Sperm-Glazed Dough Is Invading the London Art World

"So, whose vaginal fluid did you use?"

This is not, on the whole, something I ask over a cup of tea. At least, not on a Wednesday lunchtime, nestled under a side table in one of Shoreditch's first-wave Italian cockney cafes. Not while eating an omelette across the table from a man wearing a black tracksuit top, with a copy of The Sun resting against his "Special Breakfast."

But the 29-year-old, Essex-born artist Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau—a name that summons images of French aristocracy, rather than East London fried bread—is a man who brings together the art object and the abject, philosophy and shit, luxe lifestyle health culture and pube-sprinkled lumps of dough. So where better to talk art and semen, crisps, and metaphysics than over three types of potato and a plate of beans four miles east of the White Cube?

Matthew's most recent exhibition, "Communal Juicing", included something called The Cheesedough Series—art objects made of homemade Play-Doh, coloured and salted with broken Cheetos, and glazed with extra strong cider, semen, and vaginal fluid.

"This entire project could only exist in a food culture like Britain's, when it was sort of shock and awe from the 1980s onwards," says Matthew, as I eye up the squeezy bottles of brown and red sauce that stand guard at the edge of our table. "Up until then, garlic would have been something quite crazy. Then suddenly, in a generation and a half, even my mum had eaten most things."

There's not a lot of garlic hiding in the sticky, laminated breakfast menu between us; but there is a hell of a lot of egg. As someone who likes to treat life like a long-form training montage from a Sylvester Stallone movie, I opt for the cheese omelette. It comes with chips or salad. ("Chips and salad is OK, madam," relents the waitress when I beg.) Matthew orders the Special Breakfast with hash browns instead of tea, and a can of Fanta.

"In 2012 I did a performance with loads of drawing at the Liverpool Biennial about anal pornography," says Matthew a few minutes later, looking me directly in the eye as I crunch down on a piece of cucumber. "Humans are tubes. In the core of your digestive system— the alimentary canal—is stuff from the external world. So it acts like an external space in the middle of our bodies. That ties in to the object-oriented ontology I was interested in."

Object-oriented ontology for those of you, like me, who spend more time thinking about fettuccine than philosophy, is a school of thought that sees human beings as just another object in a world of other objects. "It's quite a flat way of seeing things," explains Matthew. "It's not metaphysical. Humans are just objects, like this bit of toast is," he says. "So are ideas." He then tries to explain metaphysics to me using a can of Fanta but, if I'm honest, I was slightly distracted by a man's sandwich beside me, and more than slightly out of my depth, conversation-wise.

Food is a way for Matthew to bring together his twin interests in philosophy and politics. "The difference between Coke and grape soda, in terms of sugar content, isn't much," he says. "But in terms of racial distinction, how they price it, the graphics and who buys it, the difference is marked. I was interested in the fracturing of the working class and that was spelled out in those things. I was going in [the corner shop] to buy my instant noodles, which is somehow OK in middle-class circles if you call them ramen. And if you only buy a can of Coke, that's fine. But if you buy a can of grape soda, a big pack of Cheetos, and a load of crisps, that's not [considered] OK."

"But how did it all start?" I ask, ploughing into my salad. (I say "salad". It basically consisted of a whole boiled potato, half a cup of pasta, enough kidney beans for a casserole, chickpeas, sweet corn and some coleslaw, sitting on top of three pieces of lettuce and a cherry tomato. It was the kind of salad you'd eat were you considering a 17-mile hike up into the mountains of northern Scotland with no stove. It was, in other words, my kind of salad.)

"I used to refer to the stuff I was interested in as 'cultural detritus'; what's left over," says Matthew. "One day it was someone's birthday in my studio, so I spelt out 'Happy Birthday' in onion rings. That was actually my finest artistic achievement. It was on a wooden table and when we went to clear them away after about six hours, they'd stained the wood. All the palm oil and cornflour had gone into the table."

As a student, I referred to the black circle of oil left beneath the deep-crust wheel of regret I called dinner as "the pizza ghost". I think of those ghosts, and the Cheeto greeting now, as I look down at Matthew's hashbrowns and pink, tongue-like bacon. "So then I started trying to make prints out of crisps. Just laying them down on paper," he adds. "Cheetos were the ones that left their colour as well as their oil."

Matthew also uses Cheetos in his sculptural work—grinding the burning yellow crisps into dust (which he sometimes eats by the spoonful) and adding them to his dough. "I wanted to use clay, but didn't want to use clay because of all its historical associations; it would be like painting in oils," says Matthew. "So I made Play-Doh out of flour. Then I started embedding hairs in it."

"Whose pubes?" I ask, lifting a flap of omelette with my fork and checking, gingerly, for any evidence of the chef's scratching in my own lunch.

"Oh, they're not pubes, actually," replies Matthew, gloriously unconcerned about the looks we're getting from fellow diners. "Pubes aren't so good. My hair's too thin, so it won't go into the cheesedough. So I used beard hair because it's more spikey."

I ask him if it was important to use his own hair. "No, it could have been anyone's hair," he replies. "The vaginal fluid isn't my vaginal fluid. It's a girlfriend's, from last year. But I'd like my next project to specifically collect other people's stuff; their semen and things."

At this juncture, it seems timely to get out in the fresh air and cleanse our palate with a little kale. After all, Communal Juicing did include something described in the exhibition text as "a live, durational performance work with two masticating actors and a cold press Omega 8006 juicer". So we walk 100 metres around the corner to a hipster hotel—all concrete and flattering photo booths, pot plants, and low clicky electronic music—to buy something to drink from their juice hatch.

"I was going out with a girl who was really into juicing," says Matthew after a fairly in-depth conversation with the woman behind the counter about her Model 280 Norwalk juicer. "I think I realised that this abjection would act on a micro scale. Juicing takes food and puts it through a process. Out of one end comes juice, and out of the bottom you get this abject, shitty pulp."

"People drink juice because it's good for them," he continues, a bottle of liquefied kale, ginger and cucumber in his hand. "But why do they want to do something that's good for them? If you die fat and young, it makes no difference. If you die healthy and old, it makes no difference. It doesn't matter. Post-Enlightenment, after we've put truth and God and objectivity out of the way, it doesn't really matter what you're doing. All that's left is taste and presentation."

And perhaps that's true. When it comes to the basics, when you strip life down to its aliments, maybe all that separates a juice bar from a greasy spoon is taste and presentation.