titles are central to the works: they suggest tenderness, they invite affection. Kiss of the Egg…! Delicate kisses only! Be gentle with the egg!

Ovoid commentary from my friend Susie

The egg in literature

Orozco’s whimsical, inventive use of an egg reminded me of a Clarice Lispector…essay? short story? that I came across last year. Clarice Lispector was born to a Ukrainian Jewish family that fled to Brazil during WWII. She became one of Brazil’s most celebrated writers, specializing in novels and short stories that that strange, alluring stream-of-consciousness.

One of her strangest works is “The Egg and the Chicken,” which begins like this:

In the morning the egg is lying on the kitchen table.

I see the egg at a single glance. I immediately perceive that I cannot be simply seeing an egg. Seeing an egg is always in the present: No sooner do I see the egg than I have seen an egg, the same egg which has existed for three thousand years. The very instant an egg is seen, it becomes the memory of an egg. The only person to see an egg is someone who has seen it before. Like a man who, in order to understand the present, must have had a past. Upon seeing the egg, it is already too late: an egg seen is an egg lost. A vision that passes like a sudden flash of lightning. To see the egg is the promise of being able to see the egg again one day. A brief glance which cannot be divided. Does thought intervene? No, there is no thought: there is only the egg. Vision is the essential faculty and, once used, I shall cast it aside. I shall remain without the egg. The egg has no itself. Individually, it does not exist.¹

The first sentence is very plain: the egg is lying on the kitchen table. The narrator sees the egg. Then we enter a very strange space: in two sentences we pass through the realm of observable reality—into a realm where the egg is:

• An eternal object (a concept, symbol, category of object that has existed for milllennia)

• A starting point for epistemological inquiry (are we really seeing the egg? or are we encountering our memory of an egg?)

• A phenomenological problem (are we actually seeing the egg? what does it mean to view the egg?)

• An existential dilemma (does this egg, which just a few sentences ago was resting unproblematically and uncomplicatedly on a kitchen table, actually exist?)

The fact that Lispector can begin with something so ordinary—literally an egg on a table—and leap into this unexpected space of inquiry…I find it so, so weird in the very best way.

The egg in design

It seems as if there’s just something weird about the egg, something endearing and familiar but also foreign to us. Here’s another weird thing: the egg chandelier by Gohar World, originally started by the sisters Laila and Nadia Gohar to make surreal kitchen and dining goods:

Gohar World’s egg chandelier in wrought iron

Imagine inviting your eleven closest friends over for an intimate dinner party. At the end everyone has to kiss one of the eggs—it’s like Orozco’s Kiss of the Egg, but platonic and less committed to the Couple Form.²

Anyways! This chandelier—why is it even called a chandelier, when clearly it’s not meant to be hung from a ceiling? you need convenient access to the eggs!—is so weird, and I should say here that “weird” for me is always positive, always affirmative. We need more weird little objects in the world; we don’t need any more sleekly tasteful ways to store foods.

I would argue that there are only 3 acceptable ways to store eggs at home:

1. Don’t store them at all; be vegan (happy Veganuary to all who celebrate!)

2. Pretend that factory farms don’t exist, buy your supposedly ethical eggs, and keep them in the original cardboard egg carton. It’s genuinely one of the most brilliant things ever designed

3. Buy this $328 USD egg chandelier from Gohar World

Since I am (mostly) vegan and also on a budget, I am choosing option one. However, Gohar World is really extremely good at designing pointlessly enticing home goods—here’s one that is a mere $28 and just as uselessly charming:

Gohar World’s bottle apron in a charmingly domestic Battenberg lace

A good housewarming present, no? For a 21st century hausfrau (who probably works a girlboss job on top of baking elaborate cakes for her friends) who enjoys a bit of surrealism in her life?

But back to eggs. Here’s a more practical (more practical, not actually practical) egg-centric object designed by the ceramicist Layla Cluer’s softedge studio:

Softedge Studio’s “brekkie set” (yes, they’re Australian)

The shape is so appealingly blobby: a large entrée plate with a gently rounded, uneven rim, paired with a contrasting egg cup. And Cluer has an excellent eye for color, too.

Unfortunately: it’s sold out. A small tragedy and an enormous relief for me, a 21st century woman on a budget. But I really wanted to share this with you all because the color combination is superb, the form is really quite intriguing, and I’m already on the topic of EGGS—

The egg in theory

—and there’s just one final context we should talk about eggs in! And that is the colloquialism of “egg” as a trans person who hasn’t quite realized that they’re trans yet. Perhaps it’s someone who isn’t really familiar with the concept of transness; or someone who is familiar, intrigued, repulsed, envious—and maybe there is something within them that thinks, Oh, this could be me.

But for some reason (well, often it’s for many reasons) they aren’t yet ready to identify as trans, to actually transition (whatever that means for them)…and perhaps, because they are not ready, they might react with antipathy, hostility, fear, and other generally negative emotions to the idea that they could be trans, that they could ever transition.

I like this colloquialism because I am intrigued by any concept that touches on one of the most interesting problems of existence: how we understand ourselves, misunderstand ourselves, and grapple with who we truly are and want to be. The literary theorist and scholar Grace Lavery has a paper called “Egg Theory’s Early Style” that touches on this:

[E]ggs have theories. Chiefly, the egg’s theory is that they (he, she…etc.) cannot transition…to attempt something like a sex change would not so much be malicious as it would be gauche.

The problem, obviously, is how to differentiate between feeling like idk, I would never transition because you are actually cis—or because you are actually trans but simply in your egg stage.

And the other problem is how the description “egg” is applied to people, almost condescendingly—oh, that poor person doesn’t realize they’re trans yet! How naïve, how tragic! As Lavery notes,

the very idea of the egg…seems to imply a claim to know others better than they know themselves—a claim that, however functionally indispensable to queer and trans relations, can hardly be generalized or scaled.

It’s an interesting philosophical problem, no? What if someone is actually queer or trans but doesn’t know it yet? Is it helpful to tell them? Is it overstepping? What if you’re right but they hate you for suggesting it? (This is one of the central problems in Imogen Binnie’s brilliant novel Nevada, which didn’t make it into my best books of 2023 because I simply…forgot. But I’ll amend the record here and say that it is, in narrative structure and characterization, definitely one of the best novels I read last year.)

And what if you’re wrong? What if this really is a straight and/or cis person? The difficult and interesting truth is that we really can’t know other people fully—we can barely know ourselves fully. We’re all eggs in that way, incapable of knowing who we’ll become, as time presses onwards and forces us out of our shells.

1. This translation comes from Giovanni Pontiero, and I copied it from the anthology The Lost Origins of the Essay. Translation nerds may be interested in comparing it to Katrina Dodson’s version, which—is fine. I don’t know Portuguese, so I can’t attest to the accuracy and fidelity of her translation. But I feel it doesn’t read quite as smoothly:

In the morning in the kitchen on the table I see the egg.

I look at the egg with a single gaze. Immediately I perceive that one cannot be seeing an egg. Seeing an egg never remains in the present: as soon as I see an egg it already becomes having seen an egg three millennia ago. — At the very instant of seeing the egg it is the memory of an egg. — The egg can only be seen by one who has already seen it. — When one sees the egg it is too late: an egg seen is an egg lost. — Seeing the egg is the promise of one day eventually seeing the egg. — A brief and indivisible glance; if indeed there is thought; there is none; there is the egg. — Looking is the necessary instrument that, once used, I shall discard. I shall keep the egg. — The egg has no itself. Individually it does not exist.

2. I’m thinking, of course, of Hannah Black’s “The Loves of Others” essay in The New Inquiry, where she describes how our interpersonal lives are so obsessively devoted to being in a romantic/sexual couple:

[Y]ou don’t have to be a couple to participate in the couple form. You can watch movies about couples, you can listen to songs about them, you can watch them fuck on the internet. In fact there is nothing else to do.

To this, I would add: you can watch couples interact with each other inside the curved, airy confines of Orozco’s Kiss of the Egg.