projects on food & art! (2/2)
a continuation of pt. 1! food, time and decay...
Welcome back :) After my reflection last week on EXPO, I return to continue my pt. 2 on art + food. Feel free to jump back to pt. 1 here, but I ended on the two latter questions below, and it’s time for *modernity* (at least some art historical *modernity*) to enter the conversation, though most of these artists are already canonized. I want to talk with living artists on decay, time, food, etc. — so LMK if you have any suggestions!
See the bolded questions:
Are food and art connected?
If so, how are food and art connected?
Why do artists have such an interest in food?
What new possibilities might food offer as an artistic medium?
Two Projects: Food as an artistic medium
I wrote about still life paintings as a purely visual feast earlier, and this week we’re turning to artists using food AS a medium and more specifically, how artists have embraced the other senses that food engages: taste, touch, smell, and the experiential and ephemeral quality of it because FOOD ROTS 😭 (illustrated by the greek yogurt sitting in the back of my fridge right now)
Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944)
I wanted to start off with the Futurists, who were an Italian group of 20th century artists and theorists, obsessed with the ideas of speed, nationalism, dynamism, technology, and violence. Artist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) is most famous for his Futurist Manifesto (1909) and for also co-authoring the Fascist Manifesto (1919) - again, very important to note, he was a Fascist. We can see in the below images (had to include the Balla), that the Futurists emphasized a super attunement to modern life, movement, creativity, and action as means to revive an Italian society they saw as declining.
However, something you may NOT know is that Marinetti wrote the Futurist Cookbook (1932), which contains recipes, stories, and dinner party plans as a means to extend his broad sociocultural and artistic vision! To Marinetti, food was another means to actualize his creative vision. And despite how wild these recipes are, I agree with Marinetti’s understanding of food (beyond the visual) as uniquely able to trigger memory, thoughts, and visceral emotional reactions. He writes:
"While recognizing that great deeds have been performed in the past by men badly or crudely nourished, we affirm this truth: that we think, dream, and act according to what we eat and drink."
—Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Major retweet. Now, I don’t think all of the recipes sound appetizing, but I appreciate how experimental the dishes are: there’s an ‘Economical Dinner,’ a ‘Tactile Dinner'… and see below, but coming up with a pastry sphere filled with red zabagliaone and a 3 cm bit of licorice immersed within it?! Yes.
Marinetti also proposes to get rid of cutlery to not interfere with the possible "pre-labial tactile pleasure" that eating can give. He wanted to abolish traditional condiments in favor of having smells waft through the air, but in a more general sense, to Marinetti's mind, eating should be an experimental journey of the senses.
Carsten Höller’s Brutalisten
Much like Marinetti’s focus on food as experience, German artist Carsten Höller is interested in the possibility of transformation that eating can entail. Think about it—digestion on the most basic level, is a chemical set of transformations and processes. Höller’s restaurant Brutalisten, located in Stockholm, adheres to the Brutalist manifesto below, and the menu is loosely organized in three sections: “semi-brutalist” dishes (using oil or minimal ingredients), and “brutalist” dishes (using salt and water), and “orthodox-brutalist” dishes (no additional ingredients).
I want to go to this restaurant SO badly!
“Brutalisten is a social experiment. We want to see what happens if you eat this kind of food, because I’m not aware of any other place in the world where you can eat like this. What happens to you, and what happens to the other people who are there?”
–Holler as told to Serena Cattaneo Adorno in The Gagosian Quarterly (2022)
Time & Decay: Food vs. Art
The last idea I wanted to address is how food (again, decays) can capture the passage of time, unlike many other mediums. Therefore, contrary to early modern Dutch artists that addressed decay by immortalizing food in memento mori paintings of it, other artists have leaned into an acceptance of food physically rotting, and time.
Dieter Roth (1930-1998)
Swiss artist Dieter Roth (1930-1998) used food as a means to visualize the passage of time. Specifically, he liked the idea of unpredictability, lack of control, and space for chance in using food as a medium of inevitable decay. Below is one of his ‘islands’ that used sour milk, and was later preserved in transparent varnish. Roth was also friends with the Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri (b. 1930) who was famous for his ‘snare pictures’—where in a similar manner, Spoerri would varnish the table and create an assemblage from it right after diners left.
Dieter Roth’s first project in the US was at Eugenia Butler gallery, where he created an exhibition called ‘Staple Cheese’ (1970) which is a play on the idiom ‘Steeple chase.’ Roth exhibited 37 suitcases filled with cheese on the floor below an installation of cheese on the wall. The suitcases were to be opened one a day, while the wall pictures included a horizontal line tracking the vertical movement of the cheeses to question the idea: *as art ages, it gets better.* However, within a few days, the odor made it impossible to enter the room! The suitcases were stored in a container designed by Roth for a number of years and later on, the entire exhibition was destroyed. It’s gross, uncomfortable, and amazing, and I like that Roth embraces the ‘afterlife’ of food, which we rarely think about because we’re consuming what is *new,* fresh, and appetizing.
In closing
To close my discussions, art and food have always been connected as critical expressions of, with, against, from, and to culture! In the early modern period, food was a status symbol of wealth (still is), and when artists depicted food they captured complex flows of global trade, labor, and consumption that food is inextricable from, all the while presenting pronkstilleven paintings as a kind of ‘visual feast.’ Other artists like Filippo Marinetti (1876-1944) and Carsten Höller (b. 1961) used food as medium because it offers new potential for engaging viewers beyond visual sight in taste, sound, and hearing. In that process, each artist aims for a kind of extrasensory transformation (chemical, sensory, physical) that happens when you eat something. Finally, artists Dieter Roth (1930-1998) and Daniel Spoerri (b. 1930) used food itself to foreground the inevitability of decay. There are many more artists and connections to be discussed (re: liquids! communal nature of dinners!), but when you think about your next meal, as a start, I hope you may be able to look at food with a different lens.
Are food and art connected?
If so, how are food and art connected?
Why do artists have such an interest in food? SENSORY STUFF BEYOND THE VISUAL RE: TASTE! CONSUMPTION!
What new possibilities might food offer as an artistic medium? ROTTING!
For next week’s newsletter, I’m hosting my April supper club dinner next Saturday, so I’ll write on how I like to plan dinner party menus! Happy Friday, send this to a friend. Be nice, have fun! Until then.
LOVEEED reading you!