The Taste of Art : Cooking, Food, and Counterculture in Contemporary Practices 9781682260258, 9781610756075, 161075607X

Citation preview

The Taste of Art

Other titles in this series Devouring Cultures: Perspectives on Food, Power, and Identity from the Zombie Apocalypse to Downton Abbey Latin@s’ Presence in the Food Industry: Changing How We Think about Food Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop: Rethinking African American Foodways from Slavery to Obama American Appetites: A Documentary Reader

The Taste of Art COOKING, FOOD, AND COUNTERCULTURE IN CONTEMPORARY PRACTICES

EDITED BY

SILVIA BOTTINELLI AND MARGHERITA D’AYALA VALVA

The University of Arkansas Press Fayetteville 2017

Copyright © 2017 by The University of Arkansas Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America ISBN: 978-1-68226-025-8 e-ISBN: 978-1-61075-607-5 21

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Designed by Liz Lester • The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Control Number: 2016962679

Cover image: Allen Ruppersberg’s installation Al’s Café, photograph by Gary Krueger, courtesy of Allen Ruppersberg.

Cont e nt s

Series Editors’ Preface Jennifer Jensen Wallach and Michael Wise

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction Silvia Bottinelli and Margherita d’Ayala Valva

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part I: Taste of Art: Methodologies and Critical Approaches

Chapter 1 Can Cuisine Be Art?: A Philosophical (and Heterodox) Proposal Nicola Perullo

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Chapter 2 Time Changes Everything: Futurist/ Modernist Cooking Carol Helstosky

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Chapter 3

From Stove to Screen: Food Porn, Professional Chefs, and the Construction of Masculinity in Films Fabio Parasecoli

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Chapter 4 Spoerri Reads Rumohr: The Spirit of Culinary Art Revisited Margherita d’Ayala Valva

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part II: Food Art: Multisensoriality and Experience

Chapter 5 Food, Decay, and Disgust: Paul McCarthy’s Bossy Burger as Contemporary Still Life Anja Foerschner

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Chapter 6 In & On: Herbs, Fish, and Janine Antoni’s Touch 107 Silvia Bottinelli v

Chapter 7 Luciano Fabro: Bitter Sweets for Nadezhda Mandelstam Sharon Hecker

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part III: The Kitchen: Intersections between the Private and Public Spheres

Chapter 8 Feminist Art: Kitchen Testimony Jody B. Cutler

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Chapter 9 Es Geht Um Die Wurst: On Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s Sausage Photographs Edward A. Vazquez

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Chapter 10 Elżbieta Jabłońska’s Kitchen Interventions: Food, Art, and the Maternal Identity Barbara Kutis

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part IV: Eating Out: Food Art in the Public Sphere

Chapter 11 Artists and Friends: Daniel Spoerri’s Eat Art Gallery Cecilia Novero Chapter 12 Express Yourself: Al’s Café in Context Rachel Federman Chapter 13

Ways of Eating: Tradition, Innovation, and the Production of Community in Food-Based Art Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson

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part V: Not for Art’s Sake: Ethics, Ecology, and Sustainability

Chapter 14 Joseph Beuys: Gastrosophical Aesthetics Harald Lemke

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Chapter 15 Provisional Objects: Alison Knowles’s Bean Rolls Nicole L. Woods

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Chapter 16

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Cooking and Eating across Species: Natalie Jeremijenko’s Cross(x)Species Adventure Club Lindsay Kelley

Contributors Notes Index

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contents vii

SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

The University of Arkansas Press Series on Food and Foodways explores historical and contemporary issues in global food studies. We are committed to representing a diverse set of voices that tell lesser known food stories and to provoking new avenues of interdisciplinary research. Our strengths are works in the humanities and social sciences that use food as a critical lens to examine broader cultural, environmental, and ethical issues. Feeding ourselves has long entangled human beings within complicated moral puzzles of social injustice and environmental destruction. When we eat, we consume not only food on the plate, but also the lives and labors of innumerable plants, animals, and people. This process distributes its costs unevenly across race, class, gender, and other social categories. The production and distribution of food often obscures these material and cultural connections, impeding honest assessments of our impacts on the world around us. By taking these relationships seriously, Food and Foodways provides a new series of critical studies that analyze the cultural and environmental relationships that have sustained human societies. This innovative essay collection, The Taste of Art: Cooking, Food, and Counterculture in Contemporary Practices, furthers our mandate to examine underexplored aspects of food culture by examining “food art,” which the editors of the volume, Silvia Bottinelli and Margherita d’Ayala Valva, define as artwork that utilizes food as both “material and process.” Food art, for instance, goes beyond representations of food in still life paintings or painted meal scenes by conceptualizing food itself as an artistic medium and the process of eating and cooking as artistic (and political) actions. From these critical perspectives, food can expand the capacities of what constitutes art, and art can help subvert the normative cultural limits that certain foods often serve to naturalize. This methodologically expansive collection explores the intentions of food artists working in a variety of modes of artistic expression. A

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truly unique collection of essays, the volume provides a new set of approaches toward integrating the study of food within both the arts and humanities disciplines, and should excite and inspire readers with diverse backgrounds and interests. Jennifer Jensen Wallach and Michael Wise

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Series Editors’ Preface

Ack nowl e dg me nt s

First of all, we are grateful to Jennifer Jensen Wallach and Michael Wise for believing in our project. We also thank all the University of Arkansas Press staff that we had the pleasure to collaborate with. This book would have not been possible without the impressive work of all its contributors. We would like to thank each of them for their competence and punctuality. We must also acknowledge Nicole Caruth, Claudia Salaris, and Peter Scholliers, who were involved in the initial phases of this project and inspired subsequent developments. A heartfelt thank-you goes to those who shared their feedback with us during the various stages of this book’s preparation, and in particular Matthew Collins, Emily Green, Peter Lieberman, Valerie Moon, and Diane O’Donoghue. We are truly grateful to Julie K. Stone and Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas for the many conversations on edible gardens as well as food production and consumption in the context of activist art. Many thanks also to Shilpa Prasad, Simone Lenzi, and Roberto Abbiati, scholars and “gastronaut” friends, namely irreverent foodies, for stimulating our reflection on the apparent silliness and indeed profound significance of food fashions and trends. Several of the essays in this volume benefit from the generosity and availability of the artists whose work is discussed in the texts. We must thank profusely Janine Antoni, Peter Fischli, Elżbieta Jabłońska, Alison Knowles, Liza Lou, Paul McCarthy, Barbara Räderscheidt, Martha Rosler, Al Ruppersberg, and Daniel Spoerri. Our sincere thanks also go to curator Meredith Johnson and artist Rachel Budde for sharing their invaluable insights on the piece “In & On” by Janine Antoni. In addition, the following individuals, galleries, and institutions deserve our gratitude for having given permission to publish selected visual sources: the Archive of Luciano and Carla Fabro, the Cleveland Art Museum, Creative Time New York, the Getty Research Institute, the Luhring Augustine Gallery New York, Giovanni Ricci, the Dieter Roth Foundation, and the Whitney Museum. We truly appreciate the role played by our students in the shaping xi

of this volume, because many of the thoughts and arguments articulated here were inspired by lively discussions in our classrooms at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in Boston. We thank the institutions that we are affiliated with for their generous support to our studies. Our colleagues gave us constant advice on the subject of this book; among them we would like to mention especially Lauren Kimball Brown, Magdalena Campos Pons, Jim Dow, Mags Harries, Darin Murphy, and Ashley Peterson. On the home front, many helped us to devote time to our research, by watching our beloved children, Benjamin and Johannes (Margherita’s boys) and Arianna and Giulia (Silvia’s girls). We are indebted to Alexander Auf der Heyde, Diego Puppin, Gina Corvino, Olga Brown, Maria Cristina Mazzoni, Tabea Bock, and Henrieke Homburg. Last but not least, it has been an immense privilege to develop The Taste of Art together. We must thank each other for having been such organized yet self-ironic, strict yet understanding team workers. We look forward to many more collaborations in the future.

xii Acknowledgments

The Taste of Art

I ntrodu c tion

Whether bathing in soup or leaving rotten leftovers in museum corners, cooking on oversized stoves in front of gallery visitors, or inviting unfamiliar guests to share homemade meals, these apparently unrelated actions have at least two elements in common: food and art. In fact, they are fundamental components of performative pieces by Janine Antoni, Paul McCarthy, Elżbieta Jabłońska, and Lee Mingwei. The work of these artists offers a taste of the plethora of implications related to art that is focused on food production, processing, and consumption. Food art—a term that we use to define art which uses food as material and process—has been blessed with an impressively positive reception because of its ability to respond to the contemporaneous societal and cultural concerns with food, health, and sustainability. A thorough study of food art depends on a cross-disciplinary perspective, because of the multifaceted incarnations of artworks concerned with food; diverse mediums, modes of participation, as well as commentaries on global and local societies are at play in pieces involving eating and cooking. Our approach is that of two art historians confronting food studies as a challenge, and considering the focus on food as a way to reread some important issues of contemporary art and culture. We would like to guide our readers—not only art historians but also food historians, artists, and philosophers—through a selection of both historicized and contemporary artistic experiences dealing with food. Despite the interdisciplinary range of the contributions included in this volume, our main questions stem from the art historical discourse, and our point of departure is the subversive role of food within the art system. Artists who choose to incorporate food in their work tend to do so as a way to challenge mainstream expectations. Food art has thus revealed its potential as a form of counterculture. Our use of this term in the present volume’s title and text describes not only the behavioral revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, but also a superhistorical 3

c­ ategory, which indicates the intention to break established boundaries by reaching beyond commonly accepted norms. This attitude is already evident in early European avant-gardes like Dadaism and Futurism. Futurist cuisine, in particular, sought to systematically reorganize the eating habits of the whole Italian nation. Since the 1960s, European and North American neo-avantgardes, among which Fluxus, Eat Art, and Arte Povera, returned to the incorporation of food in art projects that adopted a confrontational approach. As argued by Cecilia Novero in her seminal book Antidiets of the Avant-Garde, these movements do not programmatically search for a pleasurable experience through taste.1 On the contrary, ingredients might be cacophonously paired, or even provocatively inedible. The artists’ goals range from opening up to nontraditional materials to bridging the distance between art and life in order to critique traditional classifications of art mediums such as painting, sculpture, and architecture. The avant-gardes have legitimized the entrance of food into the realm of art materials, beyond the representation of food as subject matter. In fact, while food as iconography has inhabited still lifes and banquet scenes for centuries, the actual experience of it as sculptural material, as well as the performative acts of eating or processing foods, have become part of the artistic language in the context of the avant-gardes.2 The founder of the Eat Art movement, Daniel Spoerri, maintains that our aesthetic categories need to be challenged, by focusing on cooking and eating as art forms. The traditional hierarchies of the senses have proven obsolete when describing these kinds of performative experiences; the rediscovered sense of taste engenders new means of artistic production both in the private and public spheres. Cuisine reveals its artistic scope if the participants in the cooking-eating experience can free themselves from the visual boundaries of perception; through consumption, food does not vanish but rather changes into something else and even transforms the eater. Thus, in the 1960s and 1970s, not only food art challenged the limits of what was defined as fine art; but it also reinvented the role of the viewers, who became active participants in works of edible art. In addition, food art questioned the identity of the art gallery by founding new spaces for art consumption, as in the case of Allen Ruppersberg’s Al’s Café in Los Angeles (1969) and Gordon Matta4 Introduction

Clark’s Food in New York City (1971). Furthermore, feminist performance and installation art, like the notable collaborative pieces created for Womanhouse (1972) in Los Angeles, revisited the domestic spaces of cooking and dining to question accepted gender roles. During the 1980s, the theoretical interest in identity politics was mirrored by food art, as Jana Sterbak’s Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic exemplifies. This 1987 piece is constituted by a size38 dress sewn out of flank steak. Sterbak emphasizes that women’s bodies tend to be so bluntly objectified that they are often treated as pure flesh—subject to decay and depreciated with aging. It is through the skillful triggering of an emotion of disgust that the artist makes the public intimately aware of biased social dynamics. Since the 1990s relational aesthetics practices often include food as generative of sharing, generosity, and giving, as a counter to the culture of individualism and isolation that characterizes capitalist societies. In many cases, food is used as a tool for community building. Amy Franceschini and Fritz Haeg, among others, employ edible materials in relational practices that challenge industrial food systems. They critique the mainstream culture of fast foods and promote food that is not only intended as a product to be consumed, but also as a material to be grown organically with earth-friendly methods. As a scholarly inquiry, the subject of food has a well-established genealogy. While we don’t aim to provide an overview of food studies as a discipline here, it is important to consider the instances in which scholarship on food impacted the making and interpreting of art in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Most of the Eat Art artists discussed in this volume are well aware of the main reference points of post-structuralist studies from the 1960s and 1970s. For example, Daniel Spoerri read Lévi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked (1969), looking for answers to his quest of archetypes (primeval cooking).3 In the 1980s, when movements such as slow food started raising awareness about the social role of eating, pushing for a reevaluation of food craftsmanship from below, the same artist contributed to the journal La Gola—the Italian magazine, which focused on material culture and paved the way to the slow food movement. The stress on material culture and the rediscovery of local traditions battled against the overbearing influence of the global market, consumerism, and fast Introduction 5

food habits, and Spoerri took the slow food side, being informed and self-conscious enough to understand the changed context since the time that had given birth to Eat Art. Indeed, it is during the last thirty years that the ethical connotations of food have been explored by philosophers and scholars, and food is now just as much about politics and ethics as it is about sustenance: many feel the pressure to shop and eat responsibly, healthfully, and sustainably. The definition of food art’s historical narratives is a work in process, which we participate in shaping through this very volume. Being aware of influential contributions to the field will help the reader understand this volume within a genealogy of thought. We choose to overview both academic publications and seminal exhibitions as precedents for our scholarly publication. We recognize the important differences between curatorial and art historical contributions in scope, goals, and fruition; yet it is also important to recognize that select curatorial projects have proven instrumental in pinning down critical ideas related to the use of food by twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists. The 2010 show Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen4 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was inspired by the museum’s acquisition of a Frankfurt kitchen designed by Grete SchütteLihotzky in 1926–1927. This design history exhibition functioned as an opportunity to include an overarching section titled Kitchen Sink Dramas, sampling pop, feminist, and Eat Art pieces since the 1960s. This section highlights how the space of the kitchen, which modernist designers had infused with ideals of efficiency and rationality, was seen by contemporaneous artists as a contested battleground where anxieties would leaven. Also in 2010, Alexandra Alisauskas edited Aesthetes and Eaters: Food and the Arts: starting from the analysis of Ferran Adrià’s presence at Documenta 12 (2006) and the assumed lack of a shared vocabulary to describe this experience, the essays investigated the role of food in art history interrelating social and art historical theories.5 This collection highlights heterogeneous areas of investigation in the realm of art and food, by devoting sections to topics as diverse as the retooling of utensils; the treatment of the menu as a medium; the sensorial stimulation of edible materials; and the eliciting of the uncanny in art about food. Aesthetes and Eaters offers unprecedented examples of 6 Introduction

scholarly inquiry in food art. Likewise, The Taste of Art uses a scholarly approach; however, its organization has a more comprehensive ambition, especially focusing on Western art. In 2009 and 2010 the exhibition Eating the Universe in Düsseldorf, Germany, reflected on food art as a metaphorical appropriation of knowledge and included a retrospective on the Eat Art movement, centered in 1970s Düsseldorf, as well as a section on the contemporary food art scene.6 The title Eating the Universe referred to the 1972 New York television show, where Austrian artist Peter Kubelka transformed the broadcast studio into a cooking workshop, cooking in front of a studio audience while explaining the basis of his philosophy: the recognition of cooking, eating, and digesting as the “dearest of all the encounters given to us by nature with the universe surrounding us, a universe to which we completely belong, which makes our existence possible and which nourishes us.”7 Within Kubelka’s idea of cooking as “the oldest visual art”—not in the sense of particularly beautifully arranged dishes, but as capacity to deal with products from our environment that involve human and cultural evolution—the public of the Düsseldorf exhibition was confronted with a selection of artists who dealt with food from various perspectives. Among them, one could find Sonja Alhäuser’s butter installations, Dustin Ericksen and Mike Roger’s Cups project, video documentation of Paul McCarthy’s performances, Mika Rothenberg’s video installations, Jana Sterbak’s Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic, and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s cooking performances. On the contrary, the show Feast at the Smart Museum in Chicago, in 2012, had a more particular focus. In fact it was specifically concerned with the concept of hospitality in the context of meal sharing.8 The exhibition catalogue presents an anthology of primary sources on each artist involved in the show; and a small selection of brief essays that discuss topics ranging from the culture of hospitality in Virginia Woolf ’s writing to historical feasts in the Middle East. This selection, like in the case of Aesthetes and Eaters, offers in-depth yet sparse analyses. Feast targeted a general public. This is even more true for Expo 2015, which took place in Milan, Italy, appealing to a very broad audience. The event was a contemporary incarnation of World Fairs.9 Tellingly, the subtitle Feeding the Planet indicated how Expo 2015 explored the Introduction 7

economy, culture, and sustainability of food in the contemporary world. Beyond a cornucopia of spectacular but sometimes superficial pavilions, Expo 2015 included two exhibitions dedicated to art, design, and dining spaces at the Museum of the Triennale. Arts and Foods and Kitchens and Invaders,10 curated by Germano Celant and Silvana Annichiarico, combined showcases of art and design to investigate the ways in which public and private dining have transformed since 1851. The accompanying catalogues include an array of cross-disciplinary essays authored by established and emerging scholars and critics. The wide chronological and geographical scope of the publications, which mirror the exhibitions’ diverse range, makes them a remarkable survey which purposefully avoids providing in-depth analysis of specific case studies. By contrast, presenting complex and articulated discussions of selected historically and culturally contextualized examples is one of The Taste of Art’s goals. While other Italian exhibitions shed light on popular topics such as food advertisement in the postwar period or food design, the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo hosted a conference on Food, Philosophy and Art, which posed theoretical questions: what place does art hold in the kitchen?11 Is creativity inherent to food and cuisine? How do ethics and aesthetics interact in gastronomy?12 Nicola Perullo’s contribution to The Taste of Art is a significant synthesis of the symposium’s approach, and it raises substantial questions on the relationship of food and art.13 Other methodologically sophisticated studies include recent French research, which introduces the idea of culinary art as artification of the everyday practice, suggesting a new consideration of cuisine as a form of cultural heritage and investigating its relationship with aesthetics.14 In addition, international methodological trends in Western art histories are currently reconsidering the centrality of the art object and its materiality, which encompasses the interest in nontraditional materials such as food.15 The emergence of new interdisciplinary approaches attentive to conservation science issues, known as “Technical Art History,” has led to a critical reevaluation of all art materials—from pigments to objects and bodies, from foodstuffs to the infinite variations on mixed media—while also considering the 8 Introduction

strategic selection of materials for their aesthetic qualities and their power to signify.16 Food art can then be studied in its materiality and its ability to produce new sorts of palettes and textual sources. Of course, food’s immaterial legacy, linked to memory, identity, and performativity, is no less important. For this reason, food is examined both as art material and process in the essays incorporated in The Taste of Art. Some of our contributors consider the potential of food in defining personal narratives and political identities; others study the spaces of food processing and dining, both in the domestic and public realm, and assess the recent concern with sustainable food production addressed by artists through participatory projects since the 1990s. We invited contributions from scholars in different disciplines, such as art history and art practice, philosophy and history, performance studies, media, and gender studies. The volume includes essays by a diverse group of exceptional authors from a number of different countries, although areas such as Italy and the United States, where a remarkable research interest in food studies has developed in the past ten years, are strongly represented. The Taste of Art’s structure groups the essays into five main sections. To signify our strong commitment to a multilayered and multidisciplinary approach, we dedicate the opening section to methodological issues, and present critical readings from the points of view of philosophy, history, film studies, and a stream of art historical research that pays special attention to the analysis of primary sources. The subsequent thematic sections discuss the use of food in art projects concerned with multisensoriality, physical perception, and the construction of knowledge. Shifting the focus from the individual to the space that s/he inhabits, the third section includes articles that examine the domestic kitchen, which is seen as a site that questions the separation between the private and public spheres. Artist restaurants and public dining are the topics of the fourth section, while participatory pieces concerned with ethics, economies, and sustainability expand on the idea of public space in the fifth section. It is important to underline that the readers will find additional trajectories linking various essays across the boundaries created by the volume’s structure. We actively point to similarities or parallels Introduction 9

among selected essays both in the notes of each text and in this very introduction. The first section of the volume introduces the idea that food art can be approached from various points of view, and samples some of them: from a philosophical digression on cuisine as art to the discussion of culinary histories; from food’s representation in film, to the analysis of artist writing practices as a backdrop to Eat Art performance. The book opens with Nicola Perullo’s essay. Perullo’s nine theses see cuisine as the art of the everyday, holding both aesthetic and creative value. Instead of trying to find analogies with the fine arts, Perullo suggests an “inversion of perspective.” This implies conceiving cuisine as art both in its most ancient sense—as tèchne, craftsmanship, and material practice—and in terms of originality and creativity (such as represented by the so-called avant-garde cuisine). Thus, culinary art is synthesized through the acceptance and binary integration of both notions of the new (avant-garde, originality, shock) and the known (tradition, comfort, familiarity), as is also suggested by Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson. Their perspective is that of studio artists who contextualize their own work by positioning it in the frame of other relational food art experiences, which merge tradition and the avant-garde. Perullo addresses similar issues from the perspective of a philosopher with a high degree of competence in experimental cuisine. His essay presents cuisine as a matter of taste, where taste is understood as originating from “an art of joy and pleasure.” The question of taste, approached from an ethical point of view, is also thoroughly examined by Harald Lemke. His essay for this volume specifically discusses Beuys’s installation substituting Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason with Maggi-Würze, a brand of German soya-sauce, as a means to contradict the notion of disinterested taste. The second essay of the first section is Carol Helstosky’s contribution, which analyzes the legacy of Futurist cooking on modern avant-garde cuisine, and discusses the dichotomy of tradition and modernity within the frame of historical research. Starting with a contextualization of the Futurists’ stance on food, Helstosky constructs a comparison between the early avant-garde and recent practices of molecular gastronomy. This kind of reading connects pre–World 10 Introduction

War II movements with more recent phenomena, that see the kitchen as a site for experimentation and contestation. The Futurists staged performative events, opened a restaurant, launched a manifesto, and wrote a cookbook. Helstosky reveals how significant their revolutionary approach was, in that the Futurists advanced “a new way to think about food,” as an alternative to the values of sustenance and pleasure: “all of their dishes, drinks, and menu plans constituted social and political commentary and were intended to make the diner think.” Molecular cuisine—the author specifically refers to Ferran Adrià—has inherited this use of food to challenge the diner, in order to stimulate emotional and intellectual responses through the deconstruction and reconstruction of well-known dishes. Fabio Parasecoli’s essay proposes a reading of food from the disciplinary perspective of film studies. He focuses on visual representations of “food porn” aesthetics in the food film genre—referred to as a specific approach offering “images so pleasurable and attractive that they can satisfy viewers excluded from any actual consumption of food.” The essay identifies recurrent visual narratives that enhance the status of chefs as creative artists and skilled experts in postindustrial societies. By considering films from very different cultures, the text assesses the wide diffusion and uniformity of both the “food porn” approach and its use to reinforce traditional gender roles (women’s nurturing role, male chefs’ traits as leaders and entrepreneurs). Parasecoli examines what he calls the “aural code” employed to represent cooking and eating scenes, a strategy that emphasizes visual aspects over the taste experience (as also mentioned and questioned by Perullo’s theses). Putting the stress on the visuals contributes to shape popular cultural ideas of “ornamental cookery,” once identified by Roland Barthes in his commentary on food photography in Elle magazine.17 As a matter of fact—according to Parasecoli—the images from most recent food films reinforce stereotypical gender identities, impacting the growing audience of foodies worldwide. This contribution shows how a careful examination of popular visual culture may integrate the study of food as a form of art, combining the high and the low, the avant-garde and the everyday. Another disciplinary approach among the many that are potentially applicable to the study of food art is the focus on art historical Introduction 11

sources, proposed by Margherita d’Ayala Valva’s contribution. From this point of view, artists’ writing on food can be seen as a particular kind of source that is halfway between the technical treatise on craftsmanship and the cookbook, entertains intense relationships with these literary traditions, and owes much to both. As d’Ayala Valva’s essay shows, to Daniel Spoerri culinary writing has the meaning of an autobiographical, archaeological assemblage, an intricate ­construction/deconstruction of the self. His Gastronomic Itinerary (an anecdotal recipe diary kept by the artist during one month of his stay on the Greek island of Symi, from 1966 to 1967) assembles scholarly-like references and personal narratives as a form of topographic-artistic-linguistic decontextualization. Looking back to his sources, Spoerri significantly chooses unusual examples of cookbooks quoting heterodox texts, with neither distance nor authority, with the attitude of a “Universaldilettant”, thus identifying with nineteenth-century scholar Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, author of The Spirit of Culinary Art (1822). This essay proposes both an analysis of the artist’s reading-writing practice and an interpretation of his daily and decennial research on food in the context of gastronomic literature, as it tries to decrypt the distance or oedipal filiation among authors enjoyingly read, mocked at, and repeatedly quoted. This argument retraces a thread in Spoerri’s own attitude toward food, suggesting what the author calls “palindromic reading” of his own writing, manipulating and performing around food. After giving a taste of possible methodological approaches to the study of food art, the volume goes back to the roots of the eating experience. The articles of the second section analyze art that comments on the sensorial encounters between food and the body. Touch, smell, taste, and sight help us to gather information about food. In order to make us rethink our relationship with food as material, source of sustenance, product of the earth, and symbol of prosperity, artists like Paul McCarthy and Janine Antoni exaggerate our perceptions or shuffle up our expectations about table manners. Anja Foerschner’s “Food, Decay, and Disgust: Paul McCarthy’s Bossy Burger as Contemporary Still Life” pinpoints the dichotomies that govern the relationship between food and the body: happiness and compulsion, restriction and obsession, pleasure and disgust. The author interprets 12 Introduction

McCarthy’s flirting with hyperabundant flows of mayonnaise and ketchup as a moral warning against the unpleasant consequences of consumerism. Decay of organic material reminds us that freshness and plenitude are not forever. The bodily disgust triggered by seeing and smelling rotting foods parallels the rejection of excessive wealth that should drive consumer choices in contemporary society. Janine Antoni’s work, discussed in Silvia Bottinelli’s “In & On: Herbs, Fish, and Janine Antoni’s Touch,” also plays with multisensoriality and disgust, although for different reasons. In fact, in the 2011 relational artwork In & On the artist aims to push the viewers slightly outside of their comfort zone by having their bodies absorb the same ingredients through the mouth and the pores. Taste and touch—the tongue and the skin—both have the ability to feel food. The initially repulsive effect of eating the same ingredients that can be found in body care products translates into a deep and intimate awareness. Some themes Bottinelli finds consistently addressed throughout Antoni’s body of work; collaboration, multisensoriality, viscerality, dialectic interplay with raw materials, and a strong interest in the origin of familiar ingredients have all reoccured in the artist’s visual strategies since the 1990s. One more recent exhibition, titled From the Vow Made (Luhring Augustine Gallery in Chelsea, New York City, on view from March 21 to April 25, 2015), continues to develop some of these themes by exploring the associations evoked by milagros (votive offerings), which link references to body parts or domestic objects to ideas of protection, preservation, and healing.18 In Antoni’s art, knowledge is achieved through the senses. Sharon Hecker’s analysis of Luciano Fabro’s 1990 piece Computers di Luciano Fabro, caramelle di Nadezda Mandel’stam articulates this principle further, by unveiling the links between body and mind, taste and memory. The artist wraps candy in papers that include photocopied citations of Nadezda’s memoir. Her husband, Osip Mendelstam, wrote a poem that criticized Stalin’s governance during the Soviet regime—an act that cost him his life. Nadezda was asked to destroy all the copies of Osip’s controversial writings, but she resisted the command by saving the poems on scrap paper between her kitchen pans, as well as by memorizing them. Memory preserved the words and also Introduction 13

a bittersweet episode from Nadezda’s life. Stalin’s policemen searched her apartment to check that Osip’s poems had been destroyed, and they offered her candy. Fabro cites this episode by wrapping candy in phrases from Nadezda’s memoir. He makes a close association between food for the body and food for the mind. His work reflects on the cognitive role of eating, seen as a way to recall memories starting from sensorial acquisition of data. However, sweetness can sometimes be misleading and deceptive, because it can push the eater to swallow unpleasant truths. Remarkably, Fabro uses the sense of taste as a tool for indexing personal narratives of historical relevance. The intertwining of personal and political meanings in Fabro’s work introduces the reader to the theme of this volume’s third section: “The Kitchen: Intersections between Private and Public.” While the site of the kitchen plays a marginal role in Nadezda’s narrative, it becomes central to the art discussed by Jody B. Cutler, Edward A. Vazquez, and Barbara Kutis. Jody Cutler’s paper carefully compares four prominent examples of feminist art, in which the kitchen is the protagonist. Cutler discusses the cultural specificity of Nurturant Kitchen, attributed to Robin Weltsch and Vicki Hodgetts (1972), Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table Series (1990), and Kitchen, by Liza Lou (1995). In the process of considering the ways in which gender, race, and generational identity affect the perception of the kitchen, Culter describes the multifaceted meanings that the kitchen can elicit. While being aware of the specificity of each case study, the author draws clear connections between the works that she analyzes. For example, she shows how they all embraced mediums such as photography, installation, video performance, and crafts, which were considered marginal by the market and by most galleries at the time in which the pieces were created. Also, all the works revisit the site of the kitchen to question cultural expectations of gender and race, often reinforced by advertisements and TV shows. Another perspective on the kitchen is offered by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, who also question the monolithic and banal reputation of the site. According to Edward Vazquez, Fischli and Weiss’s Sausage Photographs include culinary references that playfully point to the 14 Introduction

relationship between language and lived experience, photographic image and conceptual art. Vazquez skillfully positions the piece in the history of the neo-avant-garde, in particular conceptual photography and 1960s performance art, by establishing tight comparisons with works by artists such as Roth, Knowles, Ben, Polke, Ruscha, Nauman, and Baldessari. Fischli and Weiss’s series alludes to German ways of saying that make use of the sausage in metaphoric sense. Sausages are a commingling of materials, an amalgam of fragments taken from unidentifiable ingredients. By definition, they decontextualize and reshape the elements that they incorporate. The Sausage Photographs appropriate the technique of making sausages, which is reflected in the way that the artists construct their images. The photographs put together narrative scenes made out of camouflaged wursts and domestic corners reconfigured as sets. The oven, the bathroom mirror, or the refrigerator appear in disguise, as the sausages themselves that are dressed up as human characters. Like in a game, they pretend to be something else. The oven becomes a cave, the bathroom mirror a catwalk, and the fridge a spaceship launching ramp. The domestic plays make-believe, by imagining becoming something fashionable, heroic, or historical. The kitchen covers an important role in this series, because the scene sets are often made out of appliances. Kitchen appliances are symbolically associated with modernity and efficiency and are often represented as time-savers that enable the homemaker to spend hours outside of the house; here, they are portrayed as literally pretending to become public spaces. Yet these public spaces are seen as run down and slightly greasy. In a more tautological way, Polish artist Elżbieta Jabłońska brings the kitchen appliances and counters into the gallery space, thus making them part of the public sphere. As discussed by Barbara Kutis in her essay for this volume, titled “Elżbieta Jabłońska’s Kitchen Interventions: Food, Art, and Maternal Identity,” the artist impersonates the stereotypical Polish mother—a nourishing homemaker who feeds her family and guests without joining the others in the pleasures of eating. At the same time, Jabłońska also performs as herself: a woman artist who can participate in the art world also because she can master professional and networking skills. The realm of the family and the institution blend, thus challenging the assumptions Introduction 15

of a s­eparation between the private and public sphere. Different from many other women artists, Jabłońska emphasizes the warmth and energy of the home kitchen. By bringing the kitchen inside the museum, she encourages the public to recognize this quotidian space as a site of everyday creativity. She does not condemn the kitchen in and of itself. Rather, she questions the imposition of strict gender roles and advocates for a more flexible societal structure that may enable individuals to negotiate multiple identities. The fourth section of this volume examines food art projects that take place outside the domestic environment, for example in the gallery, the restaurant, mobile kitchens, and other unorthodox milieus. Several threads sew together the essays of this section. Among them, let us highlight the stress on participation through various food art experiences, community building through food as a symbol, and the interaction between the notions of tradition and avant-garde in communal-­dining experiences. We reprint a chapter from Cecilia Novero’s book Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art. In her essay “Artists and Friends: Daniel Spoerri’s Eat Art Gallery,” the author retraces Spoerri’s friends’ food interventions within the collaborative project of the Eat Art Gallery in Düsseldorf in 1970, in which the artists employed food as material, displaying edible multiples and performing actions. The experiments and experiences involved the whole body, both that of the artist and of the viewer/consumer, and addressed the physical and intellectual “incorporation” of inedible art. Novero explains and illustrates through various examples how the group of artists gathering around Spoerri took a stand in the philosophical discourse of what may constitute art, investigating, through uncategorized possibilities of creativity, the boundaries between aesthetic and nonaesthetic experience in a typically neo-avant-gardist way. In this context, food is explored within the notion, adapted from Lévi-Strauss, of savage diet as bricolage, namely as “the raw material of this art and its philosophy and politics.” The analysis of actions by Robert Filliou, Emmett Williams, and Ben Vautier, and the multiple, edible works by César, Arman, and Dieter Roth provide a framework for Beuys’s artistic interventions and notion of “expanden art,” further analyzed by Lemke’s essay in this book. 16 Introduction

The American West Coast context of the late 1960s and early 1970s is investigated through a significant case study: Allen Ruppersberg’s seminal environment of the Vietnam era, Al’s Café (1969), often cited in accounts of postwar Los Angeles art; rarely, however, discussed as much in depth as in Rachel Federman’s essay. Every Thursday evening from October 9 to November 13, 1969, Allen Ruppersberg operated Al’s Café in a storefront near downtown Los Angeles. Decorated with Americana culled from the artist’s extensive collection of postcards, posters, calendars, and other ephemera, the environment was a convincing facsimile of a typical American restaurant, with some notable exceptions. This essay identifies Al’s Café as a physical as well as a discursive crossroad in the postwar art history of Los Angeles, illuminating the singular function that it played in 1969 as a metonymic representation of California (and America). Federman’s article develops a sophisticated argument about the restaurant as a whole, where food played a clearly symbolic role within a theatrical mise-en-scène, suggesting binary associations such as destruction/regeneration, nature/artifice—all defining themes of the Vietnam War period. For example, inedible dishes such as “Simulated Burned Pine Needles à la Johnny Cash Served with a Live Fern” were there to signify “anxiety over the loss of the American, and especially the Western wilderness.” Federman connects this episode of art history to both street and stage counterculture, within the sociological background of the fall of the public sphere in Western society as in Richard Sennett’s reading. The reception of a community of viewers/eaters and their direct participation/consumption in public performances with food becomes predominant in the relational-art experiences classified by Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson (together forming the art collective Spatula&Barcode). The idea of community itself, with a particular focus on the dichotomy between modernity and tradition, is here explored from an insider’s point of view, originating from the authors’ direct experience and personal involvement in food-based social practice. Such is the particular perspective offered by this essay, consistent with the multilayered approach proposed by our book. The axis of tradition/avant-garde and the links to gastronomy, art, and the everyday are suggested and complicated through multiple examples. This essay surveys feeding and eating both in molecular gastronomy Introduction 17

and in socially engaged art, enriching the critical debate on relational art by moving beyond easy equations such as that of familiar/­ comforting foods with tradition or that of food with generosity. A moral concern with food and its impact on ecology, economy, and sustainability is expressed by the works analyzed in this volume’s last section. Harald Lemke focuses on Joseph Beuys and maintains that “Beuysian art conceptualizes food in a number of ways, three of which are examined in his paper: (1) self-cooking both as an important change maker and as a convivial and creative activity available to everyone every day; (2) the use of foodstuff as material for artistic work; and (3) the production of food as an essential issue of global economy and politics, particularly with regard to the fundamental link between agriculture and eating culture in terms of ecologically sustainable relations to nature.” According to Lemke, a variety of food artworks by the German artist respond to his systematic preoccupation with issues of equality, which can be addressed properly only when individuals are valued for their creativity instead of their ability to produce capital. Also, growing food, along with everyday cooking, can facilitate a person’s reconnection with organic materials and allow for creative actions embedded in the flow of quotidian life. Beuys models this attitude for his public when, among other things, he plants seven thousand oaks in Kassel (1982) and mocks TV cooking shows demonstrating low-key recipes in his studio (1979). A different strategy characterizes sculptural works that include edible ingredients, such as honey or lard. In these cases, food gains a markedly symbolic meaning, connected with mythologized episodes of Beuys’s life. The ingredients nearly function as relics, which witnessed exemplary moments of a very special person’s path. The artist becomes an exemplum virtutis; even if the public can’t be expected to live through the same extreme experiences memorialized by Beuys’s personal accounts, these accounts work as moral warnings. While Alison Knowles does not construct a mythical persona around her personal narratives, her work has some commonalities with Beuys’s. Specifically, both artists are interested in the rituality of the everyday, the ways in which consumer culture and natural elements coexist, and the power of storytelling. Both were exposed to the environment of Fluxus, an avant-garde group that aimed to under18 Introduction

mine the otherwise accepted commerciality of the art system. Fluxus artists replaced the traditional art object with pieces that could not be easily sold at inflated prices in high-profile galleries. Performances, artist books, or small objects included in Fluxus-kits could be shared outside of the market system, thus intentionally challenging existing sociocultural structures within the art system. In Nicole Woods’s article for this collection, she discusses Knowles’s piece Bean Rolls (1963–1964), made out of a tin box that contains different varieties of dried beans together with a collection of stories, recipes, and documents related to beans. The artist gathered this information at the New York Public Library, then copied and archived it on paper rolls. The rolls share the same space of the actual beans inside the tin box, where document and reality coexist loosely, giving the viewer the chance to combine information and experience freely. Alison Knowles’s Bean Rolls urged the public to reexamine the social and cultural associations of a particular food. Natalie Jeremijenko’s Cross(x)Species Adventure Club instead looks at foods that operate at the molecular level. Lindsay Kelley’s contribution to The Taste of Art shows how Jeremijenko’s goal is to propose solutions for remediation projects, which are explicitly based on the eating process. The artist delineates alternative pathways to counter specific ecological problems. She contributes to building menus that, according to Kelley, “place our bodily and planetary ecosystems in conversation and move beyond the meal to argue that food preparation, recipe development, eating, digesting, and excretion are mechanisms for environmental remediation.” For example, the piece Lure, included in Cross(x) Species Adventure Club, consists on feeding fish with lures laced with chitinase, an agent that helps the animals process mercury, so that the level of this poisonous element decreases in their bodies. This benefits the fish and their predators (including humans). Kelley highlights how Jeremijenko’s practice shows commonalities with postwar food industries as much as current culinary trends that take advantage of scientific research to affect the way we eat. However, she also underlines that the goals are ultimately different. Cross(x)Species Adventure Club is both a remediation project and a discursive piece, showing that eating inextricably connects our bodies to the environment. This volume as a whole wishes to offer a glance of current Introduction 19

­ evelopments in food art research, and aims to share a cocktail of d in-depth analyses, which contribute to define the current debate on food and art. The Taste of Art is intended as a platform for the understanding of a multilayered topic, allowed by the presentation of a vast spectrum of points of view. We are aware that we are handling a complex matter that calls for further scholarly investigation. The table is now set and we believe that it could become a springboard for future studies. We look forward to welcoming other scholars, writers, and practitioners to a healthy convivium of ideas. Silvia Bottinelli and Margherita d’Ayala Valva

20 Introduction

part I



Taste of Art

Methodologies and Critical Approaches

Chapter 1

Can Cuisine Be Art? A Philosophical (and Heterodox) Proposal Nicola Perullo

Whether cuisine can be considered art is a very old question that philosophy has posited frequently since Plato’s time. In the history of Western thought, many of the answers, primarily negative ones, began with a hypothesis to be verified as to whether cuisine had such characteristics that would allow it to be assimilated or included in the domain of the arts and in particular those which, from 1700 onward, were defined as “fine arts.”1 Beginning in the eighteenth century, reasons for considering a positive approach toward cuisine as art became more evident, thanks to the vast changes taking place in modern Western society that, in the twentieth century, led to a profound subversion of art in general, from Duchamp’s readymades to installations, collage, and performance art. This subversion offered space for a positive answer to that old platonic question. Usually, approaching the question as to whether cuisine is art involves trying to discern, through particular and exceptional culinary results created by great chefs, conditions, elements, and structures that allow analogies with other already accredited art forms that do not require other justifications and that imbue cuisine with this status. A common demonstration that cuisine is a form of art involves discerning formal characteristics of a specific meal or particular dish that are analogous to ones in music, painting, sculpture, architecture, theater, and performance art.2 Often, even the chefs themselves take this perspective, working with artists and imitating procedures or 23

characteristics from other art forms. Naturally, there’s nothing wrong with bringing cuisine closer to other forms of art; as in all human activities, cuisine thrives on a fruitful contamination from diverse knowledge and practices. My position, however, is that this strategy is not very effective. In this essay I propose an inversion of perspective: to understand and accept the hypothesis that cuisine could be art, it is necessary to think of art as a cuisine. In other words, one does not proceed from accredited arts to cuisine, but rather from cuisine to art. This means definitively secularizing art and understanding it as a material practice, which is process and performance oriented and contingent. As we already know, the possibility of understanding it in this manner is both ancient and modern at the same time. Ancient, because it is connected to a paradigm that has been relatively forgotten today, in which “art” designated a technical capacity, a way of producing, and a concrete know-how.3 Modern, because it regards a way of using it as a specific cultural experience, aesthetic, as well as a consumer good, which has been exponentially affirmed over the last hundred years. In the age of mechanical reproduction of artworks and of widespread aesthetics, art has become—or can be—something different with respect to its occurrences in terms of uniqueness and superior artifacts. The following nine theses for cuisine as art propose a theory that seeks to bring out the deep meaning of the values of the food, assuming that cuisine can be the art of everyday life in which aesthetic value and artistic value coincide.4

1. Cuisine can be art if there is cuisine that is not art Cuisine has a history in both its public and official dimensions as well as in its private and domestic ones. The question of artistic cuisine must be put in a correct historical and theoretical context. This leads us not to simply ask, “Is cuisine art?” but rather, when is cuisine art—in terms of historical, geographical, and, generally speaking, situated occurrences? Types, categories, or styles, however, do not identify the quality of the cuisine. Any type of cuisine can be art—both “high” 24

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and “low” level, professional and domestic—but none is art by statute. Cuisine is an a posteriori art. In the West, the establishment of a code with respect to which we can legitimately pose the question of an artistic statute of cuisine is very recent: it was formulated in the eighteenth century—more than one hundred years later than that of the conventional arts—when the social role of the cook changed profoundly. If in the 1500s the great chef Bartolomeo Scappi—author of an Opera in six books published in 1570 and a reference point for all cuisine of the century—was the expression of the highest technical ability and competence regarding products, a century later in France, the paradigm shifted not only with the dramatic change in values of taste, but also with respect to the code of cuisine. Between 1600 and 1700, cuisine also lived through the querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, with the gradual emergence of a new cuisine: Nouvelle cuisine—made famous by the chef Menon—which marks the first moment in which cuisine reflects upon itself and a chef claims the possibility of creating the unexpected. Between 1735 and 1745—in works such as The Modern Cook by La Chapelle (1739) and New Treatise on Cuisine by Menon (1739–1742)—for the first time, cooks claimed libertà (freedom) of expression with respect to the past. During the same period in Europe, there was a lively debate regarding aesthetic taste, expertise, greater access to culture and artworks through the processes of democratization of modern bourgeois society; museum institutions and restaurants, public houses—where one could receive a paid service that not only satisfied simple needs for refreshment as well as more articulated pleasures—were established.5 In the 1800s the profession of chef was delineated with more precision. The magazine L’Art Culinaire, founded by Maurice Dancourt, was published from 1883 to 1920 and became the official organ of the Society of French Chefs, the association that brought together chefs of the caliber of Escoffier, Urbain Dubois, or Montagné.6 To understand the question of culinary art from a philosophical perspective, it is necessary first to know the history of cuisine and the way in which its protagonists are represented. Some of the milestones that reflect cuisine as art are the “new cuisine” of Menon, Marin, La

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25

Chapelle; the great French ­tradition of the nineteenth century, with Carême, Urbain Dubois, and Escoffier; the second “nouvelle cuisine” that emerged between the ’60s and the ’70s of the twentieth century, with Point, Guérard, Chapel, the Troisgros brothers, and Bocuse; the “­techno-emotional” revolution underway in the ’90s in Spain with Ferran Adrià; the “new Nordic cuisine” promoted in the latest years by René Redzepi. At the same time, however, it is not enough to refer only to the public history of cuisine to determine its artistic potential. Given its intrinsic characteristics, cuisine is an activity that regards everyone, not only de jure but also de facto. So, which cuisine is art? Or better yet, when is cuisine art? We can never know that in the abstract sense. Certainly, cuisine is usually not art when it is not cared for, when it is not made by competent makers, does not spring from physical and ideal gestures that are aware and passionate. But who can say in advance when that will happen? Technically superior ability, the relationship (conscious or not) to past tradition, the ability to reproduce it, an identifiable style, attention and care given to form, and creative genius all depend on factors that cannot be determined in principle. Cuisine can be art only if there is cuisine that is not art, but there are no a priori conditions that can satisfy us in our pursuit of which cuisine is art, because cuisine is art a posteriori.

2. Cuisine can be art if art is meant in its double sense The word art covers at least two distinct semantic fields: on the one hand, the old one that considers art as the technical ability to (re)produce something perfectly according to the rules, and on the other, the modern one of creative capacity tied to imagination that produces work that is innovative and original. This latter meaning is particularly identified with the cuisine of Ferran Adrià, the Catalan chef who has redrawn the boundaries of the relation between food and art.

26

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Nevertheless, cuisine can be art in terms of both meanings, and one does not necessarily exclude the other. Ferran Adrià of El Bulli is a cook who has influenced the language and the code of contemporary cuisine more than anyone else with respect to the theme of art. His work has been compared with that of the avant-garde (first and foremost, with the Futurist cuisine of Marinetti, where the meal was thought of as a multisensorial total experience). He has been the first and only chef to receive institutional recognition from the “art world,” with his participation in Documenta 2007. He started a true revolution that stirred unprecedented interest, not only among the gastronomic community, but also in cultural and artistic institutions. Adrià has affirmed on numerous occasions that the primary impulse for his cuisine was born from a sentence uttered in the mid1980s by Jacques Maximin, one of the great exponents of the second nouvelle cuisine: “Creativity means not copying.”7 This, however, is a typically modern thought. In the ancient world, the meaning of “creativity” was tied above all to the elaboration of artifacts on the basis of imitating nature and according to precise rules to be followed. To create meant to make well, and by following the rules. The modern model of art and above all self-representation by the artist, as we know, follows a different direction. These ideas were also valid for cuisine, until the pinnacle was reached by Adrià, a chef who was able to transform a restaurant into a gastronomic theater in which one could have an aesthetic experience due to creations that harkened back to the art environment using originality and innovation to differentiate himself from his predecessors.8 For example, he incorporated new techniques and technologies such as spherification and freezing with the use of liquid nitrogen. Adrià’s work has been the fruit of research that assumes the chef ’s freedom—almost without limit—as its foundation. If original expressions for exceptional experiences followed by institutional recognition is legitimate, however this representative model of cuisine as art and cook as artist is not the only one possible. Doing something “a regola d’arte” (“to perfection”), according to perfectly acquired precise rules, is an expression that survives today



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in mechanical and artisanal activities, but also in so-called traditional and everyday cuisine. Expressions such as “tagliatelle fatte a regola d’arte” (“tagliatelle made to perfection”) or “una pizza a regola d’arte” refer precisely to this environment. Adria’s Melon Caviar does not have preceding direct points of ­reference and appears as an original creation. The appreciation of it does not come from direct cultural recognition, but rather from an appreciation for the new. Nadia Santini’s Tortelli di zucca (­pumpkin-stuffed tortelli) from Dal Pescatore, famed Italian Michelin three-star r­ estaurant, are clearly a different case; the excellence of the dish emerges from a comparison with other examples of the same type that lead to its appreciation as “a regola d’arte.” Analyzing these two paradigms of possible art, two strategies emerge (which do not, however, correspond mechanically to these two paradigms) for cuisine as art. I propose to define the first as elevation strategy in which cuisine becomes art by elevating itself beyond the ordinary and everyday dimension and by creating a new language that can be assimilated or compared to arts that are “taken as given.” Culinary art exists “provided that it distances itself from tradition that is artisanal and repetitious, and that its goal is to create excitement.”9 The second strategy, which I propose here, is defined inversely as lowering strategy, which is characterized by a look at art from below. A look from below naturally does not mean to negate the ideational possibilities of cuisine; touching, handling, mixing, cutting, cooking, dressing, and spicing are practices in which the material touches the imagination and, in some cases, creates it. In the lowering strategy, however, there is adherence between material and ideal gestures. The idea is not found beyond the body and its techniques, but rather it develops and evolves itself by weaving into these.

3. Cuisine can be art if it is meant in terms of fascination for the new and a reminder of the well known Culinary art is expressed in possible gradations of polarity between the new (originality, surprise, shock) and the known (familiarity, comfort, reassurance). 28

Taste of Art

Relationships and the evolution of cuisine rotate around this polarity, in a historical, anthropological, and aesthetic sense. One of the most powerful prejudices of artistic cuisine concerns the presumed necessity to create new and shocking dishes and menus that provide stimulus for multisensorial and intellectual emotions. One can cite many examples, in the wake of the Bulli model, of famous restaurants that have developed extreme projects in this direction. In 2013, the Roca brothers’ Celler de Can Roca in Girona created the trans-mediatic work The Dream, a gastronomic event imagined as a trip into human existence and made from food, images, and sounds (a screenplay created together with the Catalan artist Franc Aleu, with projections of images on the table and walls, sophisticated microphones out of which sounds and voices emanate). Or instead, consider Ultraviolet, Paul Pairet’s restaurant in Shanghai, based on interactive, gastronomic, and audiovisual experiences, meant to produce emotions and provoke thoughts. The point being: in order to experience emotions and thoughts, is it always necessary to make new artifacts? Is the “new” the only way to experience a multisensorial and intellectual emotion? In the cases just mentioned, such multisensorial experience has as its paradigm—explicit or not—in the aesthetics of form as visual representation. It is not by accident that the work The Dream also became a film, an exhibition, and a book; here cuisine is thought of as art to the extent that it comes near to forms, writings, and procedures characteristic of other types of art, imitating or interacting with them. And this assumption connects to the idea that the imagination that creates new forms can only free itself through a detachment, a distance from the ordinary. But is this “exceptionalist” vision of cuisine, this elevation strategy of cuisine to art, adequate to completely understand cuisine as art? First and foremost, the problem concerns aesthetic appreciation; then, it becomes an issue of its connection to institutions and the market. According to a largely respected model in the field of culinary art, appeal to the authority of the art world—collaborations with artists, insertion in specialized events—gives an institutional (and, to many,

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also theoretical) justification for the acquisition of the cuisine’s artistic value. In the great majority of cases that determine the cultural and social horizon in which it is practiced, perceived, and lived, cuisine is the bearer of reassurance, comfort, harmony, and understanding. Naturally, there is nothing wrong with exceptional gustatory experiences, just as there isn’t with extreme and avant-garde artistic ones. But if art has for decades accepted—both in theory and in practice— the idea that it has been contaminated by the ordinary and everyday (just think of Allan Kaprow’s, Joseph Beuys’s, or Andy Goldsworthy’s work), why then shouldn’t the same apply to artistic cuisine?10 In the lowering strategy, ordinary and comforting home cooking have the same artistic dignity as that of the exceptional and extraordinary kind. It is not, however, only a historical fact. There are also aesthetic reasons for this strategy. At least in the case of cuisine, the production of the new as a creative “must” risks an ordinary and everyday activity aimed at satisfying repeated needs/desires, the likelihood of a paradoxical perceptive anesthesia. The risk, in other words, is that the user enjoys these experiences not through the intensification of his/ her aesthetic sensitivity, but for the mere fact of having taken part in them. In this light, culinary art becomes exclusively a fact of marketing aesthetics and of—as some have written—an expression of the age of artistic capitalism.11 There is also a specific evolutionary aspect. Our relationship with food begins with the fetal stage, which points us toward birth and weaning. Through food—in particular, through sucking maternal milk—the newborn begins to explore and get to know “the meat of the world” with regular intensity. This relationship is a perceptive plexus where necessity, enjoyment, knowledge, and affection come together. Research demonstrates that the sensorial and aesthetic inputs the baby receives in these first phases of existence through nutrition are the basis for their overall psycho-physical development and, specifically, for their future food preferences.12 Remember: before speaking, we taste. The impact with food has extraordinary importance in one’s perceptive aptitude. The cuisine we grow up with therefore has a central function in our lives. The permanence of many infantile childhood food passions that carry over into the adult age, naturally to varying degrees, is an emblematic case of the evolutionary relationship of old to new, 30

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known to unknown. On one hand, evolution requires the rise of awareness, the desire for the unknown, and the need for the new; on the other—according to unpredictable ways and timing—it needs familiar reassuring elements, because of the principle of self-­preservation. Evolution is the continuing relationship between the two poles; and the relation between home and outside, domestic and external, is a consequence of this process. Just as there are “exotic” and adult foods, tied to acquiring external experiences (for example, foods whose appreciation is the explicit outcome of a social process: the bitterness of coffee, the acidity of wine), there are also foods and tastes that are domestic and infantile (sweetness, milk flavors, softness). Hence, it would be wrong, de jure and de facto, to undervalue the tasting pleasure offered by tastes and flavors from memories and childhood, in part irreducibly biographical and in part collective and shared.

4. Cuisine can be art if art frees itself from the domain of visual perception Food does not get used up and does not disappear; instead, it is transformed and it transforms us. To understand cuisine as art, it is necessary to go beyond the equation of “permanent object = visible presence,” and the representational perspective that supports it. An alternative model that is not constrained to the aesthetics of form, which values instead vital and metabolic aspects as well as transformation and change, asserts that food always leaves a trace even if you cannot see it. Aesthetic cuisine—according to the conventional meaning of aesthetics as the theory of beauty understood through that which is seen—would be that which is judged by the eyes. The dominant model of this paradigm employs visual perception, and beauty pertains to images, their forms, structure, shapes, and colors. However, modern aesthetics was not born with this exclusive feature; according to its founder Baumgarten, aesthetics was intended as “science of sensible

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knowledge”—that regards all the senses, including taste. However, as in general philosophy as with specifically epistemology and aesthetics, sight quickly assumed an almost exclusive theoretical dominance. It is a paradigm clearly exemplified by Hegel, in a passage from his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art: “the sensuous aspect of art is related only to the two theoretical senses of sight and hearing, while smell, taste, and touch remain excluded from the enjoyment of art. For smell, taste, and touch have to do with matter as such and its immediately sensible qualities—smell with material volatility in air, taste with the material liquefaction of objects, touch with warmth, cold, smoothness, etc.”13 In this influential cognitive aesthetic model, a close solidarity exists between the forms represented and their visual permanence. In any case, the primary and principal function of cooked food is its physical assimilation, that which we call “consumption.” We need to think of that materiality as a specific element of gustatory experience; if metaphorical assimilation (of concepts, ideas, representations, forms) is in fact peacefully allowed into the domain of aesthetics, it is instead the body that is the true discriminator for accepting tastesmell perceptions in the field of art. At least for this reason, cuisine cannot be considered like the other arts; food is the only piece of the world that we physically ingest, digest, and metabolize. It is not the case, naturally, of negating the importance of sight in the overall appreciation of food: taste is a multisensorial perception, and sight is the sense that conditions and influences most of our choices and preferences. It is legitimate to say that “we also eat with our eyes.” The point being that, as a consequence of the lowering strategy, it is necessary to give full philosophical and aesthetic legitimacy to the overall process of food assimilation. Let’s clear up the point with a comparison with what happens with wine, a drink that is very often associated with the question of art. For some tasters, the perception of certain qualities happens only in the space between the mouth (with its receptors and sensorial apparatus) and the brain (where the materials are perceived and appreciated), since the liquid may not be ingested and even spit out. The action underlies a precise idea; the aesthetic values of wine do not develop in the overall process of its assimilation from the mouth to the belly, nor do they correspond to the satisfaction of its most real functions 32

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(quenching thirst, inebriating, warming, socializing); they reside in what the liquid expresses before it is ingested. This is a strategy for a visualization of the taste of the wine: a “keeping it at a distance,” and a reduction of its overall transformational power, giving advantage to its elevation according to the visual and distal paradigm. The lowering strategy proposes another possibility for culinary art and aesthetics, taking into consideration its fundamental part—the primary and functional value of food and drink. Cooking transforms a material for its final assimilation, but assimilation of food is its elaboration in terms of energy, vitality, satisfaction, and joy. It is a fact that food does not disappear, but rather it is transformed and it transforms us, for its effects on both the body and on the mind: food can cause happiness or sadness, but also intoxication, making you feel heavy or sad. Naturally, in the grand process of assimilation that begins with taste, sight is also involved, but within the overall complex system, not as the only aesthetic consideration of an experience that would otherwise be merely nutritional, energetic, and “low.” Lowering the power of the visual, then, means positing the exceptional into the everydayness, legitimizing in the aesthetic dominion simpler expressions of making cuisine.

5. Cuisine can be art if the everyday and the ordinary are not its negation In cuisine, one can find varying degrees of difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary, between the everyday and the exceptional, rather than in radical discontinuity. The codes and rituals related to daily food preparation—both in restaurants and at home— are not obstacles to the cook’s possible artistic success, but rather represent fertile grounds from which diverse expressive methods of cooking can be derived. The film Cooking in Progress (2010) by German director Gereon Wetzel, dedicated to the cuisine of Ferran Adrià, shows the Catalan chef during some of the stages of his work. He designs, thinks, discusses the concept of the dishes and their execution with his staff, the



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stages of the meal, the architecture of the menu, and naturally, tastes. However, he is never shown in the action of cooking. This removal of the practice of cooking in the contemporary media depiction of the chef/artist is very significant because it testifies to how the limits and prejudices we have gone over in the previous thesis are rooted with respect to the theme of creativity.14 In this film, the hand and the practical gestures of making are absent, and culinary art seems to flow from the head and from projects, and its practice requiring gestures of manual labor is relegated to the background. The implicit paradigm in this representation (giving that Adrià is also a great cook, possessing great skills and technique) is the dualistic hierarchy between form and matter; the first, elaborated by the mind, is active; the second, worked by hand, is supposedly passive and powerless. The hand—and everything that concerns any task carried out by the body—is seen as a mere instrument of the head, as it realizes the practical execution of the ideas. Note that this model responds both to a theoretical prejudice and a historical error. Cuisine as art, as the other arts, grows and develops in a plurality of ways. Let’s take two examples. The first example concerns the Cyberegg by Davide Scabin of Combal Zero, Rivoli, Italy. This dish, just as in the previous case of the Melon Caviar, was developed as a project out of intuition before the execution, then clarified during practical experimentation and the production of the dish, which involved the choice and the treatment of the raw egg, the creation of a sheath to wrap it in, and materials for the presentation of the dish contained in a plastic box. We are clearly confronted with a new work that, without direct terms of comparison, asks to be understood and enjoyed primarily for the meaning it conveys. Again, that does not exclude the technical ability of the chef and the expertise of the practical processes—the dish is still made and eaten—but these aspects are placed in the background in the aesthetic experience itself. Here, enjoyment and appreciation are focused more on ideal gestures. In this example, ordinary and everyday cuisine appear to be completely absent. The second example is The Egg and the hen, a dish by Renè Redzepi of Noma, in Copenhagen. Before describing it, however, a reference to the context of this cuisine is necessary. Redzepi is the major exponent of new Nordic cuisine, a movement that emerged about 34

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ten years ago. The philosophy of the movement, which developed in Northern Europe, mainly in Denmark and Scandinavia (another important exponent is Magnus Nilsson of the restaurant Faviken in the small Swedish village of Faviken), promotes a model based on attention to the environment and sustainability, and which I define as neo-­naturalism: many foods are presented—or recreated—in their “rough” form, with the goal of provoking a pleasure. Behind this proposal, however, there is a lot of work that goes into a design aimed at subtraction and at times at minimalism, and often the attempt is made to be light and non-invasive in working with materials.15 In The Egg and the hen, the principle material element, the egg, is lying on hay and is brought to the table natural, to be cracked open, cooked, and dressed with the help of the diners. This “raw aesthetics” radicalizes use of simple and ordinary products—even though that egg is not an ordinary egg—and in this sense seems to realign the exceptional with the everyday, the public with the domestic. Cooking an egg at a restaurant could mean a new stage in the idea that de jure anyone can make cuisine as art: an idea that the German artist Joseph Beuys pursued as a key concept, also through culinary performances. At the same time, however, compared to the prior example of Nadia Santini’s Tortelli di zucca (Tortelli stuffed with Pumpkin), we find ourselves confronted with a dish that was designed to evoke a forgotten habitat by rebuilding it in a fictional way in the microcosm of the plate. These examples tell us that artistic cuisine can be presented in many different ways. The possible variables are uncountable; technical perfection does not necessarily correspond to formal perfection, since a rough and brutal gesture can seem necessary and therefore perfect in its imperfection. The “revisiting” of codified and known recipes in which new variables are inserted is another possibility; “pure” reproduction is another possibility, once the prejudice regarding creativity as making something new is overcome. It should not be so difficult to understand once we see art processes as a field composed by different, sometimes even opposite styles, opening the channels of culinary “art” up to the very possibility of providing meaningful, illuminated, shared aesthetic experiences, accordingly to a Deweyian perspective. The strength, quality, and value of these different approaches emerge and develop only, however, with the act of production within a total

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r­ elationship, composed of many actors and factors, and upon which only a posteriori agreement is possible. The experience of cuisine is a complex experience, which manifests itself most obviously through taste.

6. Cuisine can be art if it does not reduce taste to emotions and concepts The aesthetic pleasure of food is articulated on different levels, although it is primarily channeled into the tasting experience. “Cuisine is art,” not because it intentionally tries to be a conceptual experience, connected to an emotional intention, but rather because it requires unavoidable attention be paid to sensory and material effects, tied to the assimilation of taste from which peculiar emotional and aesthetic qualities are developed. In an interview a few years ago, René Redzepi declared that the primary aim of his work was to explore new gastronomic possibilities and to research unusual combinations that would provoke interest and curiosity. In this declaration, the chef underlined that the creation of “good” food was, at best, a secondary function, since taste is subjective and as such an independent variable. But what is taste? When we discuss cuisine, we always arrive at the question of taste, the big problem around which the epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical questions rotate, and which holds cuisine and gastronomy in its grip. The problem of taste is the problem of subject, namely of subjectivity as individual consciousness, identity, and awareness. The fact that the implication of individual pleasure corrupts presumed objective “purity” of taste—which should presumably be only possible through the distancing of the distal senses—seems to activate the search for “stable” values of cuisine. From this point of view, Redzepi’s emblematic phrase finds itself, in spite of and paradoxically allied with, Kantian aesthetics of disinterest. In fact, since it seems that taste cannot be disputed, it cannot constitute the main criterion of aesthetic 36

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and artistic valorization. But what is truly meant when taste is reduced to something this obvious? We have already seen that artistic cuisine, in its current interpretation, is presented as the creation of dishes/sequences/menus/situations that produce emotions. We can define this model, parallel to what has occurred in contemporary art, as conceptual. In other words, in this cuisine, artifacts and edible experiences are created that do not aim primarily at being good—pleasure as sensory enjoyment—but rather at being new and original. Now, if in contemporary art one can research expressions that provoke disturbing feelings in the viewer that are distressing and shocking, the same is not possible for cuisine for theoretical reasons. Imagine a chef who decides to cook sad and anguishing dishes in his/her restaurant, like a writer with his/ her books or a director with his/her films; just imagine the result! This expressive limit in cuisine has often been used as an objection to its artistic possibilities. I believe instead, more simply, that cuisine is a peculiar art and as such has its specific characteristics; it is an art of joy and pleasure, in physical, intellectual, and emotional terms (often intertwoven). Stemming from this argument, the primary finality of taste can be revalued. Taste is individual pleasure, but it is also shared knowledge, grammar, and language. Taste can also excite and give emotions, as we have already shown. Certainly, there are different qualitative levels of emotions offered by cuisine; in particular, vision also plays an important role, and we are always faced with a multisensorial dimension, channeled mainly through the incorporation of taste. On the contrary to what has been suggested by many, it is actually taste that proves to be the most solid and lasting instrument for shared appreciation. Through taste, emotion deepens, gaining weight and articulating itself in possible sensory dimensions; it can become memory, feeling, passion. Certainly, taste is subject to the laws of the marketplace, but it can also represent a powerful tool for questioning them. Cooking and gustatory experiences begin at home, in a domestic environment outside of a monetary exchange. The specific material assimilation of food brings one back to those sedimentations of ­meaning—sensorial and cultural—that constitute our identity. In other words, taste can dislodge memory and activate pathways to broader and more solid awareness than superficial emotional appeals

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tied to the new without points of reference. It would, however, be completely off the mark to interpret this thought as mere praise of the past and of cuisine that is based on comfort and tradition. The weight of taste can develop through imaginative elaboration of new artifacts, as we have seen through the examples we made. A dish of spaghetti with tomato sauce or a pizza can excite just as much as dinner at Alinea, the Chicago restaurant, where Grant Achatz is one of the most innovative and creative chefs of the current scene. Emotions can be diverse, and their quality and intensity do not depend on the chef ’s intentions nor on the type of cuisine. When I ate at El Bulli I had an overall exciting aesthetic experience that made me think of cuisine as an artistic fact. However, I have been excited at other times by cuisine that was not intended to produce excitement, but “simply” to satisfy taste through a job well done.

7. Cuisine can be art if it cuts across the problem of gender Culinary art cannot be reduced to its representation by professional institutions, which are almost exclusively dominated by male members. We need to overcome the axiological hierarchy between the public space of cuisine and the domestic cuisine of service also by questioning the domination of gender. Cuisine is art when it takes into account the importance of the interested relationship it has with food, which has at its origin the maternal gesture of feeding—an act that brings well-being. In the very influential ranking Top50 Best Restaurants only one woman is included among the fifty best chefs in the world—how can this be? Some common and superficial responses, such as the job is “too tiring” for women, do not merit comment. If we look instead at the central role that women have almost always played in the history of domestic cuisine in the West, we can begin to find plausible reasons; there is a rigid distinction between cuisine understood as a task versus 38

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cuisine as a profession. It is through the issue of professionalism that we understand why cuisine as art is and has been the prerogative almost exclusively of men. There is a French word that expresses this axiology; that is, chef. The chef, according to the definition by the historian Revel, is a man capable of inventing that which hasn’t already been eaten at home. The chef is therefore a chief; that is, primarily a head, a mind. The space of the chef is outside of the house. But the boarders between private and public, as we have seen for our topic, are fragile; cuisine brushes away the rigid opposition between private and public, offering itself instead as a permeable multiplicity of articulated differences. The institutional representation of art—aesthetic, political, social—usually subordinates the internal space with respect to the external private and public one, which is deemed to be more important. Training and learning of a specialized job take place outside, and it is outside that one meets known and institutional masters. Cuisine cannot escape this representation. Women should stay in the kitchen: this thought expresses the ideology of a precise social structure that involves all aspects of human life.16 The autonomous space of women is carved out within the domestic walls and, above all, expresses itself in cooking and in other tasks that are done in the absence of men, who go out to work, produce, create, and fill public roles. There is only one woman chef out of all of the fifty “best” restaurants in the world ranking, mainly because it is harder for a woman to have access to the institutional circle of “high” cuisine codified by men. Couldn’t a restaurant based on home cooking be considered the best restaurant in the world? What paradigm does this model of culinary art refer to in this case? Home is the place where time is measured by the completion of tasks and the exchange is not monetized. This is not the space of specialized professionals. Here, distinctions of gender derive from a perceptual experience related also to the internal living space, and not by accident, women have often been assigned the management of the domestic economy. Home cooking is an integral part of this time management; it is mostly a relationship with foods that are chosen and cooked, but also with family members who share that space. Food prepared in this context accomplishes precise functions; it is an interested preparation, since it can respond to nutritional and economic motives, as well as taste and diet. The person who is responsible for its

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­ reparation also takes care of the diners’ well-being, which follows a p paradigm that is often distant from the modern gastronomic restaurant, based on the “gourmet’s freedom” that claims to provide a sensorial pleasure that is apparently disinterested, a taste that is “an end unto itself ” regardless of dietetic principles. Since it is a task rather than a professional activity that has been acquired by outside training, home cooking is neither perceived nor represented as an art. On the contrary, “disinterested” cuisine can allow itself to be wasteful and not very healthful: we can indulge ourselves once in a while! As l’art pour l’art meme, the same is supposed to be true for artistic cuisine, a cuisine for its own sake. Naturally, no one intends to negate the value and legitimacy of this institutional model; the public history of artistic cuisine comes out of it, and even within this frame, it is composed of tendencies and styles that are very different, irreducible to the simplification of home/outside. The point is to understand how the institution of aesthetic and artistic values, in which a good part of culinary and gastronomic thought is still immersed, is based on this general axiology where the polarities are hierarchical oppositions.17 Professionalism has to do with time being completely absorbed in activity. Women are excluded or kept in marginal positions from this circle. Her marginality is the marginality of the interdisciplinary nature of this undisciplined savoir-faire. A cuisine that goes beyond gender characterizations beginning with a revaluation of the domestic, of the home, and of culinary dilettantism is possible. Even when this cuisine is interpreted by great chefs. In an interview, the great Italian chef Fulvio Pierangelini, of the restaurant Il Gambero Rosso in San Vincenzo, once said: “At times, because of the dishes I imagine and try to create, my cuisine is defined as being feminine, and for me this is a great compliment [. . .] Everything comes from mother’s milk. Unfortunately today many women chefs, who want to be successful with gastronomic critics, cook in a masculine way (that is, in an abstract and technological way, more with measurements than with sensitivity) gaining fame and recognition, but losing their specificity.”18 Pierangelini had mothers as kitchen help, not professionals, in his restaurant.

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8. Cuisine can be art if the author and the signature are crystallizations of interdependent relationships Cuisine is art only if the author and the signature do not refer to singular entities, but to chains of relations. In fact, the “making” processes of culinary works and gastronomic experiences involve many actors. The chef ’s signature does not denote that the work is his/ her individual property, although the final result is the most visible one of numerous processes. Cuisine is thus the work of a “maker” that is a manifold subject, involved in the process from the cultivation of the food to its consumption. And the art is accomplished as a plural making of a concrete practice. One of the relevant notions in the institutional field of modern art (also in science, technology, and culture) is that of the author. Every work of art is supposed to have an author and a signature, thus sealing the parentage and also the property. It is also possible that there is more than one author, but that does not affect the substance; the authority of the work of art resides within the author or authors, his/her recognizability as such, and the guarantee of its authenticity signed by the proper names according to the signatures. The question of the author refers back to that of the aura and of the autographic nature of art, and more in general, to ductus.19 Although it has been subjected to radical questioning by much philosophical and semiotic culture over the last fifty years, the ideology of the author is still very influential, as much in the imagination as in cultural and social practices. The representation of cuisine as art is no exception; as we have clarified, this has been characterized in such a direction for at least three centuries. Over the past twenty years, then, with the mediatization of the chef figure and the explosion of the institutional system of the “gastroworld,” the relationship between authorship and cuisine seems to have even strengthened. Signature dishes and cuisine of the author circumscribe the role of the chef, who is an alchemist demiurge creator of works.



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However, the cook is always a tinkerer (bricoleur) as Claude LéviStrauss had understood in The Savage Mind. Tinkering is a manipulation of a material which, in part, has already been obtained, in order to come up with something new from which a personality and a style can emerge. In order to achieve this, the tinkerer operates retrospectively; in fact, he turns to an already established set of tools and materials, taking inventory in order to choose a solution to the problem. The chef, then, is the emblem of the tinkerer, because he operates by “engaging in a dialogue” with the raw materials available and with the tools used, according to their profile and peculiarities. In other words, the creation of the tinkerer is a recreation. Tinkering brings together technique and know-how; creative imagination is a projection of intellectual ability that connects given and known elements. Design is then the ability to produce a destiny from an original source, a memory inscribed in the choice of raw materials, the biographies of the actors in the community, and in the relative relation of forces among their members. The art of cooking lies precisely in a long chain of processes, where those who grow and look after the raw materials (plants and animals that were not created by human beings, yet already have a relationship with them in a biocultural sense) are taken into account, as well as those who process them (female and male cooks/ chefs, home and professional), those who eat them, and even those who consume the food all participate in the artistic/­aesthetic process of cuisine as a relational and dynamic performance. Therefore, authorship in cooking is twice false: for the idea that assumes the possibility of creating something from scratch and for the artifact itself as a representation of the artwork.

9. Cuisine can be art if it is meant as environmental and convivial Cuisine is an art in that it is a plural artifice. The typical individualistic approach of modern art, as articulated in the relation of a chef, a work, and a participant, does not adequately capture the artistic meaning of cuisine. In fact, cuisine is an environmental art since it is an atmospheric aesthetic experience composed of 42

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processes, not of objects. The atmospheric qualities of the cuisine spill over and are reworked in conviviality, in a place where the chef proves to be the host. The concept that best embodies the characteristics of the relational and environmental aspects of cooking as an art is the noble and ancient convivium in its broadest sense. It is in the conviviality that aesthetic qualities grow, develop, and allow us to consider cooking as an art. Cooking develops in a variety of environments: from the fields to the seas, from heaven to earth, gradually shrinking until it arrives at the convivial table. Cooking is a convivial art in a global sense because it is a transformation process that involves complex relationships between organisms: the makers on one side, the edible material—of animal or vegetable origin, composed to a large extent by organisms—on the other. These relationships, which are subject to continuous space-time variables, require interaction in the sense of a continuous correspondence. Ultimately, care, dexterity, skill, and culture are, for the cook, ways to correspond to foods. The project, the intention of the maker, as well as his or her listening to the features and needs of the material, converge in this process. For this reason, often cuisine as art can be seen as a case of environmental art. An ecological artwork, operating through noninvasive interventions that are respectful of the nature and ecology of treated materials; in doing so, it undermines the concept of art as an imposition of form on materials, as malleability at will. As a result, it also undermines the concept of the artist as an individual/author and demiurge, and questions the paradigm of aesthetic capitalism in which art is treated as a commodity and a consumer good. Artists such as Allan Kaprow, Joseph Beuys, Giuseppe Penone, or Andy Goldsworthy promote, in this sense, the “view from below” I propose (lowering strategy) as the crucial move for the establishment of cuisine as art. For Andy Goldsworthy, for example, the strength and effectiveness of his artistic work consists of the energy emanated by the materials. When he throws a bundle of twigs into the air, the result is a “work” that lasts for the length of time that the act requires to unfold in space, releasing the energy of the twigs with the movement, their rise and fall. And with just one shot of the camera, this work becomes fixed and recorded on a support of

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film.20 This example provides a perfect image of the work that goes into cuisine; materials are chosen, physically experienced through the senses, processed and assembled by makers, and finally consumed by other makers, the users, who through their sensitive involvement—the tasting experience—complete the cycle. The concept of convivium has to be framed in this context. The convivium is the place where all of these relationships blend together and develop further. The table—or in any case a flat hard surface, sufficiently able and capacious enough—is their final support. Food, objects, plates, drinks, glasses, cutlery, and people, an inside and an outside: this is the setting where cuisine reaches completion and which will eventually bring together strength, emotions, and feelings such that they can be recognized as art. To consider hospitality as an aesthetic quality and a feature of cuisine as art, in all its possible variants—of design and style—it is clearly necessary to overcome rigid disciplinary boundaries. Cuisine is art if this term—a concept whose significance we need to work on pragmatically—is not confined to a single domain. Aesthetics, history, anthropology, dietetics, economics, and design must be considered complementary perspectives for the full understanding of this topic. The quality of a food and of a meal fit into and always emerge from a hospitable and convivial context. Cuisine as art is a plural artifact that regards processes and not objects, and for this reason its aesthetic values refer to the overall functionality of well-prepared food: nutrition, goodness, taste appreciation, joy of sharing. Only within this specific and irreducible space, traditionally aesthetic qualities—­ goodness, harmony, finesse, elegance, and beauty—are found and mean and express something. Cuisine can be art, but there are no rules or valid precepts in the abstract, nor ideologies of alleged “absolute quality,” that make it so. There is only one way to understand it; one must consciously dive into the atmosphere of every convivium and respond to it in the sense of active correspondence as described above: an interrelation, as a continuous relay among all its actors, the makers of the food, the makers of the tasting experience, and of course the food itself, with its own characteristics and irreducible qualities.

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Chapter 2

Time Changes Everything Futurist/Modernist Cooking Carol Helstosky

Therefore we do not want Italian cooking to remain a museum. We affirm that Italian genius can invent another 3000 dishes, equally good, but more in keeping with the changed sensibility and changed needs of the contemporary generation. —Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Cookbook1

Cooking, like art, is a transformative and dynamic process, intended to surprise, delight, or sometimes provoke the consumer. And, like art, cooking has deployed and directed our creative energy; gastronomy was, and remains, both an art and a science. For much of its history, gastronomy negotiates between innovation and surprise on the one hand, and familiarity and tradition on the other. Some food and art historians have noted the imbalances in those negotiations, particularly when the creator has stressed innovation, surprise, and even shock in preparing and presenting food. Outrageous or avantgarde cooking movements failed to make an immediate impact on food consumption habits, leaving many historians at a loss in terms 45

of explaining the broader significance of such thinking and practice.2 Such was the case with Futurist cooking, which emerged in 1930s Italy, full of ideas about revolutionizing Italian food traditions. For decades, historians of fascism and later, historians of Italian food, have either dismissed or attempted to contextualize Futurist ideas about food and its preparation, yet the ideas and menus comprising The Futurist Cookbook (La Cucina Futurista) evade a thoroughgoing historical interpretation. Was Futurist cooking an elaborate joke, an extended commentary on fascist food policies, a wake-up call to hungry Italians, performance art, or something else entirely? This chapter proposes to compare Futurist cooking with the more recent practice of Modernist cuisine or cooking, also referred to as molecular gastronomy, in the hopes that such a comparison will lay down the foundations for a history of avant-garde or nontraditional food. Such a history takes seriously the continuity of ideas about food, preparation techniques, and the relationship between food and politics. A comparison between Futurist and Modernist cooking reveals striking similarities between the two; both utilized food to direct or control the diners’ minds and bodies, both relied on diverse forms of technology, both deconstructed and reconstructed well-known dishes and dining situations, both elicited simultaneous emotional and intellectual responses to their creations. Both, this chapter argues, sought to challenge the diner to rethink the meaning of food during the eating experience. Both transcended the typical achievements of gastronomy in moving beyond the invention of new unexpected dishes through an emphasis on the newness of a technique or an attitude with regard to eating. Lastly, both Futurist and Modernist cooking regard food and the consumption of food as artistic practices, suitable for extraordinary times as well as the everyday. The comparison takes seriously the idea that Futurist cooking was, indeed, an avant-garde philosophy of food consumption, more readily understood decades after its debut as a culinary call-to-arms against bourgeois mediocrity.3 Put another way, the Futurist appropriation of cooking for revolutionary purposes comes into sharper focus when compared to more recent trends in Modernist cooking, which also have revolutionary implications. Although the two culinary revolutions were decades apart and occurred under very differ46

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ent circumstances, their similarities reveal much about the meaning of avant-garde cuisine, in particular, the transformation of food for the purpose of thinking with, and about, food. Futurist cooking was part of the so-called second wave of Futurism, which debuted as a radical artistic movement with Filippo Marinetti’s daring manifesto of Futurism in 1909. Futurism as an artistic movement had a complex affiliation with Italian fascism. Both Futurism and fascism advocated the completion of the revolution of possibilities begun in the trenches and battlefields of the First World War: violence and struggle were life affirming, and men had a duty to destroy the last remnants of bourgeois civility and political habits. Although Futurists were some of the most ardent supporters of the early fascist regime, individual members were never wholly satisfied with Benito Mussolini’s more pragmatic revolution, thinking that the Duce didn’t go far enough in his policies or prerogatives. Decades old and almost a decade into the fascist revolution, the Futurist artistic movement had become middle aged. Futurists, themselves middle-aged with families, turned their attention to cooking and Italian food habits with the “Futurist Manifesto of Cooking,” launched in December of 1930 by Marinetti and Luigi Colombo (Fillìa) on the pages of La Gazzetta del Popolo in Turin. In order to test out the principles of the manifesto, Futurists proposed new dishes and staged banquets and meals at the Holy Palate in Turin, opened in March 1931. A year later, The Futurist Cookbook was created as a documentation of the movement: manifestos, stories, suggested menus and recipes for a new style of cooking and a new attitude toward food. Futurist cooking may have been part of the movement’s focus on lifestyle, but it was no less radical in its philosophy or intent to revolutionize Italians than other Futurist innovations. Moreover, the choice of food as a vehicle for change was not accidental or serendipitous. Mussolini’s fascist regime (1922–1945) made food and its availability a primary plank of fascist economic and social policies. Certainly food was on the minds of both artist and fascist bureaucrats as Italy managed to weather the worldwide economic crisis, but greater challenges lay ahead. Dreams of resurrecting a vast Italian empire would necessitate a more bountiful food supply or perhaps a better way to utilize available food resources.4 Mussolini had promised a transformation of Italians and Italy but,

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a decade after seizing power, he fell short of satisfying the Futurists, who continued to think about possible means of effecting change, specifically, creating a more virile, martial, and industrious Italian for the mechanized world. In putting forward a theory of Futurist cooking, the Futurists thought about what food should not be, advocating the abolition of culinary traditions and established ways of thinking about food. The manifesto proposed a new way to think about food as a means of sustenance and pleasure. Futurist cooking demanded: • The abolition of pastasciutta5 • The abolition of volume and weight in the conception and evaluation of food • The abolition of traditional mixtures in favor of experimentation with new, apparently absurd mixtures • The abolition of everyday mediocrity from the pleasures of the palate6

The manifesto elaborated on the ideal meal, one in which aesthetics, originality, invention, and the incorporation or involvement of all the senses during consumption were paramount. Although the manifesto was greeted with a combination of ridicule and astonishment, both in and outside of Italy, it set forth the basic principles of Futurist cooking. In the years that followed the publication of the manifesto, Marinetti and others tried to enact these principles, staging banquets at the Holy Palate and elsewhere. Although several scholars have examined Futurist cooking as a type of performance or a cultural pronouncement of the avant-garde, there have been few studies that take Futurist cooking on its own terms, as a statement about food and its place in modern society.7 Frequently overlooked, yet seemingly obvious, was the urgency or revolutionary spirit of Futurist manifestos. Painter Fillìa, responding to criticism from the Italian gastronomic world, emphasized how there was “the urgent need to change our cooking because our whole way of life has changed and because, as it breaks old habits, the palate must be prepared for the foods of the future.”8 It was the sense of urgency behind the Futurist dining spectacle that made, and continues to make, Futurist cooking stand apart from many previous and 48

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subsequent attempts to recreate food or pioneer a technique or style of cooking. The Futurists were hardly interested in food for food’s sake; even highly inventive dishes like “sculpted meat” (a cylinder of minced veal stuffed with eleven types of cooked vegetables, set vertically on a base, balanced on a sausage and chicken base and covered with a thick layer of honey) served a greater purpose, in this instance, evoking images of rural Italian regions for those consuming the meat sculpture. All of their dishes, drinks, and menu plans constituted social and political commentary and were intended to make the diner think. Many of their invented dishes exaggerated feminine (“Strawberry Breasts” imagined breasts sculpted from pink ricotta and candied strawberries) or masculine (“Ultravirile” a repetitive pattern of pink-hued phallic meats garnished with circular or spherical foods) characteristics while a few dishes made reference to mostly carnal acts between the sexes (“Manandwomanatmidnight” a highly suggestive food sculpture meant to be eaten by a couple). Foods were put together in odd ways expressly to remind Italians of their present and future potential under fascism. Dishes evoked Italy’s geographic boundaries (“The Gulf of Trieste,” a mussel risotto served with a dish of vanilla crème), imperial obligations (“Libyan Airplane,” two candied chestnuts steeped in Eau de Cologne and milk, placed on a sculpted airplane of mashed bananas, apples, dates, and peas), or air war and Aeropittura (“Equator + North Pole,” a sea of egg yolks and oysters, out of which rises a cone of whipped egg whites, decorated at the very top with bits of black truffle, evoking an image of black airplanes). Even more pointed were the Futurist-planned banquets, each designed to use food as a means of underscoring the tensions inherent in political and social interactions. The recommendations for “Official Dinner,” for example, openly mocked the pretensions of formal state affairs; no doubt Marinetti and others were still indignant about Italy’s treatment at Versailles.9 A Futurist-inspired banquet would avoid the usual pitfalls of official dinners—embarrassed silences, diplomatic etiquette, and the “low, wan, funereal and banal tone of the dishes”— in favor of a more honest evening. After being warmed up by a few obscene jokes, diners would be served a very sloppy milk and tapioca soup “to ridicule and put to flight all diplomacy and reserve,” then consume such dishes as “The Cannibals sign up at Geneva,” “The

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League of Nations,” and “The Solid Treaty.” The evening ends with the entrance of a “familiar old drunk” who appears and demands more drink, which he receives on the condition that he speaks “for two hours on possible solutions to the problem of disarmament, the revision of treaties and the financial crisis.”10 Food could be used to chide diplomats or predict the future for newlyweds at a wedding banquet or even anticipate vague yearnings for decolonization (“Dinner of White Desire”). Food was prepared and assembled in highly imaginative ways, but such inventions always served to remind the diner of the political context, sometimes to laud fascist solutions but more often to criticize the established world order. Layered between recipes for dishes and events was a good deal of fulmination and righteous indignation regarding consumer habit in fascist Italy. Some of Futurist anger was directed against the particularly Italian habit (in the interwar period) of eating pasta. The Futurist Cookbook began with an extended critique, scientific, aesthetic, and historical, of pasta consumption. Pasta, associated with the slow pace of southern Italian life and the alimentary contributions of Italian emigrants, weighed down the modern, Italian body, poised to move ahead in global economic and political spheres.11 In some of the Futurist recipes, rice substituted for pasta as a dietary starch, echoing the regime’s very public endorsement of rice cultivation and consumption.12 Here the Futurists were consciously rethinking Italian food habits, completely rejecting some, like pasta, while turning others (antipasto or the separation of sweet and savory tastes) upside down. Although Futurists condemned the nation’s love for pasta, they railed against consumers who behaved in “un-Italian” ways, specifically the “xenomanes” who would rather drink cocktails (which the Futurists renamed polibibite) at some swanky bar (which the Futurists renamed quisibeve or “here one drinks”).13 Although the Futurists attempted to revolutionize language as well as food habits, Futurist cooking remained ambivalent, or confused, about what, precisely, Italians should be eating and drinking. Efforts to rename foreign foods and trends, for example, left foreign influence and habits largely intact and the preponderance of recipes for polibibite would indicate that many Futurists were quite fond of the un-Italian habit of drinking cocktails. While not entirely consistent in its revolutionary philosophy, The 50

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Futurist Cookbook was, and still is, a significant document in the history of food. The element of surprise instigated new intellectual and sensual reactions to familiar foods. Odd combinations, for example, challenged diners to think about food in relation to historical experience or memory. Thus, the dousing of meat with eau de cologne evoked the experience of Italian soldiers in World War One, who sanitized dishes and cooking implements with cologne or perfume (several of the Futurists were veterans). Or the pairing of sweet and savory (meat and honey or mussels with vanilla cream), often repeated in the suggested banquets as well as in the recipes for specific dishes, was not entirely new to the traditions of Italian cooking from earlier time periods. Surprise or shock could also be achieved by a quick succession of tastes, either in the same dish or in a series of small foods, like canapés. Any of the tastes might conjure up a memory of a past experience or a desire to do something different. Futurist dishes were designed to initially shock, soothe, or provoke, but the underlying intention was always to make the diner think. Futurist cooking also attempted to get the diner to feel, that is, the act of eating aerofood employed all the senses in frequently elaborate eating sequences: Every dish will thus be preceded by a perfume attuned to it, which will be dispelled from the table by electric fans. Next the use in measured doses of poetry and music as unexpected ingredients to accentuate with their sensual intensity the flavours of a given dish. The second course consists of four parts: on a plate are served one quarter of a fennel bulb, an olive, a candied fruit and a tactile device. The diner eats the olive, then the candied fruit, then the fennel. Contemporaneously, he delicately passes the tips of the index and middle fingers of his left hand over a rectangular device, made of a swatch of red damask, a little square of black velvet and a tiny piece of sandpaper. . . . astonishing results: test them and see.14

Activating all the senses enhanced the dining experience. Futurist cooking proposed to reorganize the senses, so the unpleasant smell that comes from washing dishes would be transformed by a scented soap (a standard practice today). Perhaps, the Futurists wondered,

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people could be nourished by broadcasted radio waves (this idea, they observed, seemed to have escaped Marconi) or consume vitamin pills instead of food. Impatient with the application of science and technology to food processing, the Futurists invented and proposed a battery of scientific instruments for the kitchen: colloidal mills to pulverize flour or dried fruit; atmospheric and vacuum stills to distill flavored alcohol; “ozonizers,” machines designed to give liquids and foods the perfume of ozone; ultraviolet lamps to irradiate foods (and thus make them more digestible); and electrolyzers to “decompose juices and extracts, etc. in such a way as to obtain from a known product a new product with new properties.”15 Existing and proposed machines would infuse familiar foods with new meaning or create entirely new foods. Modes of preparation were distinctively futuristic, seeking to obliterate traditional modes and attitudes toward food, even though diners were frequently urged to think about the past while eating Futurist constructions. For most Italians in the 1930s, Futurist ideas were laughable. After decades of deprivation in a largely subsistence economy, more Italians were able to afford the very foods the Futurists reviled (like pasta). Fascist economic nationalism had insulated Italians from the worst of the global economic crisis and the population was yet to feel the impact of the fascist invasion of Ethiopia and, later, the cost of fighting with Hitler in the Second World War. In other words, the early years of fascism were relatively stable for consumption patterns and a fledgling middle class could now express itself through culinary habits and invented traditions. However, no sooner had Italians created and promoted a bourgeois culinary tradition than the Futurists labeled it passé, insisting upon a total reorganization of food, dishes, and menus as markers of Italian identity. Still, Futurist ideas were dramatic enough to cause an international stir, with some press coverage of the “Futurist Manifesto of Cooking” and the staging of banquets at the Holy Palate restaurant in Turin as well as banquets in Paris. In Italy, the press devoted a great deal of energy to covering the campaign against pasta but after the initial coverage of Futurist culinary invention, journalists, gourmands, and publishers turned their attention to the need for belt tightening, food substitutions, and creative ways to use leftovers, given that Italians once again faced food shortages.16 52

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Following the defeat of fascism and World War II, Futurism and Futurist cooking were forgotten. While Futurist art was rediscovered after the war, Futurist cooking was still considered a curiosity or compartmentalized as part of the “lifestyle” movement within Futurism. In the 1980s, however, the rise of nouvelle cuisine ignited the conversation about the limits of food preparation and the possibility of understanding food as art. Moreover, nouvelle cuisine, by suggesting new ways food could be presented and represented to diners, paved the way for a renewed interest in forms of avant-garde cooking.17 Not surprisingly, La Cucina Futurista was reprinted in Italian and in English in 1986 and 1989, respectively.18 The rise of nouvelle cuisine had another perhaps unintended effect on renewed interest in Futurist cooking. Nouvelle cuisine, with its deliberate manipulation of tastes and (much-ridiculed) emphasis on quality over quantity, laid the foundation for Modernist cuisine. Modernist cuisine or cooking were terms used to refer to the pioneering cooking styles of chefs Ferran Adrià, Grant Achatz, and Heston Blumenthal, among others.19 Modernist cooking is generally characterized by the fusion of art and science in the production of new tastes. The emphasis is on technique, with chefs striving for new flavors and textures through both technique and tools. The fundamental idea behind Modernist cooking is to reinvent cooking, though each Modernist chef approaches this task differently.20 Modernist chefs, the most vocal and published among them being Ferran Adrià, have been compared favorably and unfavorably with Futurist cooks in terms of their approaches to food and their emphasis on surprise and provocation in the dining experience.21 Such comparisons allow us to reevaluate Futurist cooking in light of more contemporary trends. There are of course, distinctions to be made between the two types of cooking. The most obvious one is that today’s Modernist chefs have no explicitly public political positions. Unlike the Futurists, they do not use food to criticize a particular political regime or party, although their food does encourage diners to think differently about eating and about food. Modernist cooking challenges the status quo and in this sense, it is political with a lower case “p” perhaps; in the context of our current concerns about food, Modernist dishes encourage diners to explore their anxieties about global food systems, the ubiquity of food

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processing, and the continuing disparities in diet between the haves and the have-nots. Such encouragement is subtle and limited to those diners who can afford an extraordinarily labor-intensive and expensive multicourse meal. Modernist chefs differ from their counterparts in the more explicitly political slow food movement in that their focus is on changing taste, even if that comes at the expense of more sustainable practices. Ferran Adrià, for example, has been criticized for his use of chemicals and food additives, and it is safe to assume that Modernist cooking does not elevate sustainability, locavore, or organic foodways over the essential transformation of the foods served. Despite these distinctions, the work of Ferran Adrià provides a useful point of comparison with Futurist cooking primarily because Adrià has documented his work and its impact extensively.22 Certainly, Adrià has been called the “father” or founder of contemporary Modernist cooking and/or molecular gastronomy; chefs like Grant Achatz trained (albeit briefly) at Adrià’s El Bulli, a landmark restaurant that launched dozens of culinary careers. Adrià began his culinary career inauspiciously; he cooked to earn money during his required military service. His early lack of exposure to the culinary arts, Adrià argued, worked to his advantage, “For I believe that had I learned from my family, I would have been far less creative in my adult life. The creativity would, I believe, have been smothered from the start, smothered under the weight of tradition.”23 Since Adrià started his culinary career making traditional Catalan dishes, he did not vehemently reject tradition like the Futurists did, although he understood how one’s attitudes and behaviors inhibited creativity. A familiar and oft-repeated story about Adrià’s inspiration for transforming food was his encounter with chef Jacques Maximin, who answered the question “What is creativity?” with the statement, “Creativity is not copying.”24 From that moment on (as Adrià explains), he focused more on technique, as opposed to creating a popular or interesting dish. Adrià also believed that his lack of training or exposure enabled him to imagine, then create, what he considered to be the “truly important thing in cooking,” the ability to invent a technique or process whereby one can create hundreds or thousands of new dishes. His emphasis on technique, adopted and perfected at El Bulli, remakes or reinvents food using technology, the redeployment of the senses, and calling upon 54

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diners to think about and through food during the dining experience. Like the Futurists, Adrià sought different methods and techniques for preparing food in the hopes that these methods would challenge diners to rethink the very meanings of food. In 1990, Adrià spent his time off from the restaurant working on the development of new techniques and what he called “elaborations” to be applied to many different ingredients. At first, Adrià drew his inspiration from spending time with sculptor Xavier MedinaCampeny. While Medina-Campeny worked, Adrià would cook, writing down his ideas in notebooks, recording the daily menus he prepared, and illustrating his notebook with sketches, photographs, and lines of music and poetry. His creations were unusual but not revolutionary, a salad of raw celery and coriander with fried celery leaves and macadamias; raw broad beans with mint jelly and goat brains roasted with lime; chestnut croquettes with dove meat and persimmon; tuna with salsify and veal marrow; a soup of barnacles and potatoes with chervil and poached egg; sea bream with anchovy salt; individual terrines of confit chicken and lobster.25

The dishes illustrate the key points of his developing culinary philosophy: serve small portions, seek new products, work with a contrast of textures and temperatures, assume that all foods have the same potential value (so sardines are worth as much as caviar), and maintain the element of surprise.26 Adrià continued to experiment, refining both philosophy and technique and pushing both to radical ends. Adrià supervised a group of chefs who worked during El Bulli’s off-season at a Barcelona workshop (taller), changing the basic characteristics of food’s forms and flavors using techniques of freezing, emulsification, liquefaction, spherification, and the production of foam. Their efforts call to mind the Futurists, but Adrià’s chefs did not espouse the same manic approach to creating new foods and tastes as Marinetti and his cohort. Instead, they worked according to a system (devised in 1988) for classifying ingredients in different product families (salted, dried, vinegars, poultry). If a specific preparation method worked for an ingredient in a product family, then it could be applied to other ingredients in the

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same family. The collaborative and heavily documented work in the Barcelona taller uses unfamiliar machines and substances (tubs of liquid nitrogen) along with more familiar ones (electric screwdrivers) to produce new flavors and foods.27 If the Futurists had fanciful ideas about machines to produce new tastes, the chefs working in El Bulli’s taller created new tastes through technology, indeed, making the use of technology in the service of taste a standard practice for Modernist cooking. The taller’s systems of classification constituted a language or system of communication. Not surprisingly, more traditional dishes were deconstructed then recreated, yet given their familiar names in what Adrià termed “gastronomic games” for diners at El Bulli. One early example was Two ways of presenting chicken curry, in which the elements of chicken curry are transformed into curry ice cream, apple jelly, coconut soup and chicken juice, and the whole dish is presented in two different ways, both more reminiscent of a dessert than a main course. If the dish had been named Curry ice cream with apple jelly and coconut soup the gastronomic game would not have worked.28

Adrià’s success in breaking down the essential components of a familiar dish, then reimagining them according to different rules calls to mind the Futurists, who also blurred the lines between sweet and savory and served dishes out of the expected sequence. These “gastronomic games,” invented in the workshop and served at the restaurant, encouraged the diner to employ what Adrià termed a sixth sense, a type of intellectual satisfaction that comes with eating a particular dish that surprises or dredges up a specific memory. Deconstructions of familiar and traditional Spanish dishes, served either as cocktails or as edible courses, became standard offerings at El Bulli and later, hallmarks of Modernist cooking. Other senses— sight, hearing, touch, and taste—were constantly manipulated over the course of a dinner at El Bulli. Temperature and texture, for example, could be felt with one’s hands as well as one’s mouth. A dish titled “Mastic+60/spoonful-20” was a hot mastic gelatin eaten with a frozen teaspoon; “Pressed green olives with fennel” was served with a bowl 56

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of fresh fennel fronds into which the diners submerged their hands while eating.29 Modernist cooking, like the Futurist emphasis on tactilism, engaged multiple senses and relied upon the interaction of the senses for the best dining experience. In the same way that Futurist cooking provoked marital discord, saved an individual from suicide, and reminded Italians of their folly, Modernist cooking has provoked existential crises in diners on a few occasions.30 The similarities between Futurist cooking and Modernist cooking tell us much about how food can be understood as an art form. For the Futurists, the connection between food and art was obvious; these were artists turning their attention to the tasks of everyday life in order to bring them more in line with a revolutionary aesthetic philosophy. With respect to Modernist cooking, the chef Grant Achatz is well known for creating food-scapes at his Chicago restaurant Alinea. Ferran Adrià has frequently been compared to an artist in the media and, in 2007, he was invited as an artist to participate in Documenta 12, an international show held every five years in Kassel, Germany.31 Adrià seemed to understand well the confusion about how one could define the significance of what he did. Rather than recreate the restaurant experience in Germany, an effort which would never measure up to the lived experience of a meal at El Bulli, Adrià brought guests to the restaurant. No doubt Adrià was well aware of the significance of place in terms of creating the Modernist dining experience. Adrià has argued that the “notion of creative cuisine” is still in its infancy. Thus, “the idea that a diner can engage with a dish in the same way that a viewer can engage with a work of art is still a new one.” While most diners want the sensual pleasure of eating instead of the obligation to think about what they are eating, Adrià acknowledges that “A dish can satisfy a physiological need or provide pleasure for the senses, but it can also ‘say’ something that stimulates analysis and reflection and provokes a deeper response. Food comes closest to art when there is a desire to engage the diner in this way.”32 While there have been various efforts by artists to use food as a medium to provoke the dining public, Futurist cooking stands out for its efforts to think about the place of food in society and to restructure both food and familiar dishes. Thus, Adrià’s notion of “creative cuisine” has a history that food historians have yet to explore thoroughly.

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In trying to explain the murky origins of food as art, Adrià erroneously observed that food historians have focused primarily on the history of food and its production, rather than the history of fine dining and cuisine, and therefore, we have few studies of more recent movements in contemporary cuisine. Although food history and food studies are relatively recent fields of inquiry, there has been no shortage of histories of cuisine. Chronicling more recent developments in experimental cuisines is problematic, perhaps, given that few chefs have left as extensive a documentation as Adrià or Marinetti. Moreover, it might be difficult for chefs to describe exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it, especially at a time when popular consciousness about food trends is widespread. The presence of critics makes a definition of terms even more difficult.33 And perhaps the most difficult task for the food historian is to understand what is truly revolutionary in terms of cooking and the moment at which food becomes art. Over the last two or three decades, food historians have only begun to chronicle centuries of the history of cuisine, revealing that both food and the status of food is in a state of near-constant revolution, through all forms of processing, not just cooking.34 The fast and sometimes dizzying pace of culinary change is not necessarily a modern phenomenon. What does seem modern, or even avant-garde, is the fact that individuals have noticed contradictions in our eating habits and sought to reverse common culinary wisdom through food preparation . . . but for what ends? The Futurists aspired to a moment when citizens would be fed on vitamin pills and other concoctions to keep them healthy; if one follows that logic, food itself would wind up an artifact in the museums the Futurists so despised. Modernist chefs do not make that radical leap in thinking. They deconstruct and recreate well-known dishes as a way to pay tribute to food. Still, critics and detractors are not convinced that the revolution will be a permanent one, despite the availability of recipes and tools on the Internet and the vigorous attempts to democratize Modernist cooking practices.35 The revolutions proposed by Futurist and Modernist cooking cannot be measured by the impact on food consumption habits or the ways in which they led to lasting changes in food processing and preparation. Thus, evaluating their impact presents a challenge to food 58

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historians seeking clear evidence of culinary transformation. Instead, the impact of these revolutionary movements must be understood in terms of how food was or is perceived in a shifting context. Few understood the full meaning of Futurist cooking in the 1930s. Decades after the Futurist manifesto, we can piece together a philosophy of food that resonates with subsequent culinary trends (nouvelle cuisine, Modernist cooking) and articulates a desire to rethink and recreate food, as prevalent today as it was in the 1930s. Given that Modernist cooking is still developing techniques and articulating its philosophy, it is too soon to evaluate its historical impact. Some journalists may be quick to dismiss Modernist cooking as a culinary trend or fad, but only time will measure the impact of its revolutionary message.



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Chapter 3

From Stove to Screen Food Porn, Professional Chefs, and the Construction of Masculinity in Films Fabio Parasecoli

“Jennifer Freely is upstairs.” These words, delivered by a female maître’d to Udo Croppa, an up-and-coming chef in an Italian restaurant in downtown Manhattan, accelerate the pace of Dinner Rush, a film on the vagaries of the restaurant business.1 Its plot highlights the wrought relationship between an old-school restaurateur and his son, chef Udo, who wants to bring the family establishment into the brave new world of celebrity cooking. Greeting the food critic, with whom he has slept with in the past, he asks her what she is in the mood for. “Absolutely no butter,” she answers in a jaded tone. “I know you can make something fascinating without butter . . . just no chicken. I am in the mood for fish. Maybe shellfish. And you always do such interesting things with pasta.” “Please tell me you have grilled prawns tonight,” adds, in a dreamy voice, the critic’s dining companion, a woman the maître’d identified as the infamous “food nymph.” As soon as Udo steps into the kitchen, magic happens. Lobsters are dropped into a boiling pot of water, spaghetti is deep fried, champagne hisses while being reduced in a small pot over a hot flame. We can see the vapors and the smoke from the stove. The sounds of cooking food are distinctly audible over the loud, nondiegetic jazz soundtrack that accompanies the action. Caviar glistens, carefully handled by expert fingers. Dishes are beautifully plated and artfully drizzled with sauces that fall onto the dishes in slow motion. Knives,

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tongs, and ladles move with grace, turning into tools of artisanal craft and creation. The result—Udo announces—is “Montauk lobster and rock shrimp. It’s in a champagne shallot sauce with vanilla beans. It’s garnished with salmon caviar and tobiko caviar, which has a wasabi flavor. Some chives. And no butter.” The verbal flourish is the perfect accompaniment for the dish, a towering composition that dominates the critic’s table. The splendid food and the reaction it elicits from the two female patrons it was cooked for turn the spotlight on Udo, a charming and handsome young man, and his professional success. He comes across as ambitious, skilled, creative, and media savvy, a mix of qualities that seem increasingly relevant in order to acquire fame in contemporary haute cuisine. Udo’s charisma also manages to get the best out of his employees, in particular the all-male brigade in his kitchen. I lingered on this sequence because it is particularly significant in the narrative of the film, standing out in terms of shots, editing, pace, and style. Other kitchen scenes in Dinner Rush overall embrace a realistic approach, documenting the frantic and noisy working environment of the kitchen and the whirlwind of the dining room. This sequence, instead, fully embraces what has been often referred to as “food porn.” I will use the expression to indicate a set of visual and auditory strategies—shots, camera movements, lighting, sound, and editing—that aim to offer images so pleasurable and attractive that they can satisfy viewers excluded from any actual consumption of food. Just like in pornography, graphic, acoustic, and narrative components are meant to reproduce the physical act for spectators, often achieving comparable levels of excitement. This essay focuses on films about restaurants, professional kitchens, and chefs, as well as their embrace of the “food porn” aesthetics. Semiotics and discourse analysis will be applied in order to identify recurrent visual components and narrative themes and to explore their cultural and ideological impact. By considering films from very different cultures, the essay will also assess the wide diffusion—and uniformity—of both the food porn approach and its use to reinforce traditional gender roles.

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Food, Film, and Gender The use of food in film has been a constant since the inception of the medium. In silent movies, it often served as a pretext for physical action: characters throwing whipped cream pies at each other, or slipping on banana peels, each offering opportunities for visual comedy. As the film industry developed, food was mostly used as a prop. Shared meals offered opportunities for characters to talk with each other, providing important information about themselves and pushing the story ahead. The representation of food objects and practices from specific times and places also provided elements of realism. At times, food was meant to convey sensuality or to bring gender relations to the audience’s attention. In Tom Jones, the male protagonist and his female counterpart engage in the consumption of an abundant meal as a sensual, albeit unusual, form of courtship.2 La Grande Bouffe features many cooking and eating scenes where sex and food are depicted as obsessions and overindulgences for the wealthy.3 In Sweet Movie, the revolutionary Anna, who makes candy in her boat while sailing through the canals of her city, uses her confections to seduce young boys whom she then destroys.4 Yet, despite its recurring presence, food was seldom the protagonist. It was expensive and tedious to prepare appetizing-looking food that could appear consistently enough to maintain the illusion of reality across the many takes required to shoot a scene. Besides, actors loathed eating again and again for each take. In the mid-1980s a new crop of filmmakers brought food to the fore, using it as their main narrative engine and originating what now both critics and audiences frequently refer to as “food films.” Tampopo brought to the screen an unforgettable ensemble of picaresque characters that gravitate around a young single mother and her dream to produce a perfect bowl of ramen noodles.5 The director uses the trope of food both as metaphor and actual instrument of sexual pleasure. A handsome yakuza gangster dips his female companion’s breasts in whipped cream and marinates live shrimp in liquor on her stomach. Later, the two—fully dressed—pass an egg yolk back and forth with their mouths, till the yolk breaks provoking an orgasm in the woman. In both scenes, the male character uses food to establish his control



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over his female counterpart. The gangster appears instead to be on the receiving end when he meets a young female oyster gatherer. The girl uses her knife to pry an oyster open and offers it to the man, who cuts his mouth while slurping the luscious and briny mollusk. The girl then cuts the meat free and slides it on her hand. A drop of his blood falls on it, but nevertheless he eagerly ingests it directly from the girl’s open palm, tickling her. The playful exchange becomes sexually charged when the woman, taking the initiative, licks the blood off the gangster’s mouth and kisses him. In Tampopo we can detect the onset of the food porn aesthetics in the close-ups and the attention to texture and materiality of edible stuff. Furthermore, these visual elements offer a commentary to gender relations, as I will discuss further. Two years later, Babette’s Feast focused on a female French chef who, escaping from the Paris commune, takes refuge among the members of a severe religious community in a tiny hamlet on the coast of Denmark and spends all the money she won in a lottery to offer a magnificent banquet to her hosts.6 In a long and glorious cooking sequence, the filmmaker employs a set of camera movements and shots, ranging from the extreme close-up on the ingredients to the establishing shot of the kitchen, which will constitute the building blocks for the “food porn” visual approach in later movies. Babette’s marvelous cooking skills and her food’s sensuality is mediated by the chef ’s personal sacrifice, which reinforces ideas about women’s role. Her generous and nurturing character ultimately overshadows her impressive professional background—kept as a secret for most of the film—and her culinary virtuosity. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, Her Lover echoed some of the critical themes of the 1970s, connecting food with conspicuous consumption and violence on women.7 The aestheticization of food preparation and consumption extends beyond ingredients and dishes to include a whole restaurant, boasting spectacular edible displays and a cavernous kitchen with workers that remind of characters in Dutch paintings from the seventeenth century. In one of the most memorable sequences, two lovers have sex in a kitchen pantry while the male chef cuts and slices vegetables a few steps from them. The connection between food and sexuality could not be more explicit, underlying the professionalism and skills as the domain of the male chef, and sensu64

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ality and desire—expressed also as culinary taste—as the dangerous world of the female protagonist. The early 1990s saw the increasing success of food-centered films with international hits such as Like Water for Chocolate and Eat Drink Man Woman.8 In the first film, the Mexican filmmaker Fernando Arau uses food porn visuals to tell the story of Tita, a woman who is forced by her mother to take care of the household kitchen, learning both from her native cook and from the French-inflexed culinary fashions of the time (the fictional events take place at the turn of the twentieth century). Cooking becomes Tita’s sole outlet to express her sadness and her passion for a young man who ends up marrying her sister. Those who eat her dishes physically share her emotions and bodily states, including sexual arousal. Despite her almost magical powers, however, Tita is a victim, whose culinary ability becomes her curse, limiting her to the domestic sphere and binding her to a nurturing role that she resents. In Eat Drink Man Woman, the Taiwanese Ang Lee narrates the story of a successful, though aging male chef who is losing his sense of taste. The most unforgettable cooking scenes, which fully embrace and refine the food porn aesthetics, take place in his home kitchen, where he prepares gargantuan meals for his daughters. Despite his intention to nurture his family and to express affection for those whom he loves through food, in the end the culinary prowess he displays in preparing dazzling arrays of dishes reinforce his traits as a successful, professional chef. Viewers are reminded of his status when he is called to solve a culinary emergency during a feast in a huge banquet hall, where he saves the day even without tasting what he makes. His capacity to assess the situation, to make hard decisions, and to guide the kitchen brigades, reflects mainstream ideas about masculinity and the characteristics that men are supposed to embody. In 1996, the film Big Night emerged in the independent film scene in the United States, eventually making its way to mainstream theaters all over the world.9 At the same time, the presence of food in media—especially TV and video—was growing, often employing the same visual approaches. Andrew Chan compares cooking shows to pornography, arguing that they arouse viewers’ senses without any physical participation, messy food preparation, or annoying cleanup.10

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In the food films released since the late 1990s, food constitutes the driving force of the plot, connecting the characters with one another and often becoming the protagonist. Turning points frequently occur during large and elaborate meals, where food resolves conflicts and offers resolutions. The leading characters are often domestic or professional chefs, or at least have some deep connection with food. It is in these films that the food porn aesthetics fully developed.

Food Porn Theory The debate whether a food film genre actually exists as such and why these films increased in popularity from the mid-1980s exceeds this essay’s scope. Whatever one’s position is on the topic, it cannot be denied that, over time, films focusing on food seem to have developed an established visual and aural code to represent cooking and eating scenes, at times referred to as “food porn.” As Fredrick Kaufman observed in his conversation with photographer Barbara Nitke, from a technical point of view food and porn representation do seem to have recourse to the same bag of tricks in terms of engagement of the viewers, shots, lighting, and sound.11 Close-up shots with fading backgrounds emphasize the moistness, texture, and almost tangible qualities of the food represented. Shots focusing on the hands glorify chefs’ dexterity and skills, while larger shots can include table, instruments, and dishes, as well as the face of the cooking character. Establishing shots reveal the cooking environment and the interaction with other characters. The camera frequently uses panning movements, following protagonists in their activities in the kitchen or in the front of a restaurant. Editors daftly switch from one shot to the other, highlighting different aspects of the culinary marvels that unfurl under the viewers’ eyes. Editing can vary from slow motion to slow and meditative sequences, reaching at times a frantic rhythm, depending on the intention of the camera artist. Lighting and lens filters both play an important role in visualizing food in ways that heighten sensuality and in the material qualities of the object represented. Artificial amplification of sounds—made possible by the availability of very sensitive directional microphones— allows viewers to participate in the food preparation, making up for 66

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the lack of smell and flavors. Professionals known as “food stylists” help photographers achieve the desired effect by preparing and displaying the food in appetizing ways. Since what counts are the visuals, not the substance or the taste of the food, ingredients and dishes are often not edible; for instance, soap would be added to coffee to create a light froth, or colored glue is used instead of melted cheese. Furthermore, the photographed objects must be able to withstand long exposition to the bright light of a set, so they are prepared in order to maintain their luscious aspect for a long period of time, which implies at times using wax or polish on the food. When Cockburn, discussing cookbooks, introduced the concept of gastro-porn in 1977, he drew attention to “curious parallels between manuals on sexual techniques and manuals on the preparation of food; the same studious emphasis on leisurely technique, the same apostrophes to the ultimate, heavenly delights. True gastro-porn heightens the excitement and also the sense of the unattainability by proffering colored photographs of various completed recipes.”12 Cockburn also referred to Roland Barthes’s take on food pictures in Elle magazine, a kind of “ornamental cookery” that—according to the French ­theorist—“never show the dishes except from a high angle, as objects at once near and inaccessible, whose consumption can perfectly well be accomplished just by looking.”13 Two years later, in 1979, Michael Jacobson used the expression “food porn” to indicate “food that was so sensationally out of bounds of what a food should be that it deserved to be considered pornographic.”14 By doing so, Jacobson emphasizes connotations of excess and sin, thus introducing moral undertones that were absent in Barthes and Cockburn. In 2003, former New York Times food writer Molly O’Neill described food porn as “prose and recipes so removed from real life that they cannot be used except as vicarious experience.”15 O’Neill introduced a third important component, vicariousness, a particularly contested aspect. Chef Will Goldfarb, for instance, points out that “Where porn is a substitute for the real thing, food television is not a substitute for food,” while Alan Madison observes that “sexy, highly stylized images” have always been “the bread and butter of advertising and marketing.”16 My use of the expression leaves aside the merits and demerits of

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porn per se or any moral judgment of food porn to concentrate on the attempts to entice viewers by showing on screen what stimulates appetites in real life. In Food, Film, and Culture, James Keller argues: The cinematic hunger artists manipulate gustatory imagery in order to increase the sensory response of the film audience to a medium that cannot access smell or taste, but, nevertheless, seeks to create a full sensory response to a strictly visual and auditory medium. Food cinema thus invokes the gustatory appetite in a fashion similar to the arousal of the libido through romantic and sexual imagery, accessing the full sensory experience of the actor and, subsequently and vicariously of the audience.17

As early as in 1981, in her essay Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess, Linda Williams defined horror, porn, and melodrama as “body genres.” By focusing on violence, sex, and emotion, they provide physical jolts and “sensations that are on the verge of respectable.”18 Williams wonders whether the body of the spectator is caught in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotions and sensations shown by the bodies on the screen. Should we add “food films” to this category? Since the early 1990s, a reflection about the body’s participation in the movie-watching experience has developed in film and media theory, reinforcing academia’s growing interest in embodiment.19 Among others, Vivian Sobchack—who in her book Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture refers to “food movies” such as Tampopo, Babette’s Feast, and Like Water for Chocolate—has offered a very stimulating new approach to the issue, analyzing the experience of what she refers to as “the kinesthetic subject” whose senses are blurred. Even at the movies our vision and hearing are informed and given meaning by our other modes of sensory access to the world: our capacity not only to see and to hear but also to touch, to smell, to taste, and always to proprioceptively feel our weight, dimension, gravity, and movement in the world. In sum, the film experience is meaningful not to the dies of our bodies but because of our bodies. Which is to say that movies provoke in us the “carnal thoughts” that ground and inform more conscious analysis.20

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Chefs on Screen As we observed in some of the precursors, in present-day food-­ centered films sensual representations do not limit themselves to draw the audiences and their bodies to what happens on the silver screen. Semiotic and discourse analysis suggests that the images also reveal discrete—but nevertheless effective—ideological negotiations about gender roles and models. Our analysis will start from Big Night because, due to its worldwide distribution and unexpected success, it provided a blueprint for following films, most of which were produced by mainstream industries. Two brothers from Italy open a restaurant on the Jersey Shore in the 1950s, with a menu that defied the expectations of American patrons familiar with Italian American cuisine only. Inevitably, the two brothers’ establishment suffers because the elder—the chef—does not want to compromise his culinary integrity and the traditional ­recipes he grew up with, while the younger—the maître’d—is much more flexible out of worry for their financial situations. In one of the most famous scenes, a woman orders seafood risotto, but when she realizes it does not include big pieces of seafood she also orders a side of spaghetti and meatballs, shocking the chef, who ironically wonders if she may want mashed potatoes on the side. The second part of the movie chronicles a sumptuous dinner that the two brothers organize in honor of Luis Prima, a famous performer who is supposed to visit their establishment. In reality, it is a ruse by a competitor who is jealous of the quality of their food to have them spend their last savings on the feast and force them to close the restaurant. The preparation, the serving, and the consumption of the dinner are filmed using many of the shots and the camera movements we observed in Babette’s Feast and Eat Drink Man Woman, contributing to the crystallization of the food porn style in mainstream food films. Big Night adds shots from above, allowing viewers to assume a position of full control over the food being cooked and eaten. Furthermore, the film draws the audience in by highlighting the dinner guests’ blissful expressions when they taste food, their whispered curiosity about the dishes being served, and their awed commentaries about flavor and smells. The guests become surrogates for the viewers, allowing them to



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participate in the feast even if they cannot actually enjoy it physically. The pairing of shots of food with shots of eaters expressing pleasure has since become a mainstay in the genre. In Big Night food and food porn style were used to illustrate the relationship between the two brothers and between the two men and their romantic interests, while at the same time underlying the two men’s professional and culinary skills. Issues of gender relations and masculinity come to the forefront: to what extent is a nurturing attitude acceptable in men? Can cooking be used to express male traits such as entrepreneurship, determination, and risk taking? As a consequence of Big Night’s commercial success, indicating the existence of food-loving audiences, a few of its themes were borrowed by following productions both in the United States and abroad: among them, the creative chef who is misunderstood by the ignorant public (a tension that often leads to direct confrontation), the chef ’s determination to stick to his or her art even when it is not commercially viable, and his or her emotional unavailability and incapacity to express feelings. Among the numerous films that have employed food porn style shots and editing to celebrate male chefs’ culinary skills, we can mention The God of Cookery from Hong Kong, Ramji Londonwalye and Cheeni Kum from India, Udon and The Chef of South Polar from Japan, Tutte le donne della mia vita from Italy, Le Grand Chef from Korea, Estomago from Brazil, The Chef from France, and Chef from the United States.21 Some of the themes dominating male-centered narratives also emerge in Mostly Martha, a very successful German film that borrows the food porn visual style to highlight a professional female chef ’s talents.22 Martha, unlike Babette in Babette’s Feast or Tita in Like Water for Chocolate, is the star of a trendy fine-dining restaurant. Uncompromising to the point of not caring about patrons’ satisfaction, she is always in control in the kitchen (although suffering from anxieties) and determined to be the best. When her sister dies, she finds herself taking care of her young niece. The relationship between the two seems to be going nowhere until Mario, a male chef from Italy, is hired to help in the restaurant. He is Martha’s total opposite, but despite his loudness, happy-go-lucky attitude, and messiness in

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the kitchen, he manages to communicate with the young girl and, eventually, helps Martha discover her feminine side. In Babette’s Feast, the chef’s femininity is underplayed. She is always wearing modest clothes, and although food shots emphasize her professionalism, her skills are secondary to her generosity and her desire to thank her Danish hosts. The images of Tita’s sensual food instead express her repressed sexuality and strong emotions, for which she is harshly punished. In Martha’s case, food porn shots are used only when she works in the restaurant, and never when she cooks at home for herself, her niece, and her psychotherapist. Domesticity and caregiving do not seem worthy of full attention from the camera. Mario’s cooking and food—expression of nurturing and traditional skills rather than professional mastery—are also filmed in a matter-of-fact style, with little or no attention to their sensual aspect. Their quality is mostly reflected in the girl’s desire to eat and in her joy to do so. The only time when the results of Mario’s talents receive the food porn treatment is when he cooks at Martha’s place, finally managing to break down her barriers and, metaphorically, acquiring control of their relationship, thus assuming his masculine role. The most sensual scene in the movie shows a blindfolded Martha in the kitchen, with Mario across the table feeding her soup with a spoon and asking her to recognize the ingredients. Only when Martha relinquishes control and power do the two finally kiss. Interestingly, the food is barely visible, almost suggesting that food porn is not about pleasure or sex, and above all not about nurturing, but rather about technique, control, willpower, and professional success, often represented as masculine traits. The same tension around a strong-willed woman looking for affirmation in professional kitchens appears in the US remake of Bella Martha, No Reservations and in the Spanish Dieta Mediterránea.23 The latter is the story of Sophia, a young woman who learns how to cook in her parents’ beach tavern on the Mediterranean coast of Spain and does not want to become merely a great chef, but the best. In the initial sequences, the camera does not zoom in on the food Sofia prepares in the tiny tavern’s kitchen. However, frequent scenes of conviviality and appreciation from patrons convey the high quality of Sofia’s cooking. The filmmaker starts using the bag of tricks from food porn only



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when she moves to a larger restaurant. A soundtrack that reminds of porn film music, repetitive and marked by a 1970s-style distorted guitar, accompanies the amplified noises of food being cooked. The filmmaker seems to suggest that food in a domestic or traditional setting does not need the trappings of visual and auditory enhancement to be enjoyed. In the professional world of restaurants, instead, the focus is not so much on nurturing people with whom one shares emotional ties, but rather on asserting one’s abilities and acquiring fame. Patrons are almost an afterthought. These opposite approaches are also embodied by her two men: her husband, who wants her happy in a comfortable but unexciting life, and her lover, who pushes her to follow her passion. When she finds out she is pregnant, Sofia goes back to her parents’ village, but after five years her passion leads her to France. After learning to master French cooking, she returns to the upscale restaurant opened by her two men and named after her. On opening night, she uncorks a celebrative bottle of champagne and she symbolically soaks them both with the foam. The phallic symbolism and the inversion of roles—Sofia is the one who determines everybody’s destiny—is hard to overlook. In fact, she convinces both to become part of a ménage a trois. We soon see them at the breakfast table, Sofia wearing a man’s shirt and the two men naked, discussing their future. As her restaurant becomes successful, we see her creating new dishes with male chefs, who, standing extremely close, cross arms with her in an intimate and sensual fashion. Her kitchen has become the reflection of her unorthodox personal life, eliciting growing criticism in the village. When one of her men moves away, trying to achieve a more mainstream lifestyle, Sofia turns her kitchen into a lab, where she experiments on new dishes. The new environment is slick, all black; everybody wears black uniforms around highly technological machinery. The sensuality of the previous cooking scenes disappears, replaced by scientific precision. Sofia takes advantage of bouts of insomnia to examine the videos of other chefs (Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli and El Celler de Can Roca, both in Catalonia, are featured), while losing her sex drive and turning abusive to her employees.24 Eventually the three move to Australia, open a restaurant, and embrace their unusual family life. 72

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The film expresses a lighthearted critique of traditional gender roles. The great chef is a woman whose sexual appetites cannot be limited by a mainstream nuclear family. Similarly, no man can control her drive and her determination in the kitchen. Her cooking skills are closely connected with her sexuality. Both nudity (mostly masculine) and food porn imagery express her creativity and control; the filmmaker uses them to highlight the direct connection between sex and food, between desire and taste, which allow a woman to freely enjoy men’s bodies the same way she enjoys the flavor of food. What happens when the chef is gay? This is the situation explored by another Spanish film, Chef ’s Special.25 Like in Bella Martha, Maxi, a gay chef, has to take into account family responsibilities: when his ex-wife dies he starts taking care of his children, a teenage boy and a young girl. At the beginning of the film, we hear a voice utter in passionate and sensual tones the ingredients and techniques of a recipe and then muse: Look at this dish, how it insinuates itself, how it tried to seduce us. Am I the only one that hears that? It’s asking us to put it in our mouths, that we enjoy it, because rest assured, here people don’t only come to eat, they come looking for pleasure, to satisfy their fantasies, they want us to fuck them!

Maxi delivers this monologue in a dreamy, lusty voice. Sexuality is more overt and his allusive language revels in double entendres. The chef ’s words are accompanied by food porn shots that illustrate the work of the cooks. The camera pans along the stove, where expert hands sauté bright vegetables in a pan, cut and grill meat, flambé, and carefully pour a sauce on a dish. It then moves to the table where Maxi is giving the last touches to a dish. Only then the camera moves up and shows us the face of the chef and his two assistants, staring at the preparation, and then moves out, revealing the whole kitchen. Maxi turns porn from a metaphor to an actual description of the eating experience, not so subtly equated to a sex act. We see the last food porn sequence at the end of the movie, after Maxi has realized that his family is more important than success. However, the usual images of hands cutting and prepping, camera pans, as well as attention to texture, color, and sounds accompany

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a monologue that is all about tradition, genuine flavors, and grandmother’s cooking. Maxi uses the same words as before: “Look at this dish, how it insinuates itself, how it tried to seduce us.” But this time the monologue does not reach its metaphorical consummation: Maxi’s sous chef interrupts him pointing out that lots of people are waiting for food. Viewers realize that he is working in a new restaurant, much more modest but crowded, full of people enjoying themselves. The pretensions of his previous career are gone, but the passion and the sensuality are still there.

The Cosmopolitan Chef The repetition of themes in films from different countries implies their relevance at the global level to achieve acceptable success in terms of ticket sales and, in certain cases, of interest from critics. Filmmakers assume they can count on a worldwide public of “foodies,” who are ready to consume all forms of media with food at their core, including magazines, books, and TV shows. However, to be well received, films have to employ communication codes, embody values, and illustrate practices that the target audience is familiar with and accepts as representations of either their actual experiences or their aspirations. Knowledge of and access to fine-dining restaurants have become a crucial arena for the globalized elite’s construction of social status and cultural capital, and the media is banking on these phenomena. Like any other medium, food films do not limit themselves to reflect the reality of haute cuisine, but actually participate in shaping it. Far from providing purely discursive commentary, they have an impact on social structures, relationships of power, and economic interests. Both filmmakers and audiences—as well as restaurateurs, critics, food producers, and patrons—are involved stakeholders in the public field of cuisine. The analysis in this article indicates how films about professional chefs enhance their status as creative artists and skilled experts in postindustrial societies. A successful career in a restaurant kitchen is presented as respectable and desirable. The filmmakers’ recourse to food porn aesthetics underlies these values by making cooking and food appealing and sensually compelling. At the same time, 74

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these images unobtrusively reinforce mainstream discourses and hegemonic models of masculinity, even when apparently endorsing unconventional gender roles. In fact, when conveying the abilities of accomplished and determined female chefs in professional kitchens, food porn images often point to their emotional and social inadequacies or to their tortuous personal stories, which find resolution only when they accept their sensuality as men’s objects of desire, their nurturing traits, and their abnegation in their social duties.



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Chapter 4

Spoerri Reads Rumohr The Spirit of Culinary Art Revisited Margherita d’Ayala Valva

Premise, Methodology, and Objectives In this essay, I argue that Daniel Spoerri’s writing on food is a form of palindromic reading. Conducting himself as an all-around amateur (Universaldilettant), Spoerri often chose sources that the scholarly world regarded as heterodox, including cookbooks that bore no temporal distance and that lacked traditional authority. This decision on his part to return to the kitchen and to nature is—as has already been highlighted by other scholars—neither a reactionary nor a Primitivist recourse to tradition, but rather, as will be demonstrated, the development of an already latent form of postmodern kitchen-kitsch.1 This essay takes as its point of departure the footnotes of Spoerri’s Gastronomic Journal (1966–1967), and moves chronologically backward to its sources and cross-references—particularly to the source from which he most profited, Carl Friedrich von Rumohr’s gastronomic treatise The Spirit of Culinary Art (Geist der Kochkunst, 1822, read by Spoerri in its 1966 edition). It thus proposes a backward, or palindromic reading, as the ideal way to decrypt the rationale, to shed light upon the parallels and divergences among the authors, and to examine the dialogue—without distance—between the artist, the English translator, and their intertwined sources.2 My reading espouses a methodological approach that is attentive to the history of knowledge and focuses on artists as readers. There have been very 77

few studies on artists’ libraries or artists’ reading practices, and those undertaken have mainly focused on the early modern era.3 The question regarding how “select” knowledge from books found its way into the heads of artists and was reinterpreted in their own works remains unanswered. Do artists read books in a different way than philosophers and scholars do? Marginal notes and sketches within books are eloquent documents for assessing this particular history regarding artists’ active textual interpretations. Transcriptions and quotations, as in the case of Spoerri, are one way of looking at how authors of the past functioned as companions in the present to the working artist, including the everyday labor that takes place in the kitchen. As textual art sources for artistic production, I take two genres that bear longstanding literary traditions: the art treatise that deals with issues related to craftsmanship, and the cookbook—both of which typically address analogous raw materials.4 Consciously confronting and challenging these sources and literary genres, Spoerri reads, writes, and cooks (though not necessarily in this order).

The Gastronomic Journal: Writing and Editions To Spoerri, writing signifies an autobiographical archaeological assemblage;5 an intricate construction/deconstruction that needs to be analyzed according to the poetics of the topography of chance, namely mapping the references, cases, occasions, and anecdotes given by the artist—akin to what the artist literally did in 1962 when he documented the history of a particular sort of trap-picture: the objects and remnants laying on the table of his room in Paris.6 Similarly, the Gastronomic Itinerary (an anecdotal recipe diary kept by the artist during one month of his stay on the Greek island of Symi in 1966– 1967) assembles pseudo-scholarly references and personal narratives as a form of topographic-artistic-linguistic decontextualization. The linguistic switch contributes to this sense of estrangement: Spoerri has said that he dictated the text to Kichka, his companion in adventure in Symi, and the protagonist of his first trap-picture devoted to food (Kichka’s Breakfast, 1960). As the daughter and sister of teachers, she was naturally able to raise a great deal of discussion about each word and sentence, resulting in a text with a greater control of both 78

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form and language. The text was thus conceived by Spoerri, whose thinking was in keeping with the intricacies of German syntax, and it was then translated into a French that consisted of much simpler sentences and critical constructions; the author later affirmed that he would have written the whole text without any conclusion, since each statement is not final and “needs to be contradicted.”7 He also avows that he began to dictate this diary in order to justify his decision to cease learning how to draw, a discipline he proudly assumes he would never master. This statement is relevant to our discussion: the spoken/ written words, in the unsystematic, fragmentary form of a diary, are chosen as an alternative medium to artistic orthodoxy, just as his snare pictures are a notorious critique—typical of the Nouveau Réalisme— of panel painting. Some passages in his writings (the Journal and the Dissertation on Keftedes) are published in the magazine Le Petit Colosse de Symi, then translated into English by Emmett Williams and assembled in the book The Mythological Travels of a Modern Sir John Mandeville (Plates 4.1 and 4.2). In a later edition, Spoerri incorporates Emmett Williams’s inserts by copying the friendly comments or annotations of his companion, who had conducted significant research on ancient sources.8 Besides being a poet and visual artist very close to Spoerri in the years of Fluxus, Emmett Williams himself was also famously “adept in art-forart cooking,” as the artist defines him in his Dissertation on Keftedes, while recalling his trials on archicooked spinach.9

Spoerri and Rumohr Within this intertwined system (or, more precisely, nonsystem) of references, Rumohr’s Geist der Kochkunst plays the role of a background landscape, seen with a détrompe-l’oeil perspective, analagous to Spoerri’s 1980s assemblages from Bamler’s landscapes. Let me explain what I mean here. Erich Bamler was a painter who specialized in copies, particularly of German genre scenes (from Spitzweg), who died in Munich in 1959 having never achieved notoriety.10 Three decades later, Spoerri became fascinated by the amateurism of Bamler’s career and interpreted his works through a neo-Dadaist lens, reading the representation of caves, towers, chasms, and mountains as vaginal and

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phallic symbols, and the painter as an “unconscious lover of eroticism.”11 He thus used these paintings as the bottom layer for a series of assemblages called Background Landscapes, highlighting new possible readings through mock interventions. A similar case is that of Spoerri’s revisitation of Rumohr’s book Geist der Kochkunst, Plate 4.3 (The Spirit of Culinary Art, 1822). Carl Friedrich von Rumohr (1785–1843) is well known within the discipline of art history for his contribution to the foundational studies on Italian Renaissance art, but his book on culinary art is virtually unknown outside a small circle of German gastronomes.12 Nevertheless, an explicit disavowal of the most orthodox of art-­historical matters can be found among his own words, which were written as an overture to his Geist der Kochkunst: “We should apply Horace’s famous epithet, ‘Mix usefulness with grace,’ exclusively to the art of cookery. This has often been thought of only in terms of the totally useless and completely biased arts of poetry and painting.”13 This statement is truly remarkable, particularly because it was made by someone like Rumohr, a German country-aristocrat, art historian, collector, and artistic mediator, patron, painter, novelist, and agro-historian, who used to call himself a Universaldilettant, having devoted the better part of his life to research on art-historical sources.14 Rumohr not only spoke of cooking as an art (Kochkunst), but established an aesthetic of food that favored the genuine local Urküche (primeval cooking) as opposed to French Schmorküche (over-refined cuisine). He organized culinary art according to Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s norms, distinguishing between severe, gracious, and over-refined styles of cooking, that corresponded respectively to the archaic, Phidian, and Hellenistic styles codified by the art historian/archaeologist. Rumohr was no learned gastronome like Brillat-Savarin, and thus he “risked” more, like all who attempt to contaminate high and low disciplines; he would pay for this choice personally, ultimately being banned from gastronomic circles—for his anti-French polemic—as well as from the scholarly milieu. Anecdotes portraying him as a revolting, fat glutton, who ate with no consideration for etiquette, are commonplace. They were intended to denote both his homosexuality and his choice to devote himself to gastronomy, which was seen as inconsistent with his highbrow role as an art historian. He was indeed a dilettante, in the 80

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Goethian and etymological sense, in that he delighted himself with the matter of his study. Spoerri’s repeated evocations of Rumohr—explicitly or tacitly— during his career nearly reached the extent of personal identification when, in both a 1967 interview and its 2001 replication, he answered the question “How would you ideally define your profession?” with the word Universaldilettant, borrowed from Rumohr.15 Notoriously, Spoerri is also a dancer, publisher, artist, professor, and farmer, and he cultivates an opposition to official culture, the bourgeois, the academic, and all attempts to build “systems.” The choice of Rumohr was thus above all the choice of a figure neglected by official culture because of the breadth and apparently inorganic nature of his interests. To Spoerri, however, amateurism reunifies art and life, in both a Goethian and Fluxus perspective.16 In Rumohr’s experience, gastrosophy originated from everyday praxis and from a personal side-by-side involvement with his cook, Joseph König, who signed the first edition (1822) of his Geist der Kochkunst. The second edition, published ten years later and after Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du goût (1825), reveals that he was the author, and was keenly aware of the educational and polemic character of his work—which is why he has been recently defined as “the Martin Luther in the kingdom of pots and pans.”17 Rumohr’s book is composed of three parts: the first is devoted to the elements and concept of culinary art, animal foodstuffs, and their various cooking forms (roasting, boiling, steaming, and stewing) and conservation; the second part deals with foods and seasonings from the plant world (including flours, bread, pulses, vegetables, and fruits); the third part examines the habits and rituals of eating in different contexts, discusses how to teach people to eat, and identifies the emotions and states of mind that should not be stimulated or encouraged while eating. Geist der Kochkunst is no cookbook, but rather a gastrosophical treatise in which, from the title on, the acts of cooking and eating are identified as forms of art, of which the author intends to investigate viscerally the spirit. The educational, moral, and scientific components are predominant, and there is no trace of the smart chatter and savant humor that characterizes Brillat-Savarin’s more successful book. The word spirit refers to Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois: just as the

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French Enlightenment author analyzed the relations among human laws, their governments, morals, climates, religions, and economies, Rumohr similarly aimed to relate gastronomy to the peoples’ moral and spiritual character, their economy, and their history.18

The Spirit of Culinary Art Revisited When Spoerri wrote his Gastronomic Journal in 1966–1967, he lived in Symi with his friend Kichka Baticheff. The two were an unmarried couple—which caused discomfort among the inhabitants of Symi— and they had individual habits of cooking and eating (Spoerri mentioned that even when the couple lived in Paris along with Emmet Williams, they used three different sorts of toilet paper). Ironically, despite the frequency of animal slaughtering and of cooking, the man pretended that he preferred vegetables and the woman that she was on diet. That is to say, no circumstances could be farther from Rumohr’s ideal of the traditional bourgeois kitchen, nor is the chosen diary/ literary style of writing more distant from the treatise: the artist’s gastronomic journal traditionally registers the rituals, the recurrent obsessions, and “anecdoted chance” of everyday praxis19—one need only think of the Italian Mannerist painter Pontormo’s Diary20—while the treatise attempts to build a scientific system (though—it must be said—Rumohr’s text fails to achieve his goal, due to the inorganic structure and the amateurish character of his text). Furthermore, Spoerri’s conviviality toward group experience (from the Nouveau Réalisme group to his park in Seggiano harboring his friends’ sculptures) contrasts with Rumohr’s frustrated attempts to follow and educate a convivium of artists.21 Nevertheless, despite all these divergences, Spoerri’s experience in Symi reanimates the Spirit of Culinary Art, which is given preference above French sources. The first footnote devoted to Ruhmor from Spoerri’s Gastronomic Journal synthetizes his book perfectly, catching better than any other exegete of the German writer the authentic spirit of his conception of culinary art: I begin here my comparative citations with the book Geist der Kochkunst—The Spirit of the Art of Cooking—by Karl Friedrich

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von Rumohr. Rumohr, who belonged to the lesser German nobility, was crabby and intelligent, a great gourmet, and astonishingly in advance of his time in his taste for natural and simple cooking. Instead of beginning with recipes, he starts his first chapter with the qualities of water, continues logically with what one puts into it, and ends with cooking without water, i.e. roasts. His book appeared in 1822, several years before The Physiology of Taste by his confrère Brillat-Savarin whom he cites, in the notes to the new edition of his book in 1832 without seeming to be very impressed. In general, he finds French cooking affected in its elaborate preparations, prefers Italian cooking, but concedes to the French the invention of one of the principles of cooking that he appreciates most: bouillis. But alas, he hasn’t been as lucky as Brillat-Savarin, I don’t know why, and his book remains a literary curiosity, no one heeding his advice.22

Rumohr’s and Spoerri’s Urküche So, why this choice? Why is Spoerri’s return to the kitchen supported by a book such as Rumohr’s? For three fundamental reasons: first, the theoretical dimension of his source (which is no cookbook, rather, it is more interested in defining Urküche,23 or the fundamentals of culinary art); second, its apolitical proposal of an aesthetic of everyday cooking and eating based on local traditions as opposed to haute cuisine; and third, its belonging to the culture of encyclopedism, to which the artist looks with affection and irony. The attention given to Urküche is the fundamental reason for Spoerri’s back-to-the-kitchen exile in Symi, though his approach to such ethnographical themes (for example, the social significance of exchanging and giving food on festive occasions intrigues him) is decidedly antiscientific.24 His Journal, like Rumohr’s Geist der Kochkunst, is also no cookbook, it is rather a “Kochfragebuch” (a “questioning cookbook”), as the author will later realize: a book dealing with and questioning the basis of food and cooking.25 Both the ingredients and the methods of preparation are investigated, and extravagant sources are browsed in order to identify culinary archetypes, or to detect the perfect recipe for keftedes (meatballs). In Symi, Spoerri claims he has d ­ iscovered the



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authentic Ursuppe, the primal broth described by Rumohr, identifying it with the Greek shepherds’ soup trakhana: I myself prefer trakhana, one of the best grain soups I know of, and at the same time a complete food, prepared by the shepherds in advance for the winter. [. . .] And who knows if this isn’t the famous Urbrei, the primal broth of Rumohr’s researches, which he believed to have found in bread soup? And today I have a tendency to believe it, for with the help of Kichka’s sister I have traced the etymological affinities of the word brot in all the Germanic and Romance languages. [. . .] All this gives me reason to trust the veracity of Rumohr’s intuition.26

Bread—like meat, blood, and eggs, all primeval elements of food culture—is a main interest of the artist’s experimentations in culinary taboo, dating back to the 1961 exhibit at Addi Köpcke’s gallery when garbage was baked into bread and continuing in 1972 with the Bread dough objects.27 Again, when recalling his first period of hunger in Paris, when he was obliged to eat a soup made of broth and bread, he mentions that he felt dishonored by the fact that Rumohr had defined this bread soup as the Ursuppe. However, in this same text, his division of culinary art among roasted, boiled, and steamed foods and soups is sketched very much according to Geist der Kochkunst.28 In fact, Spoerri understands that Rumohr’s insistence on the aurea mediocritas (the golden mean between the severe and the over-refined styles of cooking) is not a social reference to bourgeois cooking, but an aesthetic proposal for everyday cooking based on local traditions: this is why when he repeatedly affirms that Eat Art has nothing to do with haute cuisine,29 we can understand his choice of Rumohr instead of Brillat-Savarin (though Spoerri is also ironic about Rumohr’s obstinate francophobia.)30 Spoerri is so aware of the way and the reason he is dealing with food that early on he seems to disavow the sense of his own Eat Art experimentations as “monkey business cooking,” when speaking of close-to-nature Symi, when he describes the meaning of bread, or when he later adds a quotation from Rumohr to fit with his evocation of Symi’s “idyllic” social order based on poverty.31 He will come back to Rumohr in 1974, while speaking in front of his Cuisine for the Poor at the Centre d’Art Pander, Amsterdam: there again he contrasts Rumohr with Brillat-Savarin, and he states that Rumohr’s 84

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book is more veristic, because it is nearer than the Frenchman’s to today’s dietary norms. He goes on to analyze the various social aspects of cuisine, attributing his rejection of unhealthful haute cuisine not to political issues, but to Rumohr.32 Furthermore, The Spirit of Culinary Art is not only about cooking; it also deals with the entire process of both cooking and eating, including its moral and cultural significance, which aligns perfectly with Spoerri’s Eat Art interest.33

The Intertextual Dialogue among Sources Nevertheless, Aurea mediocritas is the ideal target to be subverted by Spoerri’s conscious art pour l’art and his taboo experimentations, both the written recipes and the culinary artistic practice. For example, the menu travesti of the 1970s, where food was masked to confuse the senses, is the perfect example of this kind of attitude, triggering an aesthetic discourse on taste by concealing the natural flavors of the ingredients: needless to say, these sorts of experiments would have disgusted Rumohr. In his Dissertation on Keftedes (Plate 4.4, also written in Symi during the same period and later included in the English edition of The Mythological Travels), Spoerri describes recipes of meatballs made of meat, fish, bread, vegetables, innards, and blood soups (for example, the Swedish Svartsoppa, or black soup), which “would have revolted Rumohr, who never wearied, a century ago, in his fight against overcooked foods.”34 Mentioning a meatball stuffing from Apicius “to which they could really give the palm for the premasticated and the archicooked,” he appropriates a recipe cited by Rumohr, who in turn quotes Apicius in a tendentious way, mixing three recipes in order to demonstrate the blend of flavors in the over-refined cooking of decadent Rome.35 The artist perceives Rumohr’s trick in the first edition of his Journal and extensively demonstrates his intuition in the German 1995 edition.36 This example is particularly relevant because it shows the fun that Spoerri has in letting his authors dialogue before and with him: “See how chance brings things together!” he would comment, in a footnote referring to other messy cross-references from Lynceus of Samos, Athenaeus of Naukratis, and his French and English translators Desrousseaux and Gulick.37

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The mocking of academic culture can be perceived throughout the entire book. First, in the cover and title chosen by his friend and translator Emmett Williams for the English edition, who finds that the title “Mythological Travels somehow fits Spoerri’s first uncensored poetic travel adventures very well, and furnishes a solid clue to the almost perverse infatuation with magic, mythology.”38 Second, this level of reading can be clearly perceived through an analysis of the crossed mock-scholarly quotations from heterodox sources contained in the footnotes and in the Dissertation on Keftedes parodying the scholarly culture represented by his uncle, rector of the University of Zurich: Dissertation: A word that evokes my youth and the slight augmentation of allowance, strictly limited by my aunt (my guardian in those days), whenever my uncle, rector of the University of Zurich, would palm off on me a couple of old theses to sell in the second-hand bookshops of the old quarter, leaving to me any profits thus obtained. “Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde . . .” is a phrase that sticks with me, and I use it in honor of my uncle, but with the certainty that I will never become a doctor es keftedes.39

In the Journal, besides Rumohr, the other main source mentioned is Athenaeus of Naucratis, whose Deipnosophists or The Sophists at Dinner he defines as “a collection of windy discourses” and “a mass of odd quotations,” and would indeed account for his interest in him.40 The 1995 edition also cites his cannibalistic cookbook assembled for the Library of Recipe Books, dating back to the 1980s. The Dissertation on Keftedes even contains a reference list, as seen in scholarly dissertations, but it is obviously a mock bibliography. In this book, defined by Neumann as “the meatball’s anti-cultural history,”41 the author mentions texts—Lévi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked and Michel Foucault’s Histoire de la folie à l’age classique—which he claims he hasn’t read and has no intention to read, though, as Novero points out, these are the authorial points of reference for his notions of the anthropology of food and archaeology.42 He also cites heterodox sources (his own book, Julia Child’s television program, Alice Toklas’s cookbook, Ali Bab’s Gastronomie pratique, “not to be confused with Ali Baba,” sparse recipes from his friends and finally, last but not least, 86

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Prosper Montagné’s Larousse gastronomique, which he claims to criticize because he likes so much).43 Some of these recipes for keftedes, such as the Christmas Pudding, require a long preparation time (one to two months) and give Spoerri the opportunity to quibble ironically over Lévi-Strauss’s categories of the raw and the cooked, to which he adds the premasticated, the biscuit twice cooked, the triscuit thrice cooked, up to the archicuit, the archicooked. Besides the anthropological issue and art-for-art’s-sake experimentations, his interest in keftedes are given two more prosaic and simple explanations. They are the perfect “recipes for alcoholics” and the typical example of cooking made with poor ingredients, which undermine all his previous arguments: “and that is why my whole preceding big theory about conglomerates, about civilization, about the appropriation of nature and all that tralala crumbles away in keftedes.”44

Mythologies and Disguises, Nature and Artifice Disguised as a nineteenth-century gastrosoph—as in the playful banquets attended by friends dressed up as Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Lessing, and Kleist—Spoerri looks with curiosity, affection, and irony to the culture of encyclopedism.45 His assemblages and collections of objets trouvés and curiosities and his writings are the result of a similar attitude, polluting the Darwinian spirit of encyclopedism (revisited in the détrompe-l’oeil series Encyclopédie de Diderot et d’Alambert) with the mix of naturalia/artificialia from the Wunderkammer. For example, his Eggcyclopedia is both a collection of kitchen tools for the egg—the primeval food par excellence—and a (lost) collection of quotations from books where the egg is mentioned. Similar parallels between words and artistic interventions can be made for the Gastronomic Journal, as we have seen. However, Rumohr is not only a piece from one of Spoerri’s collections of curiosities, but also a character playing an important role in his musée sentimental, an alter-ego figure to the artist, as we have seen, or, within the Gastronomic Journal, to Kosta, his and Kichka’s host and main character of the mythology created in Symi (calling himself Theos because he claimed to hold the truth and the height of a

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god). Culinarily speaking, Kosta always agrees with Rumohr, defining Spoerri’s cooking trials as “monkey business cooking.” He is for “clean cooking” made of simple ingredients and against French elaborate cuisine: “Kosta, not up to the mark since the tempest, watching me at work delivered a discourse on ‘monkey business cooking,’ suggesting that I burn my Larousse gastronomique, that it was all just complicated rubbish, unhealthy, and that only in Symi can you find really ‘clean cooking,’ enumerating for me the only true foods: potatoes, beans, macaroni, tomatoes and lemons.”46 Like Rumohr, Kosta hardly hides his perplexities about the “extravagant” mixtures disguising original flavors: “We also gave a plate to Kosta, who found the rice all right, but noticed it contained raisins, and we could read in his malicious looks that he found such mixtures ‘monkey business’ like Rumohr.”47 Spoerri’s reading and critique is, after all, an oedipal deconstruction and revisitation of his own, especially German-based, culture, through a similar sort of Genetic Chain of a Private Flea Market as the one displayed in Milan in 2000, mixing together objects with great affective meaning: from nineteenth-century books such as Max und Moritz (Max & Morimal Art, from Wilhelm Busch’s blackly humorous children’s tale) to Rumohr and his randomly collected objects such as kitchen tools and Bamler’s paintings. His research is the new detail added to the foreground of a landscape, adding new meaning to the picturesque view, the painted one (Bamler’s Background landscapes) and the real (today’s Seggiano’s park). The conflict between nature and artifice is a constant in Spoerri’s practice, symbolically close to the spirit of Georgofili’s Enlightenment interests, and culturally disposed to a critical ironic and postmodern attitude. When enumerating the plants in his garden in Symi, Spoerri writes: “If anyone had predicted fifteen years ago that I would become interested in nature, I would have taken him for a fool, in days when, strutting around France as a guide for German tourists, I refused to lower myself to stop the bus and admire a sunset, explaining that the purpose of the trip was to visit Gothic and Romanesque churches and not the sanctimonious contemplation of the landscape.”48 Hence, Rumohr’s insistence on a form of cooking close to nature can be related to Spoerri’s search for objects rich in history, even personal history (Rumohr’s Urspeise),49 once newly found (the objet trouvé of 88

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Nouveau Réalisme), and eventually recontextualized, in a primeval environment (Symi, Seggiano), in his back-to-the-kitchen (Symi) and back-to-nature (Seggiano) lives, and eventually close to themes of ecosustainability50 and to the rising movement (later the slow food movement) of the Italian left gathering around the magazine La Gola in the 1980s.51 Except for some foods randomly available at the market or objets-trouvés driven by chance, for example, Worcestershire sauce, kidney beans sent from the United States, and canned food and French products brought by Mrs. Baticheff, Kichka’s mother, the artist disposes of the seasonal foods of the island and he praises the advantages of local foods: I myself am an adept at international cooking, and I try everything if I can find the ingredients. But I am also conscious of the fact that these strange mixtures of different culinary principles can lead to a derangement of taste. For while such and such a highly spiced dish is suitable to a hot climate, another may be too fat to fit another geographical region. Not to mention the bottle of fine Rhine wine that tasted sour after traveling only 50 miles in my car, or of the Epesse, from Lake Leman, which the vintners refuse to let “climb the hill,” and advise you to drink it on the spot.52

Hence we find his refusal to include his Eat Art among Nouvelle Cuisine, and the primary role played by the “food of the poor.” When writing about bread, the basis of food culture, and the use he has made of it in the trash baked into loaves of bread in the 1962 exhibit at Addi Köpcke’s gallery, he recalls the difference between the Parisian milieu and Symi, and the limited room left to experimentalism in a place where bread holds no meaning beyond that of nourishment. (Though Rumohr himself, due to his strong Francophobia, imagines something similar—and Spoerri doesn’t fail to triumphantly notice it—when he claims that the Parisians put pigeon dung in bread dough as a form of yeast.) He finds “a certain embarrassment even in analyzing the motives of my interest in cooking, which in itself proves that I am far from hunger. Not to speak of the objects immobilized in my assemblages, for no Symiot would understand the sense of them.”53 Spoerri

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reveals this same embarrassment when dealing with the inhabitants of Seggiano, who he is sure won’t understand the reasons for his art.54

Reading/Writing/Eating Backward In the end, however, Spoerri’s culinary performance through reading and writing of food is all based around digestion, which really bears the most important questions related to food, to self-preservation, and to the experience of cyclicality: life, consumption, and death. As in Pontormo’s diary, which included a detailed account of foods eaten, symptoms of illness, and bowel movements, Spoerri’s concern and obsession with life and death is the substance of his artistic reflection on food, based—like pop art’s research by other means—on the idea of vanitas and memento mori.55 The film Resurrection, produced in 1968 by Tony Morgan according to Spoerri’s script, is a work of research conducted backward on the history of a piece of meat from the feces through the body all the way to the grazing cow, because as the artist writes in his Journal, “to talk about cooking is automatically to talk about the digestive system.”56 Spoerri’s reading and writing works both forward (the text) and backward (the subtext), perusing Rumohr and his sources in the quest for culinary palindromes.

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part II

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Food Art

Multisensoriality and Experience

Chapter 5

Food, Decay, and Disgust Paul McCarthy’s Bossy Burger as Contemporary Still Life Anja Foerschner

In the wake of the reformation, which transformed Dutch society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, art was no longer reserved for churches and religious purposes, but rather found its way into the private realm.1 Food still lifes were among the genres that quickly gained popularity. Tables richly decorated with meats and exotic fruit, shellfish, wine, and opulent cakes, appealing to the senses were created by artists such as Pieter Claesz, Willem Claesz, Willem Heda, or Jan Davidsz de Heem for private enjoyment. One could marvel at the artists’ exquisite skills in depicting their subject matter in photographic detail, finely nuanced colors, and elaborate compositions.2 More than being a matter of pleasurable contemplation, food still lifes were also clearly mirrors of the prevalent social and cultural circumstances: the Dutch Republic’s global expansion and increasing economic wealth as well as the internal political, religious, and social conflicts of the period. The opulent tables constituting food still lifes tell a story of prosperity and affluence, but at the same time the paintings also reflect the uncertainty that accompanied the changes in Dutch society, and bear warnings of the vanity and transience of this “Golden Age.” Articulated in subtle references and symbolism, such as overripe fruit and meat, these reminders of Vanitas in food still lifes do not diminish the paintings’ highly aesthetic quality. 93

Even though Paul McCarthy’s (b. 1945, Salt Lake City) approach of combining performance with installations, such as his messy use of food and its decay in the installation, could initially not seem further from the sensuous renderings of food in the Dutch Baroque, I argue that both share a similar statement: of a culture of superabundance answered with surfeit. In this way, a consumer society driven by materialistic pleasure is confronted with its transient nature. Even though food still life painting equally exists in other geographical areas and historical eras, the painterly products of the Dutch Baroque distinguish themselves by bearing immediate references to and carrying statements about their cultural background. I argue that the characteristics and conflicts of the globalized, capitalist society out of which they were born are not unlike the socioeconomic circumstances we encounter today. I offer an interpretation of the North American artist’s Bossy Burger (1991) as a contemporary food still life within the parameters of its Dutch predecessors and take a closer look at what reference his work then has for an understanding of our Western culture. Food has always been an integral part of the works of Paul McCarthy; in his performances of the 1960s and 1970s he choked on sausages (Hot Dog, 1974), covered his wife, Karen, in ketchup (Karen Ketchup Dream, 1974), and sexually assaulted piles of meat (Sailor’s Delight, 1975). Since the beginning of the 1990s, his works have become more elaborate with the acquisition or construction of specific sets, the involvement of masks and props, or the introduction of actors. In the performance to Bossy Burger, McCarthy’s first work of this particular kind, he parodies a TV cooking show, which, at that time, had gained huge popularity in US television. In this performance, which unfolds in the old TV set of a 1960s sitcom called Family Affairs, McCarthy is clad in a chef ’s costume and wears a mask depicting Alfred E. Neuman, cover boy of Mad Magazine. Contrary to the appetizing setup of a cooking show, the artist lets his food preparation get out of hand. He incoherently handles pots and glasses while crying, moaning, and mumbling incomprehensible words, in short: acting very confused. Trapped in the cubic set, which can only be viewed through small windows, he empties can after can of ketchup, mayonnaise, and milk, and disperses, smears, and splashes them all over the environment and his body (Plate 5.1). 94

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Even though later pieces like Tokyo Santa (1996), Houseboat Party (2005), or Pirate Party (2005) take different narratives and topics as starting points (Santa Claus, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean, respectively), the use of food as a major aspect of performing remained central to all of McCarthy’s performative installations. Accordingly, observations made in the following text about Bossy Burger apply equally to later works of the artist. Performances such as Bossy Burger serve as “initialization ritual” for McCarthy’s installations, giving the artwork its final appearance in that moment.3 Once the cameras are turned off, everything remains as is: scattered props and tools, puddles, stains, and holes in the wall. When exhibited, the installation is meticulously set up with every item at the exact spot it had been located at the end of the performance, which is projected adjacent to the installation on monitors. Of particular interest is the processuality that works like these are subjected to. The continuous development of an artwork—its constant change—is of vital importance to the artist and accounts for the startling complexity of many of his pieces.4 The processuality of performance and set inevitably leads to an increasing abstraction of the latter—both in a literal as well as a figurative way. The thoroughly conceptualized setting and equipment are set on a journey into the unknown once the performance starts. In this course, the appearance of the environment shifts from a clean, clearly outlined set to a complex, indefinable construct, with food and liquids enforcing the blurring of levels and lines. The edible substances, which form the haptic basis of the performance, contribute to the notion of processuality with their amorphous consistency. After the performance ends, they guarantee for the installation to remain in a self-generated process for decades. Dispersed all over the set, they follow their natural course of decay with their constantly changing odor, color, and texture (Plate 5.2, 5.3). 

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With his reference to the act of food preparation, McCarthy deals with one of the epitomes of transient arts. Claude Lévi-Strauss had defined cooking as the civilizing act of mediating nature and culture, in which the raw, and the primal, is gradually refined into the cooked,

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the eatable.5 Nature is being transformed into culture. However, the result is not lasting as the organic ingredients of meals and drinks will eventually start to perish. Leaving aside the fact that most food today, especially the items McCarthy chooses, is far from being a natural product, the artist’s messy use of food opposes the cultural process of cooking: in Bossy Burger, a child that appears prematurely aged transforms the highly processed food back into a primal substance. The performer-as-cook’s interaction with food is neither careful nor does it follow the standards of hygiene and cleanliness, but instead seems rather unsophisticated. Bit by bit, the edible ingredients disintegrate, and slowly, the appearance of the “cook” degenerates. The result— food splashed all over the environment—is far from a tastefully composed meal.6 The emergence of TV cooking shows in the mid-1940s brought the act of food preparation out of the private space of the domestic kitchen into the realm of the public. In the 1980s and 1990s, the number of television cooking shows increased and formats such as The Essence of Emeril, Cucina Amore, or The Urban Peasant created an idealized food-making culture, that mediated concepts of proper eating, quality ingredients, and correct food preparation skills while countering the formerly dominant phenomenon of convenience food and fast food. The act of cooking in a cooking show itself is a highly culturized performance; a stage is being created on which the cook performs his duty and follows the fixed script of his menu, equipped with various tools. Selected steps of the food preparation—its transformation from mere organic substance to culturized and aestheticized item—are captured in order to give the viewer the necessary guidelines needed to achieve the result himself. The cook presents the viewer with an ideal version, establishing rules and norms surrounding food, its handling, and preparation. Considering how closely related food is with our social life, however, the instructional aspect does not stop here: “cooking shows teach viewers not simply how to cook but how to live.”7 Art using edible substances as a medium addresses the viewer in the most immediate way as food, especially when actually present, appeals to us in our essential, creatural conditionality as living organisms. Of considerable importance in McCarthy’s case, however, is not only how he uses food and liquids, but also what kind of items 96

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he chooses. Food is a vital aspect of personal and cultural identity and often carries numerous associations. With ketchup, mayonnaise, or hot dogs, Paul McCarthy deals with edible icons of US-American consumer culture. Gaining popularity in the postwar period—McCarthy’s youth—they became a symbol of the dawn of a new era, a time associated with notions of innovation, prosperity, and the diminution of social distinctions. Universally familiar, the substances used by McCarthy signify convenience, versatility, recognizability, and general availability, and therewith represent the self-conception of a consumer culture that has set those attributes as its standards in numerous aspects of life. In this culture, food is the most essential and ubiquitous of consumer goods—a cheap and easy commodity that exists in superabundance. At the same time, it is under close scrutiny and regulated like probably never before. Our eating habits and the food we choose define who we are and where we are positioned in society. With ever new insights and ideals, from diets, to food preparation, and eating trends such as low-carb or molecular gastronomy, to genetically or chemically modified food, both science and consumerism create an atmosphere of uncertainty and failure, which makes the natural act of eating increasingly difficult. The need to control food and food intake as well as its high social significance have become so dominant that the pleasure (and necessary process) of eating is often replaced by frustration and fear. The relation between food and body is a terrain characterized by diametrically opposed concepts: happiness and compulsion, restriction and obsession, pleasure and disgust. The experimentation with food in excess in Bossy Burger violates the rules and restrictions with which food is encoded. Furthermore, the work transgresses the principles of hygiene, cleanliness, and order that are fundamental to consumer society.8 These principles today are more than mere guidelines of appearance and behavior, but are rather equaled with socially relevant attributes like success, health, reliability, or integrity. Not complying with them accordingly can imply inadequateness, social failure, and marginalization.9 This heightened significance makes works like Bossy Burger even more precarious as they threaten the social order. McCarthy ventures dangerously close to the “lower” instincts that are supposed to be all but omitted in today’s ideal of food consumption. Those instincts, and the dirt and chaos

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they entail in Bossy Burger, trigger disgust—an emotion of considerable importance for both individuals and society. As will be shown, it offers the principal point with which the Los Angeles artist’s work can be related to a traditional food still life. 

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Disgust is a multilayered phenomenon, which makes it difficult to find or frame a uniform definition. Generally speaking, it is triggered by a transgression of physical and psychological boundaries. It constitutes an unwanted proximity, a presence that forces itself on us and is perceived as contamination of one’s personal space. The reaction is a violent attempt to create distance between oneself and the disgusting element. Room for reflection is not given.10 The emotion, which still is relatively underrepresented in scholarly research, has biological as well as social functions with food being a decisive factor in both.11 Biologically, disgust keeps the human body enclosed and secluded from the external world. The body’s boundaries are protected in two ways: for one, disgust takes effect when the body discloses its interiors and reveals the processes and functions that identify it as a natural organism. This explains why orifices and bodily fluids are perceived as disgusting—at least from a certain age on. At the same time, the emotion also prevents potentially harmful substances from entering the body. Those substances concern organic matter related to disease and infection: pus, excrement, insects, but also nondigestible foods or products of decay like rotten food.12 In his anthropological work, Immanuel Kant developed thoughts on the protective function of disgust by identifying surfeit as one of its triggers—a thought that was later taken up by Aurel Kolnai. For Kant and Kolnai, disgusting surfeit can pertain to biological needs like sex, abstract concepts like beauty, or physical factors such as food.13 The pleasure offered by those factors eventually satiates. If the input does not cease then, pleasurable satiation reverts into rejection. And indeed, the unpleasant feeling of having overeaten, the nausea and pain, and the undelightful sight of more food is a quite familiar one. The biological function of disgust becomes apparent again as the emotion protects us from overindulging, which could be dangerous for our system. The mechanism to create distance in this case is quite 98

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obvious when the food is being forcefully removed from the body by vomiting. The large amounts of ketchup and mayonnaise that appear in Bossy Burger thus not only offend against the rules of food restriction and eating manners, we furthermore are also disgusted by the excess that transgresses the principles of pleasure and even recognizes a latent threat to our vital system. The disgust experienced in the face of surfeit also illustrates the social function of the emotion. By establishing and guarding social and even moral rules, which also apply to food, disgust ensures to a certain degree our coexistence.14 Anthropologist Mary Douglas had assigned a special significance to the human body and its “disgusting interior” in relation to social order: The body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious: [. . .] We cannot possibly interpret rituals concerning excreta, breast milk, saliva and the rest unless we are prepared to see in the body a symbol of society, and to see the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body.15

According to Douglas, a clean, flawless, enclosed body represents an ideally functioning social order, whereas dirt endangers this order. Accordingly, the areas where the human body comes into contact with its environment are the areas that allow entrance into and departure from the social order. With her theory of the abject, Julia Kristeva develops a concept of a certain state of affection, which shows strong parallels to the human emotion of disgust. She uses the term abjection for the human reaction to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of distinction between subject and object or between self and other. The types of reaction Kristeva describes, such as horror, vomiting, repulsion, are very similar to the ones we display when being disgusted. The same can be said for objects that evoke abjection, for which Kristeva names filth, decay, or bodily fluids alongside moral triggers such as criminal actions, anything that “does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”16 Kristeva states that the most elementary and archaic form of

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abjection presents itself in relation to food. It is via food, through its own negotiation of the world and its edible manifestations, that the subject can set itself apart from the “other,” and can establish a boundary and become itself. But since food, in Kristeva’s opinion, is not an “other” for the individual, the individual actually expels itself through the same motion by which it claims to establish itself.17 It is a twofold moment of establishing boundaries between the “self ” and the “other,” while an essential boundary, the boundary between the body and the outside world (of food), is being transgressed. In Paul McCarthy’s performance, the poles are reversed. Food that is supposed to find its way into the body not only stays in the external world, but is deliberately and forcefully smeared onto it. The assimilation does not take place between the human body and the edible manifestations of the external world from the outside to the inside, but the other way around. McCarthy dissolves the boundaries between the human body and the external environment, which, as already mentioned, is one of the epitomes of disgust. The inside and outside are blended into each other, even more so as the liquids McCarthy uses bear close resemblance to bodily fluids. It is possible to take this approach a step further. Establishing a boundary between the human body and the external world then implies establishing one boundary between life and death. Disgust protects us and sets us apart from our natural constitution, our drives and needs, which indicates a separation from our mortality: The corpse [. . .], that which has irremediably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance. A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death [. . .] I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being.18

Accordingly, dissolving the boundaries between body and world by means of food and liquids in Bossy Burger symbolizes a negotiation 100

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of the boundary between life and death, and brings to mind the brevity of organic existence. This notion is enforced by the actual decay that McCarthy’s food and liquids are subjected to. Rotten food, which we try to avoid and omit from our kitchens and tables in everyday life, is a major trigger of disgust and, in traditional still lifes, essential in reminding the viewer of the transitoriness of material things. Disgust relevantly and vividly embodies the concept of Vanitas that underlies the painted depictions of food in the Baroque era, and allows for an interpretation of McCarthy’s work within the characteristics of a food still life. 

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The Dutch Golden Age was characterized by an antithetical tension between an affirmation of life and an awareness of its evanescence, which is mirrored in the era’s art. The emerging genre of Vanitas still life paintings took up this transcendental consciousness as their primary painterly subject and introduced a series of allegories and metaphors for its illustration. Food still lifes, on the other hand, reflected on this moral dilemma in a more subtle manner. Not only do they portray the materialist wealth and the concomitant culinary novelties, but they oppose them with allusions to the brevity of earthly life as a critique of the opulence and vanity of society. By including empty spaces or creating scenes that seem to have been abandoned in the very minute they have been painted, the luxurious depictions offer an underlying sense of absence and void. Food itself as perishable material serves as a symbol for transience and is put into the center of attention. It is represented at its toppunt, its point of perfect maturity, when things fully display their quality, before their inevitable corruption.19 The voluptuous, overripe fruit, juicy meat, or saccharine, half-eaten cakes that form still lifes border on a sumptuousness that comes dangerously close to exceeding the boundaries of the tasty and alluring. More explicit are depictions of items that have already reached a certain stage of expiration, with insects, attracted by the sweet smell of decay, surrounding them. The intensity of sensual experience, which the detailed depiction of edible items and their artful arrangements induce, implies at the same time the temporality of all sensual pleasure. Thus, still lifes as the genre of comprised sensual

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pleasures emphasize the inevitable course of time to which all organic life is subject (Plate 5.4).20 With the overabundance of food in Bossy Burger, the work shares an important characteristic with the painted food still lifes of the Dutch Golden Age. The performative installation points to the ongoing processes of all organic life, even more so as the decay of the organic material continues in reality. McCarthy’s use of food triggers disgust in a variety of ways: from the superabundance of edible substances, and the symbolic dissolving of the boundaries between human body and external world, to the dirt and process of decay that continues in the installation. The sense of absence, which enforces the notion of transience in still lifes, is picked up by McCarthy in the loneliness of the performer who, moaning and crying, seems to be trapped inside the set. It recurs in the installation, which gives the impression of having been abandoned in the middle of action (Plate 5.3).21 Contrary to painted still lifes, however, Bossy Burger leaves the sphere of pure representation and rather confronts the viewer with a total reality. Food is not merely depicted, it is actually present, and, with its stench and texture, gives no room for illusions or subtle references. It is, considerably more than in a painting, able to trigger the deeply physical emotion of disgust. The distance and motionlessness that characterize painted still lifes are dissolved in McCarthy’s work, which is rather in a constant process. Still lifes create a still, capture a moment in time, and merely hint to its course; in performative installations like Bossy Burger that point of standstill never comes, the process of time continues and is made palpable. Painted still lifes can, in a certain way, lend permanence to the ephemeral, whereas in McCarthy’s work, permanence is dissolved in processuality. Whereas a painting only appeals to our vision and our imagination, a work like Bossy Burger furthermore affects our sense of smell, probably even touch, and hearing, if the moaning, groaning, and smacking of the performance is taken into account. Additionally, the performative installation is spatially extensive and comprised of several components. In contrast to a two-dimensional still life painting, Bossy Burger constitutes a proximity that imposes itself on the recipient and accordingly fulfills the overall definition of a trigger of disgust that was given earlier. 102

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These aspects, however, should not be evaluated as differences between McCarthy’s work and a traditional still life, but should rather be understood as a translation of the genre’s characteristics into the twenty-first century. For example, though the means by which Bossy Burger addresses the transience of life might differ from a food still life painted almost four hundred years ago, the relevance for society and culture remains the same. In its own way and by contemporary means, Bossy Burger hints at the transitoriness of life, maybe not so much life in general, but of consumer life as we know it. This life shares several aspects with the Dutch Golden Age. Decisive for the success of the food still life as a genre was not only the increasing commercial availability of art for the private space, but also the rise of the Dutch Republic as a major naval power, and the establishment of a global colonial empire. These factors assured the nation’s dominance in world trade and transformed it into a remarkably prosperous nation.22 The new wealth of the upper and middle class was reflected, among other things, in an abundance of food, an increasing variety and exoticism of available items, and an elaborateness of preparation, which came into the focus of painters. At the same time, however, the global expansion also implied challenges and risks as the new prosperity yet had to be negotiated.23 In addition, the “Golden Age” was characterized by a series of confessional and political agitations not only within the Dutch Republic, but throughout all of Europe. The Dutch war of independence against Spain from 1568 to 1652 was succeeded by the war with England from 1652 to 1672 and the war with France from 1672 to 1678. This most devastating series of conflicts claimed countless lives and left large parts of Europe ravaged. Internally, the reformation had helped pave the way toward a more republican state structure that closed the gap between the nobility and commoners. Nevertheless, the constitutional system of the republic was still uncertain and opposed by supporters of pro-monarchist Orangists.24 Religious considerations of a nation split into catholic and protestant belief, and internal tensions between the seven different provinces motivated further disagreement.25 The new wealth and luxury thus was embraced enthusiastically, of course, as it helped ease anxiety, but at the same time it was met with uneasiness in the face of the nation’s future.

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Similar to the Dutch Golden Age, we find ourselves in a time characterized by an ambivalence between prosperity and luxury on the one hand, and global conflicts, economic crises, and a constant struggle to define ourselves and our identity in a rapidly changing environment on the other. Our fetishism with commodities might well be read as a mechanism to cope with the mix of opportunity and anxiety we are presented with. Food serves as a paradigm; it is a basic biological need, but nowadays claims the characteristic of the most polyvalent consumer object. It is laden with significance and meaning, and at the same time is a threat to our status in society and our evaluation of ourselves. McCarthy’s ketchup and mayonnaise are symbols for the global expansion of Western culture that had taken major steps in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and reached a peak in our current time. The material wealth that characterized the Dutch Golden Age did not only trigger a negotiation of its permanence and meaning. It also sparked moral conflicts with the Calvinist dogma of austereness and moderateness, which can equally be read in the ambivalent depictions of food still lifes. The same ambivalence can be detected in McCarthy’s work, which oscillates between pleasure and disgust. The sheer, childish joy of playing with food and the nauseating display of surfeit questions not only the limits of Western throw-away culture, but also its values and moral obligations. It is, of course, a daring endeavor to compare Dutch society of the seventeenth century with our contemporary consumer culture, and one that would benefit from a more nuanced, in-depth analyses. However, reading artworks such as food still lifes or Bossy Burger as cultural expressions and examining their power to serve as a mirror for their social background has shown that they, even though they have been created several hundreds of years apart, reflect on similar issues: globalization, consumerism, moral dilemmas, uncertainty and anxiety of finiteness, and so forth. Food, in both cases, serves as a symbol from which these aspects can be deducted. Though it may be easy to interpret food still lifes of the seventeenth century retrospectively as a simultaneous mirror and criticism of life in the Dutch Republic and to point out the problems and failures of the era, our actual awareness of similar issues in our current 104

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consumer culture remains to be seen. In any case, trends in contemporary art to incorporate notions of surfeit and wastefulness as done by McCarthy, or to work with material emblematic of this lifestyle, such as plastic or trash (Jason Rhoades, Melanie Smith, Gayle Chong Kwan) should serve as precisely an opportunity to reflect on our socioeconomic situation, and where we have to go in the future. There is no doubt that the life that we are accustomed to is highly focused on material possessions, prodigality, abundance, and choices, but, with its obsession with new products and possibilities, it is not exactly on a track toward sustainability. We leave marks that, just like Bossy Burger illustrates, we do not care about picking up (Plate 5.2). At some point, this culture started or will start to consume itself. Paul McCarthy’s work thus not only turns against the absurd abundance of consumer life, but, in terms of the concept of Vanitas, puts this life of prosperity and perspectives up against its questionable persistence.



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Chapter 6

In & On Herbs, Fish, and Janine Antoni’s Touch Silvia Bottinelli

Dinner came with a holistic experience at the New York restaurant Park Avenue Summer, between June 11 and September 4, 2011.1 Diners were invited to try out body care products made from the same ingredients used for the dishes in the menu. Coffee grounds, lemon balm, lavender, peach, among many others, were to be found in the food and the soaks, mists, and scrubs offered to the costumers. Artist Janine Antoni (Freeport, Bahamas, 1964), in partnership with chef Kevin Lasko and horticulturalist Rachel Budde, founder of the organic body care line Fat and the Moon, developed the concept. It was Meredith Johnson, a curator at Creative Time New York, who commissioned the piece as part of a series of events that fostered collaborations between chef Lasko and a selection of visual artists. Johnson describes the genesis of the project as follows: We were approached by the restaurant (Fourth Wall’s Park Avenue) to advise on and propose artist projects in the dining area itself. In considering the nature of the space, and its seasonal reinvention four times a year, I immediately thought this was a great opportunity for artists to get involved in a direct collaboration with the chef and think holistically about the full experience between food and the context of seasonality. Food and art obviously have a long history, and there was a great opportunity here to get the artists directly in the kitchen to impact the diners’ experience both visually and viscerally2.

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The curator invited Marina Abramović, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Janine Antoni, and Michael Rakowitz to participate. These artists “had a background in dealing with issues around eating, experiencing, or sharing food. All had done past projects on food, and had practices that are tied to the experience of the viewer/participant.”3 The fact that Fourth Wall, the chain of restaurants that owned Park Avenue among other businesses, referred to Creative Time for consultation about a public art event is not surprising. Creative Time has been a point of reference in the discourse of public interventions in New York City, and elsewhere, since the early 1970s. Patricia Phillips discusses the role of this organization in experimenting with public art in the form of temporary projects. According to her, the ephemerality of the pieces coordinated by Creative Time allows the artists to respond to issues that are actually relevant to the community at a specific time; the intervention is not destined to become obsolete like permanent public monuments.4 Public concerns with food are certainly rampant in the early twenty-first century and Creative Time’s interest in this subject appears to be coherent with its mission. The four pieces generated for Park Avenue Summer are site specific. They respond to the nature of the site discursively: the restaurant, which completely redesigns its menu and interior each season, functions as a signifier of seasonality, as well as conviviality, creativity, and sensoriality.5 Janine Antoni’s piece for Park Avenue, titled In & On, contributes to the discourse of food and eating in the contemporary world, addressing a number of aspects. Utilizing only seasonal ingredients, the artist connects to the main theme of the restaurant. Letting the viewers touch the raw ingredients, incorporated in sculpturally beautiful centerpieces, she allows them to experience the materials beyond taste and ingestion. The underlying argument of In & On is, in fact, that we should be able to put on our bodies what we put in them. Hence the title of the participatory project. Antoni spells this principle out in an artist book printed in limited edition, as a component of the piece: Our skin—a porous membrane that separates the inside of our bodies from the outer world—eats, breathes and filters in both directions. We experience this organ differently than we experience our orifices; and through In & On our sensory portals

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come into closer relationship with each other through texture, smell and taste.6

At the opening, the public could dive into a multisensorial experience (Plate 6.1). This is a taste of what they could enjoy: Siren’s breath, a cocktail mix with lemon balm, peach, may chang essential oil, hot water, black tea leaves, cucumber vodka, cucumber, sugar, and lemon juice; the cocktail was paralleled by a mist made out of lemon balm, peach, may chang essential oil, hot water, and black tea leaves. As a starter, diners were offered Scales and Skin (Plate 6.2). This dish included cured hamachi prepared with coconut coffee, coconut oil, brown sugar, sea salt, soy oil, ginger, rice wine, vinegar, plums, kalamansi juice, white soy sauce, and English cucumber. Hamachi, or yellowtail, is a seasonal fish that is native to the Pacific Ocean, and it is a protagonist of Japanese cuisine. It can be eaten raw (as sushi) or cooked. The soy, ginger, and rice wine flavors incorporated into Lasko’s recipe evoke the Japanese origin of the hamachi. Antoni and Budde linked a salt sugar scrub with this dish. Again, some of the ingredients are the same: the body care product is made of coconut coffee, coconut oil, brown sugar, and sea salt. Finally, the entrée: Sown Within. The tile fish was cooked with lavender essential oil, lemon essential oil, mustard greens, fennel bulb, shallots, garlic, ginger, turmeric, parmesan, white wine, lavender, water, tomato, artichoke hearts, cranberry beans, and lemon. The corresponding body care product was a soak created from lavender essential oil, lemon essential oil, ground mustard seed, and sea salt. The notes of mustard and lavender evoke the tastes of Provence, southern France. Even if the cultural association is distant from the oriental feeling of the hamachi, the presence of ginger in both recipes connects the two dishes and allows for a harmonious experience throughout the meal. Antoni’s bond to the sea finds expression in the menu, which includes seafood and references to marine imagery. The artist grew up in the Bahamas. She often recalls her childhood play on the beach, her connection with the sand and the waves. The tactile nature of this interaction is what she identifies as the origin of her interest in sculpture. Her familiarity with the ocean does not prevent her from being



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curious about other sources of food, in particular the farm. Currently living in New York, Antoni is concerned with the risk of losing track of where food comes from. For this reason, she involved the urban agriculture group EATS in In & On. EATS provided Park Avenue Summer and Fat and the Moon with the vegetables and herbs necessary for their recipes. The organization has continued collaborating with Park Avenue for the two subsequent years after In & On. Antoni acknowledged EATS’s participation on the day of the vernissage, when a volunteer gave a presentation about the scope of the organization. The aforementioned artist book In & On clarifies that: EATS is an urban agriculture project creating community-owned and operated 4-season farms and food distribution systems in urban neighborhoods. They currently operate farms in Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx. The farms are introduced into communities through collaborations between public high schools and community based organizations. In addition to farming, each community creates its own method of food distribution based on the principle that every resident should be able to eat the food grown, regardless of their income or personal circumstances. All food is grown without chemicals or pesticides of any kind.7

Ideas of social justice and ecology drive EATS’s commitment to healthful and locally grown produce. These are shared principles in the discourse of urban agriculture.8 Scholars and practitioners alike argue that growing produce close to residential areas can provide the population with fresh and relatively inexpensive foods, also reducing the environmental costs associated with industrial farming and long-distance transportation. A number of artists have supported urban farming projects in recent years, with the effect of educating city dwellers about food production. In Janine Antoni’s case, the reason is partially rooted in personal motives. In particular, raising a child in the city made her value the potential of edible gardens. In an interview released to me on June 11, 2013, Antoni mentioned: This morning I was serving my daughter strawberries and she said: will you go out and pick me one from the garden? I was serving her one that we got from Fresh Direct.9 There was a

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whole bowl of strawberries but the one she wanted was the one from the garden. And she bit into the one from Fresh Direct and she said: look at the color of the inside of this one and look at the one we grew. And the one that we got from Fresh Direct was better on the outside, but not in the inside.10

Being able to harvest from one’s own soil, steps away from the kitchen, adds value to the food. Clearly this is not only about taste. The vocabulary chosen by the artist to share an everyday anecdote puts the stress on the visual and tactile components of her child’s interaction with food. There is a multisensorial, phenomenological dimension that pertains to Antoni’s edible garden, as well as to the role of food in the context of her body of work. This is also the starting point for In & On. The story of this piece is intertwined with the story of the permaculture garden designed by Jesse Sachs for the backyard of Antoni and her husband, Paul Ramírez Jonas (Plate 6.3). Sachs was researching permaculture practices as part of his thesis work at Hunter College–City University of New York. Ramírez Jonas offered his family’s backyard as a site of experimentation. Sachs and his partner, Rachel Budde, moved into a basement apartment adjacent to the site, which became a meeting point for Antoni, Ramírez Jonas, Budde, and Sachs. The design of the space was defined by the long conversations among them; also Antoni and Ramírez Jonas’s daughter Indra had a voice in the discussion, in addition to receiving special consideration. The soil was tested for lead, and it was found dangerously contaminated. For this reason, it was replaced with new soil, then fertilized with manure from local farms and compost, which included recycled waste from neighborhood kitchens, yards, and grocery stores. The process became a remediation project, “an act of stewardship to the land,” as Budde puts it.11 The soil was turned into a fertile ground for the abundant proliferation of edible and medicinal plants. Budde offered invaluable advice about the herbal dimension of the garden. In her words, The overall concept of the design was to think of the garden as a micro forest. Every layer of the forest, mushrooms, ground cover, vines, shrubs, shade tolerant trees and overstory trees are planted with medicinal or edible varieties. The idea is: if the



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wild ­forest finds its own natural balance and harmony, so will an edible one.12

Ideally, the varieties selected to cohabit in the space would establish symbiotic relations forming a self-sufficient ecosystem. In the process of giving shape to the permaculture garden, Antoni and Budde came to fantasize about organizing a dinner/spa evening, during which a small group of attendees would eat the produce from the orchard and apply body care products made with the same ingredients. It was supposed to be a private event among those directly involved with the garden. The idea turned into something more complex when Meredith Johnson, curator of Creative Time, contacted Antoni to commission her a piece for Park Avenue Summer. The artist immediately reached out to Budde, suggesting that they translate the plan of an intimate dinner/spa event into a public art performance. Some of the plants that they learned to appreciate in the home garden were used for the menu of In & On. For example, Budde talks enthusiastically about lemon balm. It “became a favorite around the house because it’s such a calming and healing tea, and delicious of course. A lemon balm hydrosol was part of the face mist and cocktail.”13 Antoni underlines that she and Budde made a list of all the plants that were both tasty and soothing for the skin. Lasko then chose the ingredients for the menu among those recommended by the artist and the herbalist. While the recipes were mostly developed by the chef,14 Antoni participated in the selection of the tableware, and, as I mentioned above, Budde and she created centerpieces with the raw ingredients from the recipes and body care products. The diners could see and smell the materials before they were blended together in the dishes. Lasko and Budde were close collaborators with Antoni, who has cultivated an interest in working alongside others for a long time. For example, she has created videos and photographs with Paul Ramírez Jonas since 1999. This body of work was exhibited at the Miami Art Museum in 2003 and 2004.15 More recently, Antoni has explored the potential of collaboration further. Paper Dance is a shared effort with one of the pioneers of postmodern dance, Anna Halprin. In July 2013, Antoni performed a dance routine cocooning around an oversized brown sheet of paper. Her naked body engaged with the material, in 112

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an interplay of liberating movements and embracing grips. Dance is a frontier that Antoni is exploring also through an ongoing conversation with choreographer Stephen Petronio.16 Despite the fact that these last experiments are tangential to In & On, it is important to highlight that collaboration is a recurring element of Antoni’s practice, and it is amplified in this piece. Other aspects cultivated by Antoni in previous works find their way into In & On. In particular, it is the artist’s interest in materiality that appears relevant here. The ingredients used for the dishes and body products of In & On, in and by themselves, hold a special place in the narrative constructed by the artist. It is their origin, the way in which they are produced, that push for ethical and ecological reflection; it is their texture and taste, along with their medicinal and nutritional properties, that drive the artist, the herbalist, and the chef ’s decisions; and shape the viewers’ experience. Among In & On’s goals, Antoni intends to encourage the viewers to question the provenance of the food that they eat. The artist clarifies: “It’s the difference between a sweater your grandmother made and one you bought in a store [. . .]. If you understand the source, not only will you have a unique relationship with it, but you’ll wear it differently.”17 This aspect has been researched by the artist in previous moments of her career, most notably through a group of works exhibited in the show The Girl Made of Butter at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in 2001. In this context, Antoni explored her correlation with the cow and the world of the farm. The artist book published to complement the exhibition includes lists of manufactured products that contain bovine ingredients; some of the items are unexpected.18 For example, Antoni enumerates vinegar, beer, imitation cheeses, table sugar, candles, photographic film, crayons, and white glue. Through this factual inventory, she makes us revisit our assumptions about common objects that we don’t normally relate to their animal source. The sculptural works in the Aldrich Museum show reinforce this message. Bridal (2000) suspends a cow’s skin from the gallery’s ceiling and wall. We can recognize the cow’s body shape and touch its fur. Irregular shapes are cut out of the hide to be sewn into a backpack, attached to the flat surface of the raw material. The origin of the functional product becomes intuitive and explicit. In Saddle (2000), Antoni morphs the rawhide into the

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shape of her own body on all fours. The submissive stance also mimics the quadruped’s natural position, proposing an identification between the artist’s body and that of the cow. Far from being diminishing, this process aims at dignifying the animal, whose contribution to human life is often overlooked. In line with this piece, 2038 (2000) subverts the power relationship between the person and the cow (Plate 6.4). During a visit to a farm, Antoni realized that the cows drank from an old bathtub. She decided to bathe in that very tub and test the animals’ reaction. A cow numbered 2038 went closer, started licking the artist, and drank the water in which she was immersed. Antoni’s photograph documenting this experience overturns our common expectations: it is the cow that drinks from the human, as opposed to the human drinking the cow’s milk as is customary. Bathing and soaking are important elements of Antoni’s alphabet, as we began to see through our initial description of In & On and the soak Sown Within. Again, we can root aspects of In & On in Antoni’s previous practice. In Eureka (1993) the artist is immersed in a bathtub filled with white lard. The viscous material retains the shape of her body. Once the body is removed, it leaves an empty space that indexes the specific person. The residual matter emerges from the surface, forming unpredictable curves and waves. Like a contemporary Archimedes, Antoni uses her body to measure the container’s capacity and volume. She learns from what she experiences. Bathing is part of the performative process leading to the sculptural busts lined up in the installation Lick and Lather (1993). The busts are self-portraits of the artist, made out of chocolate and soap. The art historical reference is classical, but instead of the long-lasting marble and bronze, Antoni employs perishable materials. Establishing a caring and introspective relationship with her self-representations, the artist uses the soap busts to wash herself; she licks the chocolate ones continuing the sculpting process through the tongue. This reenacts the behavior of the toddler, who learns about the world through her mouth. On the busts, marks of Antoni’s actual body are left on the sculptures that represent it. The artist’s loving and introspective act also ends up erasing her own features. Antoni once declared that

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Making something is like a fight. I start out with an idea of what I want the object to be, and I try to impose it to the material. Usually the material resists me all the way. If I can stay open and have the courage not to hang on to my original idea, the material starts to speak back and tell me what it wants to be. A lot of meaning comes out in the fight that I couldn’t have known before fighting.19

The material is not passive and inert, but rather an interlocutor of the artist. We can read Antoni’s words as the unfolding of a dialectical process, based on a thesis (her idea), an antithesis (the actual encounter with the material), and a synthesis (the artwork). The piece does not coincide with the idea, but it is not the raw material either. It is the result of the conflict between the two; it encompasses elements of both. This is perhaps best seen in Antoni’s early works with edible ingredients. Alongside with Lick and Lather and Eureka, Gnaw is a good example of the artist’s approach.20 In Gnaw Antoni attacks six-hundred-pound cubes made of lard and chocolate, biting off chunks of matter and spitting them out. The chewed parts are reused to make forty-five heart-shaped chocolate boxes from the chocolate and four hundred lipsticks from the lard. After being mixed with Antoni’s saliva and sculpted by her teeth and tongue, the materials are recast into consumer goods that are symbolic of commercial ideas of beauty. The materials are imbued with cultural meanings, associated with body fat and unhealthful eating habits, as well as fetishizing images of femininity; these associations are so strong that they lead to a misinterpretation of the artist’s intention. Many critics saw the work as a reenactment of bulimic behavior, staged by a young and attractive female artist.21 For Antoni, though, the piece’s significance is more articulated. As phrased by Laura Heon, “the work poses a question: how did desire—specifically women’s desire—make this transition from intimate and primal to public and cultural? Why should the mouth that gnaws and knows be coated in lipstick and given pretty candies?”22 This open-ended problem locates Gnaw in the discourse of 1980s feminist art, which often deconstructs women’s stereotypical, dominant representation in the mass media. Even if Antoni positions herself beyond the essentialist nature of



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much of 1960s and 1970s feminist art, she reconsiders the performative and phenomenological concerns of those decades.23 Art historical references abound in Gnaw. The chocolate and lard can be seen as an homage to early Eat Art experiments by Dieter Roth and Joseph Beuys, who explore these ingredients’ process of decay or their metaphorical meanings.24 Antoni’s endurance performance points to models like Chris Burden by pushing the body limits to the extreme. Other references can be identified in 1960s pieces by Carolee Schneemann and Marina Abramović. Finally, Gnaw’s rigid cube-shaped objects evoke the masculine aura of minimalist sculpture, which is transformed by a feminine and powerful body.25 Touch, pleasure, and fatigue contribute to the definition of feminine identity in Antoni’s sculptures. Constant changes and unfinished processes suggest that identity is continually shifting and renegotiated. Antoni is interested in defining woman through the exploration of an intimate relationship with the self. The sense of viscerality is constructed through the juxtaposition of desire and repulsion, love and battle. We are attracted by the multilayered beauty of Antoni’s works, such as Gnaw or Lick and Lather, but when one gets closer the strong smells of the decomposing matter and the traces of the artist’s body might trigger an emotion of disgust.26 Overcoming this reaction allows for a profound sentiment of intimacy. Antoni states it explicitly: I’m deeply interested in a kind of viscerality; it’s interesting to me how one can get really close to another body. What we are really talking about is love. Why does love transgress that notion of disgust? [. . .] There is kind of a push-pull. [. . .] You go to the visceral side and then the distortion brings you back to the beauty again . . . if you can go that far, not everyone can. I am kind of interested in whether I can bring you to a new notion of beauty or what we consider to be something we want to be intimate with [. . .]. That’s the big project and there are all kinds of strategies that I use to bring you to that place.27

Via a conflictual connection of the body with the material, which is explored through touch, smell, and taste, Antoni subverts popular notions of beauty and explores the possibility of learning through physical and phenomenological processes. 116

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Along the same lines, some of the participants in the opening of In & On describe their experience at Park Avenue Summer as involving an initial repulsion and subsequent full appreciation. For example, the blogger pieceofchocolatecake shares her impressions online: Then came the aforementioned foot soak. As much as I appreciated the whole “in and on” concept, I was a little skeeved out by the idea of simultaneously eating and soaking my feet in the same lavender mustard broth. I got over it when I tasted the entrée—Montauk tilefish with mustard greens, artichoke hearts, and cranberry beans.28

More succinctly, Johnny Misheff from Elle states that “it’s strange to consume a beverage that, with the exception of the vodka, is being spritzed all over your face at the same time!”29 Many reviewers highlight the immersive sensorial effect of applying the ingredients on the body while also ingesting them. Among them, Eco Chic’s Lindsay Brown writes: “The smells, the tastes and the textures left me buzzing with such a sensory high, I walked back onto Park Ave., unfazed by the city’s heat.”30 On Zagat, Anna Hyclak talks about “A feast of flavors, smells and sensations that Antoni hopes will help you feel more connected to the world around you—and more conscious of what you’re putting in and on your body. Even so, sticking your face in the food is not advised.”31 The artist constructs the experience for the viewer, who is now the one to expose her or his body to multiple inputs; challenge habitual notions and social rituals; and engage in a dialectic relationship with the material. Instead of the artist’s body, the viewer’s body enters into direct contact with the ingredients. Before In & On, most of Antoni’s pieces engaged the public emotionally and psychologically more than physically.32 The viewer empathized with the artist, who put her own body to the test through extreme yet poetic and symbolic actions. The artist intentionally left something missing from the work, inviting the observers to participate by filling the gap: for example, they needed to reconstruct the process through which an object had been made, or understand the ways in which art historical references were twisted to create new meaning. The public of In & On, however, is not the same as the public of art museums and high-end galleries that Antoni often confronts.

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Restaurant goers might have a different proficiency in art history and contemporary art than the viewers that Antoni is used to engaging. Instead of asking the public to interpret the complex references weaved by her, for In & On the artist puts the participants in the place that she normally occupies. The participants, not the artist, use their mouths to perceive the texture and taste of ingredients loaded with cultural associations. The participants, not the artist, expose themselves to multisensorial experience, learning through the body, connecting theoretical and scientific knowledge to perception. The participants, not the artist, confuse the boundaries of public and private: they immerse their feet in the soak, mist their faces and scrub their hands while dining in public, instead of cleansing their skin in the privacy of their homes or behind the closed doors of a spa. Even if in a gentler and less unsettling way than in pieces where she makes her own body endure extreme conditions, Antoni puts the viewer of In & On in a challenging position, pushing the boundaries of what is conventional. At the same time, she gives the participants the opportunity to frame their experience in a more traditional manner. For example, she allows them to bring home samples of the skin products created by Rachel Budde. Using these in the domestic sphere will allow for more spontaneous reactions and bring back memories of the event at the restaurant. The viewers are also invited to keep the artist book designed by Antoni for In & On. This small publication includes drawings that interpret the ideas of the piece visually and metaphorically. It is the first time that the artist incorporates drawing in a piece; her goal is to make the content more accessible to the general public, probably better inclined to decode drawings than the multilayered components of a relational art performance. On each page, the artist stages elements commonly perceived as binary oppositions; Antoni challenges this perception by linking the elements together through the detailed representation of visual similarities. The inside and the outside, food and the human body, the natural and the artificial find a home in In & On. The first page represents a Caduceus, a symbol dense in meaning, associated with the power of medicine and health. The second includes two close-ups, one of the skin, the other of grass and roots underground. Two human figures, colored with inverted 118

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tones, are shown on the third page; they are followed by a drawing of a peach, an ingredient of the cocktail and the mist served at Park Avenue Summer, next to a close-up representation of a wet surface on the fourth page (Plate 6.5). The bodily reference to female genitals is intuitive and intentional. The fifth page illustrates the scales of a fish paralleled by a close-up of human skin. An image of the intestines, paired with representations of mustard seeds, occupy the space of the sixth page. The seventh page represents iconic elements that allude to chef Lasko and Antoni’s identity: cooking tools and a wild landscape are inscribed in the profile of human figures. A symmetrical leaf occupies the eighth page to accompany information on EATS and Fat and the Moon. Two serpents interlace recalling the curves of the DNA on the ninth page, and the last pages close the book with images of veins on one side and the striation of a stone on the other. Through representation, Antoni reiterates the argument articulated in her complex piece. Looking closely, our bodies function similarly to other natural systems that live outside of them. Our veins are like rivers, our pores are like the peach’s skin. When we feed ourselves we enhance that parallelism, to the point of making the food that we eat become part of ourselves. In the process, our organs feel the taste, the tactile sensations, the smells of the food. Biting, chewing, eating, as well as touching or inhaling the fragrance of the ingredients, convey information to our minds. Through the senses, we can learn about some of the properties of what we get into our bodies: we can detect if something is fresh and ripe; and we might be able to recognize specific shapes, textures, and flavors. This experiential process, however, needs to be matched with an intellectual knowledge of the origin of our food. Making the connection between the dishes on our plates and the environments that they come from helps us to understand the impact of everyday actions on natural and social ecologies.



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Chapter 7

Luciano Fabro Bitter Sweets for Nadezhda Mandelstam Sharon Hecker

Introduction At the inauguration of the 1990 exhibition Computers di Luciano Fabro, caramelle di Nadezda Mandel’stam (Luciano Fabro’s Computers, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Candies) in Milan, students handed out sweets wrapped in photocopy paper (Plate 7.1 and Plate 7.2).1 Without much apparent consideration, the visitors unwrapped the treats and popped them into their mouths, only to discover that the open “wrappers” in their hands contained thought-provoking phrases from the memoirs of Russian writer Nadezhda Mandelstam (Plate 7.2). Suddenly, the straightforward distribution and consumption of candy became an encouragement to visitors to reflect upon the relationship of the artist Luciano Fabro to the author of the phrases and the wider message behind the event. Nadezhda (1899–1980), whose name means “hope,” was the wife of Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938), the exiled Russian poet who died in transit to a Siberian gulag for having written a poem critical of Joseph Stalin. Nadezhda was not able to write down her memories of their experiences under the regime until after Stalin’s death decades later in 1953. Her manuscript, titled “Hope against Hope,” was s­ muggled into the United States in the 1950s and published in English in 1970.2

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Nadezhda had preserved the events in her mind for decades; she ­similarly saved her husband’s poems, officially ordered to be destroyed, from oblivion by memorizing them and by hiding fragments of his verses on scraps of paper between pots and pans. Fabro would evoke these written fragments with the phrases printed on the candy wrappers for the 1990 exhibition. Thus, the viewer’s act of eating the candies and reading her phrases in which the treats came wrapped seemed to replicate Nadezhda’s symbolic gesture of recalling the events and “ingesting” her husband’s poems as a form of safeguarding. But the artist had the idea to hand out the wrapped candy after reading an unsettling passage in Nadezhda’s memoir of a gesture that symbolized an act of willful opposition to assimilation: the writer recalled the candies that Stalin’s police cynically offered her while searching the couple’s apartment. Although she did not write this in her memoirs, it is clear that Nadezhda either refused to take these candies or else ate them because she had no choice, in both cases implying a form of quiet resistance. She wrote, “this gesture of offering hard candy was repeated in many other apartments during searches. Was this, too, part of the ritual, like the technique of entering the room, checking identity papers, frisking people for weapons and looking for secret drawers?”3 Rather than inspiring a positive memory, the sweets represented a terrible moment in Nadezhda’s mind—police searching the apartment, instruments of a totalitarian state that exiled millions to prison camps offering candy as they were overturning the ­couple’s lives. Her story exemplifies the dramatic contradictions of the Stalinist dictatorship, one notoriously fraught with surreal incongruities. By handing out candies in his exhibition and wrapping them in Nadezhda’s words, Fabro delicately rephrased Nadezhda’s negative, painful memory in a new and hopeful way. Fabro used the candies as an index, or what he himself called a “citation,” creating an anecdote behind which other things lurk.4 He saw it as “a way to reflect on relationships between people, on the State and people, even on hygienic forms of the State. It is something very simple that suddenly becomes rich with memory. And at the same time it is something that permits [me] to impress in peoples’ memories the words of Nadezda Mandelstam.”5 By sharing Nadezhda’s memory of the candies, Fabro even drew a political parallel with the 122

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manipulation of culture in the present day: “[Nadezda] . . . says that . . . what happened under Stalin’s regime was nothing more than a small experiment in a small space for what happens today in the world. In . . . less dramatic and more diluted ways we are now living what the Soviet Union had lived. As Ossip said, the State has become a non-religious State, only engaged with culture as something to be exploited.”6 The following essay examines the functions of “Nadezda Mandelstam’s candies” within both Fabro’s 1990 installation and his broader artistic project. I argue that while the candies initially elicited an innocent, direct response from the visitor, they also raised significant questions about censorship and protest in a society of fear. Furthermore, they encouraged the visitor to consider other important issues, among them the relationships between mass-produced and handmade objects, language and poetry, art and heroism, consumption and preservation as well as memory and honor. Finally, the candies were intended to stimulate reflection on the challenge of employing judgment when the sense of taste is engaged, especially given that the confectionary evoked a memory from Nadezhda’s life that was anything but sweet.

Etymologies, Monuments, and “Computers” Luciano Fabro, who was loosely associated with the Italian Arte Povera movement, presented his message-laden candies twice in 1990, once at the Christian Stein gallery in Milan and again at the Palais des BeauxArts in Brussels.7 In Milan, they were incorporated into a larger exhibition and became comprehensible only in relation to three additional works of art titled AR, Nadezda, and Computers. In Brussels, however, Fabro eliminated the other works and only distributed the candies. In both shows the process of unwrapping and eating the candies was immediate but that of understanding the gesture was gradual: Fabro engaged art students to explain the idea and also gave several extensive interviews to critics.8 These accounts were thus documented in published texts, videotaped discussions, and exhibition reviews. In the exhibition at the Stein gallery, visitors first encountered two enormous capital letters “AR” at the center of a wall. Each letter was more than one and a half meters high and made from sheer cotton sheets of

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f­ abric; together they presided over the space and subtly referenced the subject of the exhibition (Plate 7.3). Fabro’s choice of these letters elicited numerous explanations, from the etymological to the personal to the symbolic. First, “-ar” is a common ancient Sanskrit root from the Proto-Indo-European origin of language that means “to fit together” or “to assemble skillfully.”9 Indeed, this task was alluded to by the interconnected but disparate artworks in the exhibition. Second, “-ar” survives in Latin and Italian words relating to art, artifice, skill, and craft (rooted in the Latin word ars). In its central isolated position up on the wall, AR seemed to echo the nineteenth-century notion of “Ars gratia artis,” a declaration of art’s autonomy from moral or political purpose, one consonant with the same kinds of claims for artistic independence that were made by Arte Povera critic Germano Celant and especially Luciano Fabro from 1968. (Recent scholarship, however, has challenged this position by pointing to Arte Povera’s political nuances as found especially in the works of Piero Gilardi and some of the art made by Jannis Kounellis and Mario Merz.)10 Third, “-ar” is preserved in words for body parts such as limbs (arti), as well as those related to organization such as “articulate,”“order,” and “coordination.” In several senses, then, AR suggested the presence of a shaping principle for art. In 1991 Fabro’s biographer Jole de Sanna offered an alternative interpretation, asserting that the declarative letters emerged as the artist’s personal response to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, after which he had mourned the end of nature and the death of “form in art.”11 In interviews in 1990, Fabro described his renewed hope that art could continue to exist first by returning to an organizing root concept of human activity. As De Sanna argued, Fabro began again by searching for an “attitude” toward art that preceded form, or was beyond form and superficial identity. De Sanna thus drew a parallel between Fabro’s post-Chernobyl desire to create art and Nadezhda’s powerful act of saving her husband’s poetry through memory without leaving a material trace, since any act of writing the poems down on paper would have been too politically dangerous. Indeed, Fabro’s idea of handing out the candies directly referred to Nadezhda’s approach: her willful, metaphorical “ingestion” of the poems by taking them into her mind, although he added to it a bodily, sensorial absorption. 124

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De Sanna further likened Fabro’s sense of “attitude” to the conceptual “root” or organizing principle that precedes art making of any kind, suggesting that form began to emerge again in a primitive way, through the Sanskrit letters AR. Another nascent sign of the return of form in his art was the artist’s choice to hand out ephemeral candies at the exhibition opening: objects that exist only ephemerally before disappearing into the body through ingestion, but that also leave a lasting impression through the aftereffects of taste. Just as Fabro’s distribution of the candies became a nurturing, healing, creative gesture following disaster and trauma, the viewer’s act of eating them could become a hopeful mode of assimilation. Fabro further emphasized themes of survival and continuity by forming AR out of light cotton sheets taken from another piece called Rorschach Inkblots of 1980.12 His reference to an earlier work secured it within the artist’s own genealogical trajectory—looking backward and forward, the new work extended an older one as the artist reshaped it rather than creating ex-novo by moving on to an entirely new idea. Staging his notion of memory and identity through historical continuity, Fabro thus regenerated from within—other Fabro works, such as the hollowed out egg, Io (I, 1978), also address this notion of self-­ renewal through a universally recognized image of origins, the egg. He revivified his own work, casting the past as part of a continuous experience, a metaphor for his vision of art history in opposition to what he saw as a prevailing and dangerous cultural amnesia. In the first work, creatively reworking Hermann Rorschach’s 1921 diagnostic test, the artist alluded to imaginative subjectivity as another organizing principle of art, to the value of psychological associations and projective tendencies. Thus, he aligned his work with image-based consciousness and the power of individual perception. The red paint on AR can also be associated with the most primitive origins of visual expression: red, the color of blood, suggests the most basic experiences of life and death; it was also the first color, along with ochre, to be used in drawings on prehistoric caves. In a similar vein, the same year as Rorschach’s Inkblots, Fabro had also commemorated Osip Mandelstam in a work called Iconografia, a mixed-media installation dedicated to historical figures and in which violence to their bodies corresponded with violence to their ideas. The second work in the show at the Stein

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gallery, titled Nadezda, was propped against the wall adjacent to AR: an enormous sculpted fragment of gray bardiglio marble with two polished front planes cut at a right angle, while the back was left rough and unworked (Plate 7.4). The two different kinds of surface united natural and human artifice. Where the planes met, the artist crafted a hollowed-out central ridge with an elongated pyramid using the pieces left from carving the block, then placed it back inside the work, signaling a sharp separation from the original marble source that was subsequently restored—as if it were a distinct but reconnected limb. The entire piece was held together and upright from above, as if in traction, by a noose-like knotted device on a beam made from the kind of canvas belt adopted by marble workers to transport stone. At the base of the stone Fabro placed a paperback with a woman’s face on the cover, which turned out to be a copy of the 1971 Italian translation of Nadezhda’s memoirs. The physical, spatial, and intellectual relationship between stone and book was unclear, however. Nadezhda’s book seemed almost to be holding up the massive stone— or was Fabro’s heavy marble object in fact protecting the memoirs?13 The artist’s iconic stone, book, and belt, combining text and image, together represented an innovative contemporary monument. It reshaped the traditional monument’s authoritative, masculine language and minimalism’s virile physical prowess in veneration of a heroic female subject. Here Fabro honored “the effort of silence and the power of uncensorable words,”14 memorializing Nadezhda’s courage in protecting her husband’s art and memories from censorship and the inner strength of a single individual against an annihilating authoritarian state.15 He thus shared Nadezhda’s investment in memory and history as embodied in the human utterance, viewing her words and actions as signs of hope in a manner befitting her name. In interviews, he maintained that the monument embodied oralità, “that fundamental node of expression that finds form even when it cannot make itself visible.” He called it “a writing without a body in which everything is enclosed in the person . . . in one’s capacity to cultivate a desire for form. [A] person can be killed but this internal oralità survives.”16 This reading, in which form is preserved even when not visible, apparently contradicts Fabro’s interviews of the same period 126

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with De Sanna, who described the artist’s advocacy for an art that transcended form. However, here Fabro revealed that his desire for form appeared even at the moment in which he distanced himself from it, demonstrating his sense of form as an essential, enduring, if ambivalent and continually problematic component of art, especially in modern times. Six flimsy metalworks called Computers completed the show. They were hung throughout the space and decorated with whimsical multicolored metal rods in a manner that only served to emphasize their apparent instability (Plate 7.5). The Computers conjured ideas about data input, memory, and information preservation, concepts related to Nadezhda’s memoirs, which offered the interpretative key to the show. For art critic and curator Elena Pontiggia, the Computers contrasted with the paperback as “empty frames, books without pages.”17 But Francesca Pasini, another art critic and curator, quoting Fabro, found that “the mobile junctures ‘find their own form.’”18 Thus, yet again, Fabro broached the question of form, but now from another angle: that of the artwork’s own capacity for a self-determining principle (rather than the artist’s forceful regeneration of art). Indeed, each computer shaped its own organization and equilibrium based on weight distribution and position, signaling that the artist used the entire installation to play with literal and metaphorical questions of lightness and heaviness as well as of emptiness and fullness.

The Candies, Revisited To emphasize Nadezhda’s words, Fabro distributed the sweets wrapped in sentences from her book.19 Indeed, the entire exhibition is dedicated to her, rather than to Osip. Given the complex meanings of the other works in the show, it becomes clear that the candies were intended to evoke more than merely the act of eating (Plate 7.6). On a most basic level, ancient rituals cast sweets as propitiatory gifts offered to gods on religious occasions. Even today, sweets called confetti are distributed as signs of celebration, hope, and good luck at Italian weddings and baptisms. But Fabro also envisioned the candies as a direct, simple mode of testimony that might allow the visitor to ingest the messages through taste, referencing Nadezhda’s efforts to

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preserve her husband’s legacy and replicating the way she had savored and memorized his poetry, a gesture that might be furthered through any participant’s future engagement with the works of either the writer or the artist. In an act of hope, the artist entrusted the public to take part in this task. The question of form continued to preoccupy Fabro on another level, for his candy project can be seen as a work of art that cannot be bought or sold. In this respect it reflects the call of Germano Celant, author of the 1967 manifesto “Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerilla Warfare,” for the dematerialization of art and for artistic “actions” that could combat commodification and suggest avenues for artistic freedom in a capitalist society.20 By 1990, however, ephemeral art was already widely part of the artistic vocabulary but could still be sold (through documentation, for example). Thus, despite the chronological distance between this exhibition and the early Arte Povera shows, the problem of the commodification of art when given lasting form persisted in the artist’s mind. Indeed, Fabro’s reflection on old and new forms of memory and data preservation occurred in 1990, a year in which all kinds of new technological devices began to be more prevalent in Italy and elsewhere, among them the portable computer, the cell phone, and the fax machine, and the beginnings of public use of the Internet. As art historian and curator Veronique Goudinoux asked in connection with Fabro’s Nadezda: “How—and the question is not only valid for artists—can we resist the ‘designer method’ today, refusing to become suppliers of ‘objects’ of all kinds when our society seems to find no other solution to the crisis other than unlimited economic growth? The teachings of Luciano Fabro, who through his work makes us reflect on both individual dignity and the future of our world, are undoubtably [sic] precious.”21 Although Goudinoux does not elaborate on Fabro’s “teachings” in her essay, her allusion to this particular exhibition as a critique of consumerist society can lead us to compare Fabro’s candies to two other key instances of “eating” in the global history of edible postwar art and in which the question of consumption takes center stage. For the candy distribution here echoes both a 1960 exhibition by Fabro’s contemporary, Piero Manzoni, and prefigures Cuban American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s signature “candy spills” begun in 1990, the same year 128

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of Fabro’s show.22 On July 21, 1960, at the Galleria Azimuth (founded by Manzoni and his friends) on Via Clerici 12 in Milan, Manzoni created a satirical edible performance titled “Consumazione dell’arte ­dinamica del pubblico divorare l’arte” (The Consumption of Dynamic Art by the Public to Devour Art), which was first exhibited in Copenhagen a month earlier.23 He boiled and then signed a number of eggs, marking each one with his own unique thumbprint, offering them to visitors to eat and devouring an egg himself. Like Fabro’s later conceptual gesture, Manzoni’s act consecrated unmediated, corporeal contact between the visitor and the artist’s hand in what Manzoni himself described as “a direct communion” of the “consecrated” eggs with the “personality of the artist.”24 As Giorgio Zanchetti and others have noted, the artist saw this as a mockery of the Catholic ritual of the Eucharist.25 At the same time, Manzoni’s tongue-in-cheek title suggests that he conflated this religious rite with modern art, with the artist performing as its pseudo-priest. Manzoni established public participation by persuading visitors to ingest (and thus become part of) the artwork. Yet he also literalized and poked fun at the “devouring” role of the viewer as starved consumer in relation to art, with the banal boiled egg cum unique, irreplaceable art object in the position both of protagonist and sacrificial victim. As Jacopo Galimberti noted, this early example of a European “Happening” was a “demystification of the illusions surrounding the desire for a new relationship with the public.”26 Manzoni’s jesting title and performance commented ironically on postwar consumerism’s perceived destruction of art, which disappears and loses value as it is gobbled up. By eating an egg himself, the artist theatrically absorbed the “artwork” back into his own body. He also symbolically averted art’s exploitation by the outside world through (self-)ingestion. Yet Manzoni effectively subverted this element of the seventy-minute performance when he called director Gian Paolo Maccentelli of Filmgiornale Sedi to record a version of the performance in the film studio a few days before the opening of the gallery show. This film is now lost, but second and third filmings of the performance by Maccentelli and photographed by Giuseppe Bellone have survived, thus allowing the ephemeral event to be repeated for future audiences.27 And while the artistic ritual involved consumption, Manzoni had also signed and handed out eggs as artworks in cotton-lined boxes

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in the Copenhagen show. (Many of these have survived in museums and private collections, posing vexing conservation issues.) Fabro was likely inspired by Manzoni’s project. In 1977 he elaborated on Manzoni’s performance in a work called Tu: an egg filled with inedible sealing wax, preserving the egg’s form and recalling wax fruit, was exhibited dangling from the ceiling.28 Fabro’s 1990 candy distribution also recaptured the directness of Manzoni’s edible eggs. But his concept differed from Manzoni’s too; in 1960 Manzoni had claimed that art had no message left to offer and that the artwork no longer “existed,” thereby demoting the public to the role of passive or uncritical spectator. Furthermore, Fabro mediated materially between himself and the visitors, protecting himself from direct contact with the “consuming” public envisioned by Manzoni by conveying his message via a monumental historical figure, her writings, and his tiny candies. In the same year that Fabro installed his Computers, Felix Gonzalez-Torres would also begin to invoke the function of taste by producing candy “spills” for his audiences to deplete. These works, installed in many US and European museums over the years, related to the artist’s use of other everyday materials such as lightbulbs and paper stacks. The candy installations were presented in ever-changing forms, volumes, and types: piled up in a corner or spread out like a carpet, wrapped in silver, gold, multicolored, or black wrappers. In taking the candy, visitors affected the fluid, unstable form of the work. The artist claimed he envisioned this as a metaphor for life’s constant flux, as well as for death. At the same time, museum and gallery workers were instructed to continuously replenish the candies, an act suggesting the possibility of regeneration. Some versions of the “spills” were conceived as portraits: one even marked the tragic loss of the artist’s lover, Ross Laycock, to AIDS, with the quantity of candies calibrated to Laycock’s “ideal” weight when healthy. This gave the works personal and political resonance, from the death of Laycock to the disappearance of the gay community as it succumbed to AIDS. Indeed, emotionally charged candy “spills” named Untitled (Placebo), shown in 1991 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, recalled the AIDS medication that failed to save Laycock’s life. Visitors could eat Gonzalez-Torres’s candy, although the diminishing quantity reflected an unsettling detail: Laycock’s weight loss 130

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and suffering prior to his death. This process of eating poses conservation problems today, because the factory that produced the candy is now closed. It also speaks to the role of memory (and taste memory) found in both Gonzalez-Torres’s and Fabro’s work. Fabro, Manzoni, and Gonzalez-Torres all used ephemeral matter —food—to exalt and subvert the value and durability of the art object. But Gonzalez-Torres’s specification that the piles should be continuously replenished also gave the work and candy-eating ritual the illusion of everlasting life. As Randy Kennedy observed, the installations functioned on several levels: “candy as candy; as art object; as a questioning of art objects; as a metaphor for mortality and depletion in the age of AIDS; as a means for his art and ideas literally to be spread, like a virus—or maybe like joy—by everyone who took a piece.”29 As “eucharistic” as the work of Manzoni, Gonzalez-Torres’s art was also read as a haunting reflection on 1990s consumerism: like a Walmart display, the candies were repeatedly replaced by an unseen hand. As curator Doryun Chong noted, “distributing information or oblique poetics, the series were, and are, an implicit critique of the art market, questioning the very notions of commodification and ownership.”30

The Viewer and the Sweet Like Manzoni and Gonzalez-Torres, Fabro conceptually elevated food above the levels of oral consumption and immediate pleasure. But he also raised the viewer’s role to one of individual responsibility in caring for, preserving, and transmitting art and culture even in history’s darkest, most repressive moments. His installation can conjure up in the viewer many different associations, an interpretive stance, which seems to be welcomed and encouraged by the Rorschach inkblot to which Fabro referred through AR: one such association might be with the “book people” in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, who memorized literary masterpieces while the volumes were being burned, while another could be with the young Hafiz, who entrusted the Koran to memory. As in these diverse literary and religious examples, a visitor taking Fabro’s candy therefore assumes a moral position, that of recreating Nadezhda’s action for Osip in the face of censorship and on behalf of poetry, since she herself either resisted eating the candy or

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ate it unwillingly but reported on the irony of the gesture many years later, as a witness to the horrors of the time. Yet some critics still read Fabro’s gesture as a “modern form of communion.”31 This was not, however, intended as an act of faith in which the public “consumed” Nadezhda or Fabro, like the host and wine during mass, which symbolize the actual eating and drinking of Christ’s body and blood. More an act of memory, it conceptually recalls symbolic foods such as those used to remember the flight of the Jews from Egypt in the Passover Seder meal. The philosophical complexity of sweetness further supports this reading. Taste is the most direct and primitive of the five senses, but philosophers from Plato onward have ranked taste lowest in the hierarchy. The fine arts have been thought to “elevate the ‘arts of the eyes and ears’ above the activities of the bodily senses.”32 However, philosopher Carolyn Korsmeyer argues that “tastes convey meaning and hence have a cognitive dimension that is often overlooked, [since] foods are employed in symbolic systems.”33 She counters the longstanding idea that taste is “too ‘subjective’ to admit rational deliberation, criterial assessment, or philosophical theorizing,” noting taste’s age-old association with the bodily, which, due to its relation to appetite, lumps it in the category of “the feminine.”34 She contends that taste is intimate (in contrast to vision or hearing, which require distance to be effective) and is thus the most primitive sense. Both inward and outward looking, “its mode of operation requires that objects become part of oneself. Its exercise requires risk and trust.”35 Candy is a striking artistic form in Fabro’s case, for although the artist himself never discussed this directly, candy also contains historical associations with childhood and innocence. According to anthropologist Sidney Mintz, sweet tastes are uniformly liked in every culture. They thus have a special position “in contrast to the more variable attitudes toward sour, salty, and bitter [. . .].”36 Mintz confirms that, independent of socialization or acquired dispositions, the taste of sweet things is universally considered a basic sensory experience for mammals, especially human beings. Beginning with a baby’s first taste of breast milk, sweetness is the nutritive basis for elemental sensory as well as affective relationships such as that between mother and child.37 Not surprisingly, candy is used to entice children. Perhaps 132

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Fabro’s stated attempt to reawaken “innocence”38 and pleasure echoes childhood, when consolation might be found in the guise of a sweet.39 On the one hand, Fabro’s utilization of a medium like candy was intentionally trivial: “at the moment we take up an artistic activity, a reflection, an activity of responsibility with respect to art . . . we can always start again in an innocent way. With basic signs, elementary movements . . . ; from a worldly point of view . . . [we start] with an insignificant form, a situation of poverty, which cannot afford great elegance and must be as direct as possible.”40 Indeed, Fabro’s plain paper-wrapped candies, which had no particular color, flavor, or shape, held none of the immediate aesthetic appeal of Gonzalez-Torres’s carefully chosen, colorful shiny wrappers, flavors, or colors, nor were they arranged in sensually pleasing forms or plentiful piles. But while the candies themselves had none of the more obvious charms of those offered by Gonzalez-Torres, Fabro nonetheless ensured that they became effective vehicles of his message. To this end, he created a “Civil Service for Art” (a concept related to the “civil service” option allowed to conscientious objectors in the then-­compulsory Italian military service) with young art students in Milan who had been instructed to hand out the candies to visitors, an approach he repeated with art students in Brussels. In order to preserve the work’s didactic value, he also conducted a three-day seminar with Belgian art students, which was videotaped and shown to audiences while the students circulated the confections at the Palais des Beaux-Arts. Fabro said he wanted the students’ actions to present a “form of availability, a way to be witnesses to the person who remembers what is in the candy.”41 Here again, he emphasized the notion of “attitude.” He said of his idea, “it does not matter much if they [the students] understood or not. It is a bit like the Benedictine monks, who did not understand what they were copying . . . but if today we make culture available, it is mostly thanks to men who made themselves available to copy culture, who had full faith in culture. They even copied things that maybe were in conflict with their moral, social, ideas.”42 Further, he added, “I told the young people to be available and maybe they would understand only later. Just like I was available to what Nadezda Mandelstam said.”43 And indeed, although the candies are now long forgotten, their memory has been preserved in other forms.

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By contrast, Gonzalez-Torres left the visitor to take the candy without a human presence to authorize or physically offer it. Thus the giver remained reassuringly—or unsettlingly—invisible, and the act of touching and taking the candy felt transgressive, a subversion of accepted behavioral codes in an exhibition setting. Fabro’s establishment of the responsibility for giving to selected individuals was an act of trust placed directly in the hands of future art makers. In the context of the old maternal adage not to take candy from a stranger, being clear about who was offering it was a critical part of the transaction. It also took into account the philosophical denigration of taste as the most unmediated and therefore unreliable and easily deceived of the five senses.44 In Fabro’s work, the ambiguity of sweetness lies in the idea that it is meant both to entice and to set participants on guard. Mintz, who notes that the Indo-European root swād is the source of both “sweet” and “persuade,”45 traces the links between sweetness and power, demonstrating how sugar was one of the first items transformed from luxury to necessity, and thereby from rarity to mass-produced good, a transformation embodying both the promise and the fulfillment of capitalism itself.46 Indeed, it should be recalled that November 1989 was the date of the fall of the Berlin Wall. A year afterward the Soviet Union would end, and Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika had already unleashed sentiments against the soviets’ censorship since the mid-1980s, in addition to ushering in consumerism to Communist countries. In this respect one might draw an associative parallel (although this is not one Fabro himself made) with the controversial 1974 Yugoslavian avant-garde film by director Dušan Makavejev, Sweet Movie, a political indictment of communism and consumerism in which a man and a woman shown making love in a sugar pile ends with the woman violently mauling her lover to death.47 As Julien Suaudeau notes,”Makavejev tells us ‘this is not sugar,’ but a mirage of sweetness whose truth is in turn alienation (the consumer society) and a perverse and murderous ideological mystification (what the revolutionary ideal and the USSR became under Stalin).”48 Fabro, too, raised questions about the deceptive nature of direct sensory perceptions such as taste, warning that sweetness can be a Trojan horse that distorts one’s sense of judgment as one lowers one’s

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guard. Agreeing to “eat” in a political sense risks obscuring necessary intellectual suspicion.

The Wrapper If whether or not to eat the candy remains an open question in Fabro’s work, as in Gonzalez-Torres’s, what is left in the visitor’s hand after consuming it is the paper wrapper printed with the artist’s selection of Nadezhda’s statements. Wrappers are yet another mode of mediation, modern forms of protection that keep candy safe from heat and moisture, preserving it from bacteria. They stall and stimulate appetite, instilling hopes of future pleasure. Like giftwrapping, they create anticipation and excitement. The rite of unwrapping, like erotic undressing, announces and prefigures the satisfaction to come. It is useful to contrast the wrappers in Fabro’s work with Manzoni’s discarded eggshells and Gonzalez-Torres’s “spills.” In GonzalezTorres’s installations, wrappers are chosen for their aesthetic appeal. Commercially made, they incorporate different candy brands and colors that contribute to the overall tone of each show: black licorice in torpedo-like forms wrapped in shiny black paper in one, multicolored and bright wrappers in another. Yet despite their visual weight, these wrappers have no intrinsic value once they have been removed from the artist’s carefully constructed piles. After the candy is eaten they are probably thrown away. In Fabro’s installation, on the contrary, the part of the product usually discarded as waste is what remains. In a true Arte Povera gesture, the wrapper is meant to be carefully preserved and appreciated, like the old cotton sheets of AR and the old artwork revitalized in it by Fabro. The handcrafted wrappers, recalling as they do Nadezhda’s heroic efforts, enrich the sweets contained inside them. Through the wrapper, Fabro’s work represents a restrained form of “eating” and cultural “replenishing” that attenuates Manzoni’s frenetic egg devouring just as it mitigates Gonzalez-Torres’s ephemeral gesture of depleting and refilling an apparently never-ending candy supply. For Fabro, then, consumption functions paradoxically, to save rather than destroy identity, as the participant recognizes the candy’s/ poetry’s/art object’s inherent cultural value, calling for its memory to



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be preserved. In linking the memorization of the poems to sweet candies, Fabro makes clear his sense of Nadezhda’s role as container and defender of art. This act of sheltering has many mythical, literary, and religious parallels: it is comparable to the biblical teba, or Noah’s Ark, the metaphorical vessel that protected vital forces until the disastrous flood subsided and people could safely come out again; or Rhea, the goddess of ancient Greek mythology, who wrapped up and hid baby Zeus in the mountains of Crete to save him from his violent father Cronos until he was strong enough to defend himself; as a form of bodily sheltering, it recalls the Egyptian goddess Nut, who took the sun into her body each night, releasing it back out to the world each morning. Significantly, in all these stories, as in Fabro’s project, the vessel is envisioned as a feminine body that takes in the precious goods. However, it is “maternal” only in the broadest sense of a container, like Noah’s Ark, rather than a literal woman’s body. Ultimately, Fabro demonstrates that taste can trigger memories, which, in turn, generate a sense of history, which, in turn, can create containment: “I can identify with Nadjejda, like Nadjejda could identify with Mandelstam, like Mandelstam could identify with Dante, and Dante identified with Virgil.”49

Conclusion In sum, by using real food in an artistic context but devising ways to preserve the significance of the ephemeral gesture in the visitor’s mind, Fabro sent a richly nuanced message to visitors about the ways in which art should be “ingested.” The looming Sanksrit letters AR confirm his larger project, while the flimsiness of the computers in the installation playfully alludes to the inefficiency and impersonal nature of these machines as modern containers of human memory. At the same time the colorfulness and formal integrity and mechanical capacity of the computers suggest their value as catalysts for creativity. However, the candies here also warn us: even if something is sweet, even if one has a sweet tooth and one’s appetite seems boundless, consume slowly, savor deliberately, sentence by sentence, artwork by artwork, each artwork in its various parts, discovering its components and relationships and being surprised by its flavor. At each 136

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juncture, weigh significance, absorbing the forms and meanings in a Rorschach-like way that instills historical responsibility as well as a projective identification. Rely on the corporeal immediacy of taste, but restrain it with Platonic intellect and judgment, like the transport belt that keeps Fabro’s enormous marble block from crushing Nadezhda’s book. Take note of who is offering the candy, sense the tactility of the hand imparting it and the hand delivering it to one’s mouth. Enjoy and recall the flavor after “eating” is finished. And finally, conserve the parts one would normally discard: though seemingly superfluous, these elements contain and protect, conveying the work’s message. Each component of the project, the transport belt, the wrappers, and even Nadezhda herself, holds, in a different way, something precious. We are thereby entrusted to approach art with similar care and reverence.

Appendix50 by Silvia Fabro (Archivio Luciano e Carla Fabro, Milan) Luciano Fabro, Nadezda, 1990 Total height: 237 cm. (the work can be attached at varying heights) Small element: 125 x 16 cm. Total weight: circa 1500 kg. Bardiglio marble + book: Nadezda Mandel’stam, Hope against Hope (1970–1973) + transport belt (the book exhibited is the edition in the language of the country in which the work is exhibited). The work is sculpted in a fragment of Bardiglio marble that has been left rough on the backside and smoothed on the two front sides, which are cut at a right angle. The central edge has been hollowed out and inserted inside it is an elongated pyramid obtained by the operations of cutting and the grooves of the fragment. The top tip of the pyramid has been rounded off. The two marble parts of the sculpture are held tightly together by a canvas transport belt, which is the type used by marble workers and transporters, and attached to the ceiling. The height of the small pyramid, independent and mobile, is determined by



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the thickness of the book, Hope against Hope by Nadezda Mandel’stam, upon which the work rests, weighing upon it (S. Fabro, 1990). “Nadezda: I dedicate privileged shows to her, she represents the continuity of art, to which she dedicated herself. I dedicate myself to her the way she dedicated herself to her husband, the way he dedicated himself to the poetry of Dante, as Dante did with Virgil, Virgil with Homer, it is the affirmation of the aristocratic role, etc.”51 The first request that art makes is that art should continue. Like all things in nature, sometimes nature is not concerned with the survival of the individual; rather, it has the problem of ­maintaining . . . We need to understand the thoughts that lie at the root, the thoughts that feed artistic work. I found similar thoughts in Nadezda Mandel’stam’s book, Hope against Hope. A short aside: artists always say the same things. The continuity of art is that of always saying the same things for the past ten thousand years and these are those things that are always renewing art. We need to relaunch, like throwing seeds, looking ahead, the work of this woman who tried to maintain a form of wisdom, in the same way as the Benedictines did while the Roman Empire was falling. They copied everything without understanding, without at times knowing what they copied, but they had the willingness to fulfill a civil service for art: that is our position. At times we need to do things before we understand them. A few Benedictines would have understood later, perhaps by learning only Latin and Greek, others did not but were satisfied all the same. There are many levels of participation.52

Exhibitions Personal Exhibition Computers di Luciano Fabro, Caramelle di Nadežda Mandel’ Štam, Galleria Christian Stein, Milan, October 11, 1990–January 12, 1991. (no cat.)

Collective Exhibition Affinités Sélectives VII: Luciano Fabro e Michel Verjux, curated by Bernard Marcadé,

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Palais des Beaux-Arts, Bruxelles December 6, 1990–January 6, 1991. (Candies of Nadezda)

Work Has Appeared in the Following Personal Exhibitions Luciano Fabro: Die Zeit: Werke 1963–1991, curated by Martin Schwander, Kunstmuseum Lucerne, Lucerne, September 28–December 1, 1991. Catalogue: Luciano Fabro, ed. Luciano Fabro and Martin Schwander (Basel: Wieser Verlag, 1991). Luciano Fabro, a cura di John Caldwell, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, September 30–November 29, 1992. Catalogue: Luciano Fabro (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1992). Fabroniopera. Luciano Fabro, curated by Bruno Corà, Palazzo Fabroni, Pistoia, December 17, 1994–February 11, 1995. Catalogue: Fabroniopera. Luciano Fabro, ed. Bruno Corà (Milan: Edizioni Charta, 1994). Luciano Fabro (Habitat), curated by Catherine Grenier, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, October 8, 1996–January 6, 1997. Catalogue: Luciano Fabro, ed. Catherine Grenier (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996). Leaflet added to the catalogue: Luciano Fabro, Vademecum, Paris, October 1996. Luciano Fabro, curated by João Fernandes with Silvia Fabro, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Palacio de Vélazquez del Parque del Retiro, Madrid, November 27, 2014–April 12, 2015. Catalogue: Luciano Fabro, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid 2015.



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Plate 4.1. Le Petit Colosse de Symi, 3, 1966.

Plate 4.2. Daniel Spoerri, The Mythological Travels of a Modern Sir John Mandeville Being an Account of the Magic, Meatballs and Other Monkey Business Peculiar to the Sojourn of Daniel Spoerri upon the Isle of Symi, Together with Divers Speculations Thereon (New York: Something Else Press, 1970).

Plate 4.3: Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, Geist der Kochkunst (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1832).

Plate 4.4: “Dissertation sur la ou le Keftédès ou Réflexions sur le prémâché ou comment parler boulette et non art avec une excursion imprevue sur le sang,” Le Petit Colosse de Symi, 3, 1966.

Plate 5.1: Paul McCarthy, Bossy Burger, 1991 (Performance-Still). Photo: Vaughn Rachel. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Plates 5.2 and 5.3: Paul McCarthy, Bossy Burger, 1991. Installation Views Hauser & Wirth Collection Lokremise, St. Gallen, Switzerland. Set from television show, studio lights, linoleum floor, video decks, monitors, residue of performance. 372 x 868 x 700 cm / 146 1⁄2 x 341 3⁄4 x 275 5⁄8 inches. Hauser & Wirth Collection, Switzerland. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Plate 5.4: Jan Davidsz de Heem, Still Life with Lobster, 1643, Wallace Collection, London.

Plate 6.1: Janine Antoni in collaboration with Chef Kevin Lasko and Fat and the Moon founder Rachel Budde. Opening event of In & On, (Multisensory culinary/ art experience) 2011. Photographed by Christopher Kissock. Courtesy of Creative Time.

Plate 6.2: Janine Antoni in collaboration with Chef Kevin Lasko and Fat and the Moon founder Rachel Budde. In & On, Scales and Skin (Multisensory culinary/art experience), 2011. Photographed by Christopher Kissock. Courtesy of Creative Time.

Plate 6.3: Janine Antoni’s Permaculture Garden, before and after. Courtesy of Rachel Budde.

Plate 6.4: Janine Antoni, 2038, 2000, C-print, 20 X 20 inches (50.8 X 50.8 cm). © Janine Antoni. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

Plate 6.5: Janine Antoni, Siren’s breath, from In & On, artist book, page 3, 2011.

Plates 7.1 and 7.2: Opening of Luciano Fabro, Computers di Luciano Fabro, caramelle di Nadezda Mandel’stam, 1990, Christian Stein Gallery, Milan. Photographs by Giovanni Ricci. Courtesy of Archivio Luciano and Carla Fabro, Milan.

Plate 7.3: Luciano Fabro, Computers di Luciano Fabro, Caramelle di Nadezda Mandel’stam, 1990, Christian Stein Gallery, Milan. Photograph by Salvatore Licitra. Courtesy of Archivio Luciano and Carla Fabro, Milan.

Plate 7.4: Luciano Fabro, Nadezda, 1990. Photograph by Salvatore Licitra. Courtesy Archivio Luciano and Carla Fabro, Milano.

Plate 7.5: Luciano Fabro, Computers, 1990. Photography by Salvatore Licitra. Courtesy Archivio Luciano and Carla Fabro, Milano.

Plate 7.6: Luciano Fabro, Caramelle (Candies), detail, 1990. Photograph by Silvia Fabro. Courtesy Archivio Luciano e Carla Fabro, Milano

Plate 8.1: Womanhouse installation in Los Angeles, featuring Robin Weltsch, Kitchen and Vicki Hodgetts, Eggs to Breasts (Sponsored by Feminist Art Program at CalArts), 1972. The Getty Research Institute, 2000.M.43.1. Photograph ©Lloyd Hamrol.

Plate 8.2: Martha Rosler, still image from Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975, video (black and white, sound, 6:09 min.). Courtesy Mitchell Inness Nash Gallery. ©Martha Rosler.

Plate 8.3: Carrie Mae Weems, The Kitchen Table Series: Untitled (Woman Brushing Hair), 1990. Platinum print; 38.1 x 38.1 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund 2008.116.11. © Carrie Mae Weems.

Plate 8.4: Liza Lou, Kitchen (1991–1995). Beads, plaster, wood and found objects, 96 x 132 x 168in. (243.8 x 335.3 x 426.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Peter Norton 2008.339a‑x. © Liza Lou. Photograph: Sheldan C. Collins.

Plate 9.1: Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Fashion Show (Im Teppichladen), 1979, from the series Sausage Photographs (Wurstserie). © Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

Plate 9.2: Peter Fischli and David Weiss, With the Cavepeople (Hölenbewohner), 1979, from the series Sausage Photographs (Wurstserie). © Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

Plate 9.3: Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Moonraker, 1979, from the series Sausage Photographs (Wurstserie). © Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

Plate 9.4: Sigmar Polke, Bread Palm Tree (Brotpalme), 1966, reproduced in the portfolio made with Chris Kohlhöfer, . . . Higher Powers Command ( . . . Höhere Wesen befehlen), 1968. © 2017 The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne / ARS, New York / VG Bild-Kunst Bonn.

Plate 9.5: Bruce Nauman, Eating My Words, from the portfolio Eleven Color Photographs, 1966–1967/1970. © 2017 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 9.6: Peter Fischli and David Weiss, In the Carpetshop (Im Teppichladen), 1979, from the series Sausage Photographs (Wurstserie). © Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

Plate 10.1: Elżbieta Jabłońska, Kitchen, 2005, from Through the Stomach to the Heart, 1999–present. Performance Regensburg. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 10.2: Elżbieta Jabłońska, Kitchen, 2003, from Through the Stomach to the Heart, 1999–present. Performance Bialy Mazur, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 10.3 Elżbieta Jabłońska, Kitchen, 2004, from Through the Stomach to the Heart, 1999–present. Performance CAC Wilno, Lithuania. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 10.4: Elżbieta Jabłońska, Polish Artists and Curators in the Kitchen, 2004, from Through the Stomach to the Heart, 1999–present. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 11.1: Emmett Williams and Robert Filliou, Spaghetti Sandwich— Co-invention, Eat Art Gallery, 1971. Photo credit: Courtesy of Emmett Williams and Die Schweizerische Landesbibliothek, Archiv Daniel Spoerri. Copyright Emmett Williams.

Plate 11.2: Dieter Roth, Untitled (Doll in Chocolate), 1969 (Ohne Titel, Puppe in Schokolade). Photo credit: Courtesy of the Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg. Copyright Dirk Dobke.

Plate 11.3: Dieter Roth, Karnickelköttelkarnickel, 1972. Photo credit: Courtesy of the Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg. Copyright Dirk Dobke.

Plate 11.4: Dieter Roth, P.O.TH.A.A.VFB (Portrait of the Artist as Birdseed Bust), 1970. Photo credit: Courtesy of the Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg. Copyright Dirk Dobke.

Plate 12.1: Allen Ruppersberg in Al’s Café, 1969. Photo by Gary Krueger.

Plate 12.2: Allen Ruppersberg, Al’s Café. “Simulated Burned Pine Needles a la Johnny Cash Served with a Live Fern,” 1969. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 12.3: Allen Ruppersberg, Al’s Café. “Al’s Burger—Sky, Land, and Water,” 1969. Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York.

Plate 12.4: Allen Ruppersberg, Once Upon a Time in Southern California (LA in the 70s), 2010. 50 Color LightJet photographs. 20 parts: 6 1⁄2 x 6 1⁄2 inches each (food stands) 16.5 x 16.5 cm 30 parts: 6 1⁄2 x 8 1⁄2 inches each (newspaper clippings); framed 16.5 x 21.6 cm Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York.

Plate 13.1: Jeannine Shinoda: [m]eat. Madison, Wisconsin, 2014. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Plate 13.2: Douglas Rosenberg: Community/ Social. Minocqua, Wisconsin, 2007. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Plate 13.3: Mick Douglas with Cultural Transports Collective: Ride-On Dinner. Melbourne, 2006. Photo courtesy of Karen Trist.

Plate 13.4: Michael Rakowitz: Every Weapon Is a Tool if You Hold It Right. Chicago, Illinois, 2014. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Plate 13.5: Spatula&Barcode: Grim[m] Essen. Darmstadt, Germany, 2012. Photo courtesy of the artists.

part III



The Kitchen

Intersections between the Private and Public Spheres

Chapter 8

Feminist Art Kitchen Testimony Jody B. Cutler

In the United States, “first-generation feminist art,” recognized initially in the context of white, middle-class women, coalesced in the early 1970s largely through themes and images of the home and the female body, often merging the two.1 Feeding and eating, not surprisingly, were prevalent subjects that intersect in the kitchen with myriad notions of domesticity in two now celebrated works of the era, both of which have received increasing art historical attention in recent decades. The first, generally known as Nurturant Kitchen and attributed to Robin Weltsch and Vicki Hodgetts (1972, Plate 8.1), a temporary, site-specific installation for the landmark Womanhouse exhibition (1972) survives through relatively substantial documentation.2 The other, the six-minute, black-and-white video, Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975; below, Semiotics) by Martha Rosler (b. 1943), has become widely accessible in exhibitions, museum collection materials, and on the Internet (Plate 8.2).3 The considerable scholarship and criticism on the social and artistic nature of these two works and the broader issues broached by them begins with Lucy Lippard’s brief essay, “Household Images in Art” (1973, first published in Ms. magazine), which mentions the Womanhouse kitchen, and culminates in a number of ways in Helen Molesworth, “House Work and Art Work” (2000), which includes a comprehensive analysis of Rosler’s video.4 Following their lead, I hope to further the heuristic scope and historical impact of these works through the shared centralization of a physical kitchen space 143

as ­overdetermined feminist content, along with two later feminist projects approaching similar iconic status in the next generation: the Kitchen Table Series (1990–1991, Plate 8.3) by Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953), a cinematic group of twenty black-and-white photographs and twelve text panels; and the room-scale, bead-covered trompe l’oeil sculpture, Kitchen (completed 1995, Plate 8.4; Whitney Museum of American Art) by Liza Lou (b. 1969).5 While obviously not the only contemporary art projects on the kitchen theme during the period covered herein to receive some exposure (even excluding individual related images, as photography became dominant by the late 1980s), these four stand out as concerted explorations, differentiated from concurrent feminist and other art activity incorporating food as medium. In this sense, the largely (not entirely) ahistorical “conversation” I develop below between them suggests a narrowed social as well as artistic history within the expansive cosmos of domesticity (food, cooking, cleaning) taken up in much postwar feminist art, as mentioned. Meanwhile, this intergenerational overlay draws from and furthers a growing revisionist discourse on oversimplified stylistic and regional dichotomies in the historicization of feminist art.6 (Rosler, Weems, and Lou each were working in proximity to art academia in California, a milieu known for facilitated feminist art pedagogy and production from the time of Womanhouse, at the time that their kitchen projects discussed herein were conceived, yet, each was equally abreast of and hedging the mainstream art world centered in New York.) Conversely, several distinctive tendencies and directions of feminist art in the last quarter of the twentieth century are also illuminated. Divergent in approach and aesthetics, the four projects of focus testify to a range of lived and mnemonic, shared and personal experiences for American women in proximity to the mass-mediated postwar “American kitchen.” As such, the term “kitchen testimony” in my title alludes to this collective record, although it originated as a reference to literary accounts by slave and servant witnesses to digressions of their owner/employers, who tried to suppress them by casting doubt on the capacity of their “inferiors” for judgment and truthfulness.7 However, my usage implies discursive overlaps with this past insofar as female domestic labor and truth telling, turned 144

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inward among women in kitchens in many cultural traditions, features prominently.

Kitchen Confines Womanhouse is most commonly known as the first exhibition of feminist work, collectively, to receive wide attention, the results of a larger project, the short-lived Feminist Art Program founded by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro under the auspices of CalArts (California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, 1971–1972).8 Soliciting and reconstituting a vacant Hollywood mansion into art studios, the (female) students transformed the site into “an elaborate and complex example of household fantasy” and, in the process, themselves into feminist artists.9 Women baby boomers were sensitive to the psychological complications of many of their mothers, as male-constructed stereotypes of female domesticity in the United States emerging in the 1950s, among the most familiar and enduring in American history, were reified in early television programming on the cusp of women’s lib.10 Spacious, well-organized fictional kitchens like those of Harriet Nelson and June Cleaver were supplemented by a surge in mass-market interior design that introduced notions of leisure and style into middle-class kitchens in appeals for continuity in the place of women. Likewise, the marketing of modern, mechanized kitchen helpers—appliances, gadgets, and convenience foods—removed visible labor and tedium from representations of white women in kitchens, but not responsibility for food provision according to new focus on innovation and variation in food acquisition, preparation, and presentation.11 Proto-feminists like Sylvia Plath expressed anxieties about the subliminal messages of food ads, which linked modern womanhood to prowess in the kitchen, expressed in several of her poems and her famous novel, The Bell Jar (1963, the year of her death and publication of Betty Friedan’s canonical, The Feminist Mystique; the Bell Jar was first published in the United States in 1971).12 This postwar gender divide is also apparent in much American pop art, almost exclusively associated with men until relatively recently, in its lack of reference to the women mainly responsible for the securing and ­handling of

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its supermarket subjects.13 Especially recalled are several of Tom Wesselmann’s kitchen assemblages (c. 1962) that feature copious packaged-food still lifes and (presumed) reproductions of paintings by modern masters like Picasso and Mondrian; in one case, a phallic image dominates in the form of a skyscraper in the window with two oranges on the sill below.14 The far-reaching interpretations of varied strains and particular works of first-generation pop art notwithstanding, its collective connection to (male-based) advertising is fundamental. Under that rubric (among others), even where the connection was overt critique, plenty of art by women in the 1960s and 1970s can be (and is now) considered as pop, including Rosler’s early collages such as the series, House Beautiful (1967–1972, Museum of Modern Art), in which magazine photos of the Vietnam War are interspersed with home design spreads.15 With its incorporated current (at the time) pancake box logo, Betye Saar’s renowned assemblage, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum) is an iconic example that crosses feminist boundaries as well.16 In the 1960s and 1970s, however, there was a double standard when it came to overt subject matter, whereby what was considered the “natural” terrain of women was dismissed in their art carte blanche even though it could be the basis of critically admired work by men.17 By the late 1960s the kitchen had become a site of conflict between female generations as well as the sexes, for which Nurturant Kitchen represented a metaphorical arena.18 Like most of the art at Womanhouse, its status as a meta-kitchen—a kitchen usurped as a work of art about kitchens—was integral to its experimental quality. The artistic modification consisted mainly of an allover paint job, inclusive of appliances and utensils, in a saturated pink that had obvious biological and cultural connotations and perhaps also mocked postwar kitchen color trends; with plastic-based, pigmented, molded fried egg and female breast forms applied to sections of the wall and ceiling.19 The Surrealist overtone of the results, shared by much feminist art of the era, was distinctly oppositional in sensibility to (mainly male) minimalist abstraction trending at the time, even as the monochrome and scale overlapped. The fluctuation and splattering of cooked eggs and body fragments in several morphing states also suggests voyeuristic violence to female anatomical integrity not unlike the 146

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torso-head image in Réne Magritte’s Le Viol paintings (1930s–1940s). Plath offers Surrealist-inflected poetic antecedents in personifications of food and appliances, for example, “Viciousness in the kitchen—the potatoes hiss” (“Lesbos,” 1962), a line borrowed by Hodgetts for the Womanhouse catalogue entry. Weltsch contributed an original poem, beginning: “The soft skin of a kitchen pink.”20 At the time it was created, Nurturant Kitchen was relatively unique for its collaborative genesis as an ephemeral work with a prominent (if somewhat delayed) afterlife. Overwhelmingly, early conceptual and temporal art that has infiltrated the canon through documentation is tied to individual artists with subsequent public art careers. Womanhouse and several of the installations within, prominently Nurturant Kitchen, almost entirely sustained their collaborative, haptic foundations. Even attributions for the piece have been recorded variously. The original Womanhouse catalogue has separate entries for “The Kitchen” (Weltsch) and “Eggs to Breasts” (Hodgetts), which may or may not reflect original ideas and preferred art tasks, a division that has been undermined in virtually all subsequent documented recollections.21 In any case, the egg-breast ornamentation was conceived in a “consciousness-raising” group session, among the innovative components of the Feminist Art Program curriculum.22 The final display included anthropomorphized aprons in a pantry corridor and collages of exotic locales in some of the cabinet drawers by Susan Frazier, and molded plastic curtains, placed on the windows, by Wanda Westcoast, one of several invited local artists not officially affiliated with the Feminist Art Program.23 This amalgam of social, psychological, and artistic initiatives that came to fruition in this kitchen is its primary legacy. Fast forward two decades to Lou’s Kitchen, which, in retrospect, crystallizes the fleshy finish of the Womanhouse kitchen into a gleaming memorial. Working alone for five years, Lou built the framework from a combination of readymade and hand-hewn elements, then applying a coat of innumerable glass beads with tweezers in ­miniaturist-mosaic fashion. Her wholesale embrace of the hobby-store medium called up those first-generation predecessors who brought traditionally female crafts into contemporary art partly to challenge entrenched material hierarchies, epitomized in Judy Chicago’s The

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Dinner Party (1974–1979, Brooklyn Museum). It can be noted here that a precedent for that piece was the dining room installation at Womanhouse, the most collaborative in the exhibition (four artists are credited in the catalogue), in which the luscious “meals” displayed were sculpted from bread dough and painted to imitate good book photographs.24 The diachronic affinity between these 1970s works and Lou’s Kitchen is significant, although, unlike the collaborative core of both the Womanhouse rooms and The Dinner Party, Lou’s endeavor suggests artistic alienation, to which I will return. The same explicit female body imagery and craft modes employed by many first-generation feminist artists that were, early on, largely trivialized by mainstream cognoscenti and some women artists and critics, are now generally viewed as progressive for the time, foremost for refusing modernistic (male) art paradigms and thus opening the floodgates for “identity art” to come. Yet, feminist work thus identified, sometimes referred to as essentialist, was viewed by some as less progressive than that which linked new mediums, including the conceptual (linguistic) realm and video, with the new (feminist) c­ ontent— distinguished as theoretical or deconstructivist.25 Rosler’s work from the start has resisted this critical dichotomy, well reflected in Semiotics, which immerses its woman subject in a sophisticated use of video (especially for the time) that went beyond recording a performance to engage, dialectically, commercial television as a send-up of postwar cooking shows. The setting is a cramped, downscale kitchen (refrigerator and oven in view). Behind a table cropped at the picture plane, Rosler recites a list of generic kitchen tools in alphabetical order in poker-faced monotone, demonstrating as she proceeds: “apron, bowl, chopper . . . .”26 Toward the end the words are garbled and accompanied by escalating, antic gestures that evoke stereotypes of (female) hysteria, rebellion, and a satiric jab at the gusto of television culinary enthusiasts. The cooking genre was among the earliest developed in television, bolstered by established popularity in radio and promotional collusion with appliance and food companies.27 Through the 1950s the majority of hosts were actresses in the role of coiffed, shapely (white) housewife preparing husband-­pleasing recipes keyed to branded products. A variation was

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the gourmet show, which featured a “professional” male cook, beginning with James Beard’s I Love to Eat (late 1940s), although it promoted similar gender ideals that linked female desirability with cooking well (which so disturbed Sylvia Plath). In her television debut, Julia Child (The French Chef, 1963) disrupted female stereotypes inhered in those precedents with her assertive body language and visible pleasure in eating (“appetite” was for men). Yet, her career was built on a platform of bountiful fulfillment for women in the kitchen.28 Among a substantial number and diversity of works on food themes in the late 1960s and 1970s, Rosler took on, in her first art video, Budding Gourmet (1974), the internalization of these values by women, as well as cuisine and class, and the hidden economic frivolities of culinary excess in light of world hunger.29 Her inclination toward food was partly informed by her traditional Jewish upbringing, in which the kitchen was pervasive female domain.30 However, in Semiotics, despite using her own body, individuality is white-washed and emptied into a collective sign—“housewife,” defined by the banal kitchen studium (to borrow Roland Barthes’s term). Molesworth emphasizes the considerable absurdist humor in Rosler’s deadpan skewering of mass media’s blissful domestic divas and semiotic theories.31 The arbitrary arrangement of the recitative on one level ribs the high-minded contemporaneous word art of male peers such as Joseph Kosuth, Bruce Nauman, and John Baldessari, a subgenre of conceptual art that Rosler was engaged with by then, clarified in some of her own comments on Semiotics: “I was concerned with something like the notion of ‘language speaking the subject,’ and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represents a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity. . . . I was suggesting that the signs imposed on women are extremely diminishing.”32 On an intertextual level, the stilted script boils down the mouth-watering cooking show recipe to a mechanics that subjugates the everywoman’s presence and pending labor to the objects and their functions. Contingently, there is no food in sight. The ending conveys her struggle to break free of her tightly contrived, interlocking structure of systematic text, television show format, compressed screen space, and kitchen commentary. Like



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Nurturant Kitchen, albeit substituting Dada insouciance for Surrealist viscera, Semiotics subverts the normalized food-related duties of postwar American women metastasized in the kitchen.

Kitchens Reclaimed The photographs in Weems’s Kitchen Table Series do not include any kitchen appliances, although they were shot in her own kitchen.33 Her insistence on the kitchen subject is more semiotic interpellation than visual iconography, starting with the series title that attaches to the repeated (kitchen) table. In a dramatic reversal of the psychologically zapped figure and utensil-laden surface in Rosler’s Semiotics, the table in Weems’s series is a fount around which the woman-­subject, full-fledged protagonist of a loose, open-ended narrative, engages in diverse activities with significant others and moments of solitary thought. The sparse setting reveals intermittent, iconographic prop changes across the images that also suggest the passing of time. The pervasive overhead lamp calls up interrogation, relative to historical kitchen testimony (mentioned), as well as confessionals and “testaments” to the accrued, shared female province of the metaphysical kitchen over time as well as the present moments represented, whatever the diverse circumstances of real ones. The text panels contain narrative fragments in third-person voice. Not quite explanatory of the visual vignettes, they outline the arc of a waning romantic relationship in prosaic terms apropos of the documentary photo style; a few snippets set the tone: “He was an unhardened man of the world. She’d been around the block more than once herself, wasn’t a tough cookie, but a full grown woman for sure. . . . In and of itself, being alone again naturally wasn’t a problem. . . . He wasn’t working and she was, but ends meeting, ha!” Not unlike Rosler in Semiotics, Weems’s role in front of the camera in the Kitchen Table Series is generalized, delimited somewhat by intimations of class in the glimpse of the space given. Yet, the perceived difference of the image of the black female in American visual culture, including much widely recognized feminist art, was still stark in the art world at the start of the 1990s, and lent to a close association between the artist’s real body and the represented subject—a circum150

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stance Weems plays with deftly as the “star” of the series. Precisely, Weems’s blending of the authentic, or credible, and the archetypal casts a prosaic “realty effect” (as one critic put it) that promotes accessibility, in this case to a range of identifying women, supplemented by the universal trope of the kitchen table and several scenes of female bonding, intergenerational (mother/daughter), and among peers.34 Rosler’s Semiotics and several photographs from Weems’s Kitchen Table Series (along with other works by each) were included in a 1992 exhibition, Dust and Domesticity: Constructions of the Feminine (Whitney Museum at Equitable Center), which foregrounded class, gender, and racial division in relation to the theme.35 The number of overtly feminist works included stood out after the domination of “macho” painters and sculptors on the scene in the 1980s, despite the simultaneous turn to identity pioneered by feminist artists.36 Womancentered art regained mainstream attention mainly in photographic work, at the time still treated widely as a specialty or second-tier niche in the elite contemporary sphere. Interestingly, a 1991 exhibition of postwar photography at the Museum of Modern Art, entitled “Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort,” included images from Weems’s Kitchen Table Series along with work by Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, and Barbara Kruger. Like Weems, several emerging African American women artist-photographers, including Pat Ward Williams and Lorna Simpson, seemed, like Weems, to be using the documentary tradition as a starting point to address the historical mediation of black female bodies (among other subjects).37 The latter in turn brought attention to the careers and continuing output of groundbreaking, immediate African American women predecessors, who, until recent decades, were largely excluded from summaries of first-generation feminist art.38 Among the most prolific and influential, both equally involved with the black arts movement from the start, were Betye Saar (b. 1926) and Faith Ringgold (b. 1930). Saar’s renowned assemblage, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (mentioned above), in which the repeated package logo serves as backdrop to a “mammy” figurine holding a white baby, a broom, and a rifle (included in the “Dust and Domesticity” exhibition) has contributed substantially to a burgeoning interdisciplinary discourse on representations of female domestic slaves and servants of African

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descent in the West, including coded forms of dissent and African spiritual practices like “conjuring in the Big House kitchen.”39 Weems has delved into this area elsewhere, drawing partly on her academic study of folklore (UC Berkeley, graduate art studies at UC San Diego, MFA, 1984); however, it is absent from the world of the Kitchen Table Series, which confronts both stereotypes of and implicit taboos about exposing private black domestic life for public consumption in this connection. In fact, pervasive negative stereotypes have lingered into the new millennium, so that “many Americans often feel compelled to legitimize persons of color by deliberately pointing to their orderly, clean, domestic environment,” according to related research by Barbara Burlison Mooney.40 And at least since Henry Ossawa Tanner’s two famous paintings of light-filled interiors inhabited by black males (1890s), African American artists have combatted them through alternative representations.41 The portraiture of photographer James Van Der Zee, with its highly composed groupings and backdrops for his mainstay Harlem clients from the Depression through the civil rights era perhaps epitomize this tack, and can be contrasted with many documentary photographs of black families for mainstream (mainly white) distribution in the same period.42 Again, no food preparation is seen in the Kitchen Table Series, although eating and nurture are, as in one scene in which the woman’s lover digs into a meal before she has begun hers; she appears to enjoy his relish and touches him affectionately. All of her existential struggles are filtered through a self-defined, modern therapeutic concept of the kitchen that nonetheless bears traces of its past as female sanctum. While photographic, time-based, and conceptual mediums gained prominence in the 1990s, there remained entrenched gender-based material and subject hierarchies in more traditional two- and three-­ dimensional forms that arose with early feminist art. New works by women (though not men, a prominent example being the early work of Mike Kelley) in traditional craft mediums or with emphasis on female body imagery could be trivialized in the mainstream as throwbacks, from which some women artists and critics of the next generation sought to distance themselves. One forthright critic admitted her “prejudices against the art of the early women’s movement,” which “seemed embarrassing,” in an enthusiastic review of the exhibition, “Division 152

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of Labor: Woman’s Work in Contemporary Art” (1995, seen in New York and Los Angeles), which spanned several decades and included works recreated from Womanhouse with which she was unfamiliar (along with works by Rosler and Faith Ringgold).43 “By 1995 home has become, for many in the feminist art community, not only the workplace but the primary source of inspiration for their art,” Arlene Raven wrote in the catalogue.44 Early feminist art scholars (including Raven) and artists were also infiltrating an expanding art academia, which offered a network of venues to counter exclusion from commercial galleries and museums and exert pedagogical influence. Still, Liza Lou was disparaged for her interest in beads in art school (UC San Francisco, 1989), which spurred her to drop out and pursue her micro-media visions in earnest, beginning with the project that became Kitchen in her own kitchen.45 Ironically, she first exhibited the work in progress at a university gallery (1994, as Kitchenette; California State, Fullerton).46 The completed piece debuted in “Labor of Love” (1996, New Museum of Contemporary Art), something of an opportune sequel to “Division of Labor,” which juxtaposed work by contemporary self-taught and trained artists that connected craft and decoration with everyday life.47 This show (in which Ringgold was also included), along with “Dirt and Domesticity” and “Division of Labor,” was important not least for pulling generational and cultural feminisms (plural) into close proximity, one mark of so-called third-wave feminism broadly as it became manifest in contemporary feminist art.48 Importantly, “Dirt and Domesticity” and “Labor of Love” were not explicitly shows of feminist art, but included it alongside other work that showed its collective, growing infiltration into the broader scene. Beyond its shimmering surface, Lou’s rendition of a generic suburban kitchen is antithetical to immaculate representations that sublimated the more realistic disorganization of women striving to keep up with the expectations of others in the kitchen. Excess abounds, from clashing surface patterns to heaps of ready-to-eat and just-cooked foods, dirty dishes, cleaning supplies, and even (beaded) debris in a dustbin. Details like open cereal boxes and half-eaten meals also reflect the gradual change in kitchen space from isolated female domain (especially suburban homes typically had dining rooms) to a pit stop for family members on the run. Its stock and upkeep,

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however, continues to fall largely to women. Lou’s piece pays homage to a repressed, secluded past, analogous, inversely, to the constantly repurposed kitchen in Weems’s Kitchen Table Series. Its slightly kitschy turmoil even harks back to the ambiguous nineteenth-century genre paintings of Lily Martin Spencer. An inventory of references to women’s work is embedded into Lou’s kitchen, including appliance imagery in the faux wallpaper and a decorative panel on the side of the oven bearing lines from an Emily Dickinson poem, “She Rose to His Requirement—Dropt.” An image of Aunt Jemima has been hidden on the underside of the oven door, and pin-up girls on the stovetop reflect perpetual links between female stereotypes, sexuality, and cooking. Intertwined are art historical puns, from the riff on pop brand naming to the Abstract Expressionist synthetic wood grains first popularized in the late 1960s, to the sudsy sink water that mimics the swirling skies of Van Gogh. In the headline of a newspaper on the table that reads, “Housewife Beads the World!” Lou may be holding up her own art persona to that of the “crazy modern master,” as well as channeling the tabloid notoriety exploited by art giants Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. The all-consuming, sacramental technique and stained-glass effect of Lou’s Kitchen elevate here proverbial “back of the house” tableau to the divine feminist precinct of Chicago’s The Dinner Party. Lou’s spiritual aesthetic is informed by her much discussed Christian Fundamentalist upbringing and interest in Gothic and Byzantine art. The trajectory of the project was a self-imposed kind of trial through which the artist contended with substantial obstacles, among them, several relocations, damage to the piece in progress, and tendinitis. Perhaps partly a function of her isolated devotion to the project, she created within Kitchen a fading community that recalls the seedlings of Womanhouse. The hit of the “Labor of Love” show, Kitchen sold to a major collector (Peter Norton; since donated to the Whitney), accelerating Lou’s career.

Kitchen Coda It took some time for the artistic accomplishments produced at Womanhouse to gain traction in mainstream (white male) influential 154

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art circles, accelerated by emerging feminist art scholars. By the mid1990s, however, its crucial place in postwar art was secured with the publication of The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, which included a reproduction of Nurturant Kitchen.49 Although Womanhouse is perhaps best understood as a Gesamtkunstwerk, its ultimate documentational form facilitated the historical survival of discreet installations. Beyond certain ­minimalist-type installations, Yayoi Kusama’s well-documented Driving Image show (1964), essentially a rambling installation on a floor of crunchy macaroni in which bedroom and kitchen furniture and objects are covered in her signature “soft phalli,” comes to mind as an interesting precedent for, and feminist art conspirator (in retrospect) with, Nurturant Kitchen. Installation art, as an interactive, hegemonic gallery environment, only peaked (quantitatively) in the 1990s. Lou’s Kitchen both invokes and backs away from this approach as more as a colossal sculpture. Rosler’s work by the mid-1970s was at the cutting edge of forthcoming interests by third-wave (as above) woman artists in reinvigorated mass media-informed feminist critique. Through her art over decades (as well as her substantial work as an educator and critical writer), Semiotics has remained a touchstone. In 2003 the Whitechapel Gallery invited Rosler to recreate the video in conjunction with its exhibition, “A Short History of Performance Art II.” Hesitant to revive it in this context since the televised delivery was integral to its conception, she devised instead a relational performance in which women competed for the original role in a public audition using their own interpretations of the gestures accompanying the script. 50 She later used video recordings of the proceedings, played on monitors in the gallery as part of the temporal piece, to create a new video (Semiotics of the Kitchen: An Audition, 2011). In the past decade, Semiotics has been exhibited in several group shows that have evolved its meanings, including “Food for Thought: A Video Art Sampler” (2006–2007, The Jewish Museum), “Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen” (2010–2011, Museum of Modern Art), and “Everyday Epiphanies: Photography and Daily Life Since 1969” (2013–2014, Metropolitan Museum of Art). Semiotics (again) closely skirts performance art proper, as Weems’s performance in her own Kitchen Table Series remains at the forefront of its content. While many men and women

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artists began to use their bodies for art in the 1960s, the practice in feminist art has invoked necessary or desired self-sufficiency as well as self-exploration and formal experimentation. According to Weems, the Kitchen Table Series arose from a desire to work close to home with what was at hand, at a time when she was finding her mature artistic voice.51 Recently, she has commented on the propensity of women artist-photographers (including Sherman) to carve out and claim private spaces in which to create, in contrast to the spectacles constructed by male peers like Gregory Crewdson or Nic Nicosia (for example).52 Sticking with her bead medium, Lou’s methods have become increasingly collaborative—one sense in which Kitchen was cathartic for her art, culminating in ongoing work in Durban, South Africa, with a team of local (male and female) artisans. Within the ground staked out in this discussion, Kitchen stands as a climactic expression of popular postwar kitchen ideologies and realities at the onset of gradual re-urbanization and sea changes in women’s relationships to kitchens in American society strongly resonant in Weems’s Kitchen Table Series. One postmillennial piece that recapitulated the nostalgic sentiments and artistic generosity of Lou’s Kitchen was a public performance by Anissa Mack, titled Pies for a Passerby (2002), in which she baked several pies daily in a prefab kitchen cottage outside the Brooklyn Public Library, leaving them on the sill when done to be taken. Mack was not inspired here specifically by feminist issues or personal attachment to the activity, but the relational aspect of the presentation; yet, she turned to the kitchen as both an accessible and a symbolic means.53 There is also Keith Edmier’s self-contained, exact, scale replica of his 1971 childhood kitchen, replete with wood laminate, part of a larger recreation of the entire home (Bremen Towne, 2006–2007), which, like Lou’s Kitchen, integrates hand-hewn and (more) factory-made elements. The content of his purposefully sterile version, however, diverges from that of Lou’s substantially, and also brings up another, more or less formal, lineage of “house art” perhaps beginning with Gordon Matta-Clark—to which Womanhouse and Lou’s Kitchen are tangential as well. I have emphasized the American context of my discussion, since cultural specificity, I hope to have shown, is endemic to each project of focus and the collective art and social issues they encompass. However, 156

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with the global turn in recent decades especially, although extending through the entire period covered, prominent feminist artists internationally provide many entry points for expanding the discussion. As a bounded examination here, the art kitchens of focus attest to a crisis between marketed, media norms and the realities of mainstream domesticity in postwar America. As art per se, each is both confrontational and defensive in its challenge, a priori, to the longstanding mainstream marginalization of woman-centered art by women.



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Chapter 9

Es Geht Um Die Wurst On Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s Sausage Photographs Edward A. Vazquez

In Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s Fashion Show, one of ten photographs made in 1979 as part of the Swiss artists’ first collaborative project, Wurstserie, known in English as the Sausage Photographs, five models confidently saunter across a catwalk, their fashions as coordinated as their nonchalant, sideways glances (Plate 9.1). The photograph, unsurprisingly, offers little in the way of information on the latest trends from Paris or Milan, instead picturing a playfully idiosyncratic scene built in miniature from everyday foods and kitchen items. Both models and clothing are made of processed meats—plump sausage bodies draped in a variety of cold cuts—and accessorized with bottle caps, bits of plastic, the odd peanut shell, and a twisted piece of pink tissue paper. Somehow the sausages manage the characteristically blasé look of the runway model, disinterested and even a little aloof, without having faces to speak of, as their eyes, noses, and mouths are mostly implied by the round ends of casing pre-crimped with small metal bands (though pairs of tacks pressed into the soft meat of two sausages do gaze obliquely beyond the frame of the photograph). Set against a water-spotted bathroom mirror these bedecked sausages, whose bottom ends have all been cut flat for balance, are poised on a small, pink, wooden ledge carpeted with uniformly sliced squares of cheese and accented with three sprigs of curly parsley. As with a proper fashion show, Fischli and Weiss staged this scene 159

for the camera, even as they chose not to hide the marks of daily use particular to its setting. Visible through the white spots of dried water droplets (and perhaps toothpaste) are the tanks, pipes, and other trappings of a domestic bathroom, these reflections and residues visually underlining the orchestrated specificity and general haphazardness that combine in this perversely staged catwalk. Though kitchen items and foodstuffs feature in most of the Sausage Photographs, Fischli and Weiss made use of various locations in the home to stage the different scenes and the choice of a bathroom mirror seems particularly noteworthy in this instance. If bringing food into the toilet is both mischievous and unappetizing, then it is equally true that dressing up sausages in the latest Aufschnitt echoes the daily practice of getting ready to leave the house—applying make-up, tying a tie, brushing one’s hair or teeth—or even more so, vamping it up for a night out on the town. The meat models thus underscore the rituals that interlace outward appearance and private persona. That a line of five plump sausages placed upon an irregularly laid flooring of sliced cheese along a bathroom mirror can even broach larger themes of gender construction or of projected identity—more explicitly suggested in an alternate title for the photograph, Vain Crowd!—is precisely to the point. As curator and art historian Lynne Cooke has written, in the series as a whole “impish inquiry, disarming understatement, dexterous improvisation, and makeshift materials again and again serve as the means by which big questions are writ small, as the miniature becomes the vehicle for the metaphysical.”1 Through these particular stagings, household items are held open to, and become vehicles for, the potential of new associations and imaginative projections. To be sure: Fischli and Weiss are playing with their food, and humor, sometimes dark, courses through these images. Whether gherkins carefully appraise the patterns in stacks of sliced meats as if selecting a Persian carpet in In the Carpet Shop (Plate 9.6), cigarette butts rubberneck at the scene of a grizzly sausage-car accident in An Accident, or the inside of an oven is repurposed as a Paleolithic cave dwelling in With the Cavepeople, these scenes encourage laughter in the recognition of their narratives and references (Plate 9.2). Readers of the Washington Post could well see the Sausage Photographs as prototypes for that newspaper’s annual Peep Show, 160

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begun in 2007, in which readers submit humorous, historical, and often outlandish scenes made with Peeps, the popular American chick-shaped, sugar-coated, and brightly colored marshmallow Easter candy.2 With Peeps and sausage, as Fischli once commented in reference to the film The Way Things Go (1987), which follows a Rube Goldberg machine-like series of events in the studio, “objects are freed from their principal, intended purpose. Perhaps this can be something beautiful. If you identify with these objects it has a liberating effect.”3 As a series made in and through the mundane and seasoned with equal parts humor, cultural reference, sculptural staging, and deadpan photographic documentation, Fischli and Weiss’s Sausage Photographs—even though only four of the ten works actually feature cured meats—slyly deploy a sausage-logic of mixture and ad-hoc construction in their playful look at the pleasures and traps held in the domestic sphere.

Recipes for Play Though Fischli and Weiss’s lightheartedness has been characterized as “anti-theoretical” in the critically aware climate of the 1980s, their use of humor is not a reason to discount the seriousness of their endeavor.4 The Sausage Photographs build a theory of play visually, encased in the logic of Wurst. Critical perspectives on play have a long history in the twentieth century. From Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s study of play in cultural formation, Homo Ludens (1944), which influenced a host of Fluxus artists in America and Europe, as well as the writings of Guy Debord; to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s conception of “language games” in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), the echoes of which can be heard in the work of Bruce Nauman, among many others, and the robust articulation of play as a dialogical, hermeneutic concept that defines the structure of an artwork in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1960); notions of play have been thoughtfully considered by a range of authors in the recent past.5 The artists, however, craft a peculiar and particular mode of play through their work. Rather than any explicit gesture toward these writers and theorists—or even the psychoanalytic play of Sigmund Freud, whose initial dreamers make an appearance in a slightly later Es Geht Um Die Wurst

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Fischli and Weiss sculptural series, Suddenly This Overview (1981)— Fischli and Weiss look to sausage itself.6 As Rainald Schumacher has observed, “In the German language, a wealth of meanings can be associated with the noun ‘Wurst’ (sausage). The two verbs ‘wursteln’ and ‘herumwursteln’ are very common slang meaning working on something in a very amateurish or aimless manner—and can easily be associated with [the Sausage Photographs].”7 That Weiss himself once referred to their studio activity as “incessant tinkering about”8 suggests that Fischli and Weiss engaged in a long practice of such wursteln that extended well past—and was even explicitly announced in—these first works. In parsing Fischli and Weiss’s work ethic I do not intend an “Ethno-Existential Sausage analysis” of the sort proposed, with its own element of humor, by the cultural historian Erich Lissner in his 1939 book Wurstologia, oder, Es geht um die Wurst, loosely translated as “Wurstology, or, it’s down to the sausage,” but it might well be the case that Fischli and Weiss are, in fact, “Sausage-Ontologists” in Lissner’s sense of the term.9 In the first full monograph devoted to the humble sausage, Lissner gives an encyclopedic account of sausage varieties and cultural uses from Andouille to Zeppelinwurst, just as the text also playfully explores numerous idiomatic expressions where the figure of sausage operates as a carrier for broader meaning. These range from the unfazed, “it’s-all-the-same-to-me” sense of Es ist mir Wurst, the equivalency and “tit-for-tat” meaning of Wurst wider Wurst, to the now-or-never, chips-are-down urgency of the phrase used as Lissner’s subtitle, Es geht um die Wurst.10 That Fischli and Weiss chose a food with such an elastic range of metaphorical references and secure footing in the cultural imagination of the German-speaking world, and did so for a series of works steeped in the situational and variable projection of meaning, seems no accident. It is perhaps rather more the case that with and without sausage, in and through various facets of postwar consumer culture, Fischli and Weiss were messing about (herumwursteln) in the Sausage Photographs (Wurstserie) as a way to suggest how serious the situation had become (to show how much, Es geht um die Wurst). To see that sausage functions as much as metaphor and procedure as subject, we need look no further than works like With the Cavepeople 162

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and Moonraker. With the Cavepeople (Plate 9.2) offers a view into a dark oven where lumps of bread, formed into crude figures, sit in a makeshift cave strewn with sausage casings around a small matchstick fire. Lascaux-like schematic drawings of animals decorate the interior walls of the oven, directly referencing the famous Paleolithic paintings and popularly understood origins of artistic expression, just as they situate the potential of that creativity in a domestic oven, where foods change from raw to cooked. Moonraker, by contrast, mounts a futuristic scene lit by the bright bulb of the refrigerator (Plate 9.3).11 Fischli and Weiss’s title references the 1979 blockbuster James Bond film of the same name starring Roger Moore, with the inside of the refrigerator—complete with plastic cups, upturned bowls, and repurposed bottles arranged as rockets and other spacecraft—­outfitted as a makeshift space station. Not only, then, have Fischli and Weiss’s scenarios shifted from prehistory to the near future and warm to cold, but also, in changing subject matter, the focus turns from the apparent origins of art history and high culture to one of the most popular films of the season. Both, however, offer equivalent points of departure within the logic of the Sausage Photographs and lead to equally imaginative scenarios in which the artists, and us as viewers, are presented with a model of tinkering about and imagining otherwise within the confines of our everyday materiality. As a diverse grouping of simple, ad hoc scenes quickly assembled and documented, Fischli and Weiss’s Sausage Photographs emphasize the ephemerality and imaginative heterogeneity of their domestic situations. Though the images stabilize and extend—an important feature of sausage making historically—in the sense of photographic documentation, they are not a mode of preserving the artistic traces of uniquely sculptural, if quotidian, objects or performative, if repeatable, situations. The play and construction they document is an alterable, malleable one, crafted with the ellipses that bracket the framing of any scene as set against narrative arcs suggested through titling; what the images hold, what the sausages importantly preserve, is the doubling and projective imagination of that playfulness. In this sense Fischli and Weiss’s photographs differ in kind from the important work of Dieter Roth or Daniel Spoerri.12 Roth, a widely influential Swiss artist known for his prolific experiments with the book form as well as his Es Geht Um Die Wurst

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sculptural embrace of an unstable range of foodstuffs including chocolate and cheese, made a number of Literature Sausage books/sausages from 1961 to 1974.13 In these objects, Roth would replace the meat in a traditional sausage recipe with a shredded written text (sausages were made, for example, with the writings of Robert Walser, G. W. F. Hegel, and Günter Grass, among others as well as issues of weekly magazines like Der Spiegel).14 Roth’s annotated recipes for these objects detail books packed in natural casings with fat and spices and reveal smallbatch productions with measurements in teaspoons and pinches rather than the readymade, off-the-shelf goods used by Fischli and Weiss. Though radical in his choice of materials and challenging in his sculptural embrace of a form of decay, Roth’s sausage works seem almost artisanal—both in the artistic and culinary senses—against Fischli and Weiss’s scenes. Instead of crafting fragile sculptural objects that thematize their own degradation, Fischli and Weiss imagine new potential situations within a mostly readymade world, their varied and loose tinkerings quickly taken down, framed only as a series of images. In other words, in these works Fischli and Weiss take pictures rather than make sculptures.

“Photography’s just a Playground . . .” By the time Fischli and Weiss created this series in 1979, the use of photography as a tool deployed by artists who did not claim to be photographers to present work through the medium of the photograph was a well-established strategy.15 Referred to in the art historical literature as photo-conceptualism (or conceptual photography)—an important subgenre under the broad umbrella of the varied artistic tendencies associated with conceptual art—the origin of this practice is often dated to the 1962–1963 publication of the American artist Ed Ruscha’s inexpensively produced photo-book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, which reproduces twenty-six matter-of-fact images of filling stations taken on a trip along the highway between the artist’s home of Los Angeles and his hometown of Oklahoma City. As Ruscha explained, “Above all, the photographs I use are not ‘arty’ in any sense of the word. . . . [My books] are simply reproductions of photos. Thus, it is not a book to house a collection of art photographs—they are 164

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technical data like industrial photography. To me, they are nothing more than snapshots.”16 Rather than being inspired by the landscape, architecture, or even his own photos, Ruscha claims that he first became interested in the titular phrase and ultimately turned to the photograph as an illustrative device in making the final work. Photography, in the hands of Ruscha and others, became a format in which concerns rooted in the relationships between the image and drastic shifts in artistic engagement with language, performance, and sculptural materiality come together. Conceptual photography, then, is itself a type of sausage: the stabilizing of a heterogeneous, ephemeral mixture held in suspension by a thin membrane—in this case the plane of the photographic image. By the late 1960s photographic practices were so pervasive among a wide range of artists that the photographer Jeff Wall has argued, “conceptual art’s essential achievements are either created in the form of photographs or are otherwise mediated by them.”17 Though Fischli and Weiss’s Sausage Photographs date to 1979, their approach shares much with the strategies of performance and staging pioneered in late 1960s conceptual photography, and with the humorous touches of artists at a distance from the more often stone-faced conceptual approaches of New York.18 While Ruscha’s work features food from time to time—particularly in the book Crackers (1969) and the related film Premium (1971), which both take as their subject matter the preparation of a sexualized salad as described in Mason Williams’s short story “How to Derive the Maximum Enjoyment from Crackers”—the domestically minded works of the German artist Sigmar Polke and the linguistic approaches of Bruce Nauman more directly telegraph the sausage-photography that Fischli and Weiss would come to create.19 Polke visited Zürich regularly in the 1970s and Fischli and Weiss knew his work well.20 In addition to a familiarity with his paintings, it seems plausible that either Fischli or Weiss would have known Polke’s portfolio of fourteen photo-lithographs made with Chris Kohlhöfer, Higher Powers Command, produced in an edition of fifty by the Berlin gallery René Block in 1968. Of the fourteen reproduced photographs, eight are taken from the series of Praying Palms (1966) wherein Polke fashioned and then photographed a series of singular, makeshift palm trees out of various objects including buttons, half-inflated balloons, Es Geht Um Die Wurst

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gloves, and a folding ruler, as well as Polke himself, the “serious” artist here pictured in his underwear and otherwise dressed with a number of cut-paper leaves. In these images Polke created an ephemeral, lighthearted series of objects that diverge from the materiality of sculpture just as they also mock the postwar taste for interior decoration and expensive houseplants.21 Instead of presenting these individual objects as sculpture, Polke chose to bind this group of tenuous constructions photographically, in the process creating links through titling and serial presentation that bring their different sensibilities into greater relief. In one Praying Palm image Polke fashioned a small, wilted-looking palm tree out of what appears to be the pliable crumb of bread so white it almost looks like the American staple known as Wonder bread, perhaps an ironic nod to economic recovery of the Federal Republic of Germany, known as the Wirtschaftswunder, following the Second World War (Plate 9.4). On its own it would simply be a misshapen lump of bread on a tabletop, a Dieter Roth–like object that will mold and decay, but, in its photographic transformation this instability is held at bay, fixed in an image whereby the moist crumb stands in direct relationship to its title rather than as literal organic matter. The bread is seen through the scrim of language, its form gaining traction in relation to words. Like a child who might notice a shape on his plate mid-meal, the suggestions of language perform an important function in pointing toward the object’s metaphorical transformation and suspension in the photographic image. In 1972, in the eighth issue of the influential Cologne-based art magazine Interfunktionen, Polke reproduced another group of photographs that depart from the deadpan, snapshot sensibility of conceptual photography.22 These twelve, uncaptioned and undated images expose fragments of domestic interiors, everyday objects, and urban environments through the processes of multiple exposures, overlaid images, and other darkroom manipulations morphologically foreign to the Sausage Photographs. In one image, drawn from a series of four photographs each titled Porcelain Pot (1968), Polke presents a decorated teapot partially submerged in a milky liquid surrounded by a group of small, animal-shaped children’s blocks.23 In this work, as in various other photographs taken by Polke from 1964 to 1968 includ166

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ing his series Folding Ruler Stars (1968) and UFO (1968/1990), rulers, plastic bowls, and teapots take on an air of mystery and potential transfiguration through the process of photographic framing, titling, and darkroom effects. These household items remain recognizable, though tinged with a playful air of imagination and misuse brought on by boredom. These works, as Polke himself claimed, share much with his Boredom Tape (1968), a work performed in private, documented in photographs, and also staged at the Rudolf Zwirner Gallery. By tacking a tape measure along with other ready-to-hand objects to a wall in a spiral, the various iterations of the Boredom Tape document and perform “the act and product of doing something, anything, as a way to kill time. . . . Here we are confronted with the unproductive use of articles with a quite real purpose.”24 Rather than a careful modernist attention to form— for example, Edward Weston’s canonical photographs of peppers and artichokes—Polke’s images of common objects explore the imaginative potentiality of tinkering through a mixture of image, fleeting action, and titular language that Fischli and Weiss will explore in their own work.25 Other artists picture language much more directly. Take, for example, Bruce Nauman’s Eating My Words (1966–1967/1970), part of a group of influential works collected in the series Eleven Color Photographs that employ a range of puns, portraits, and art historical references, alongside such domestic standards as cold coffee and pot holders (Plate 9.5).26 In Eating My Words, also published in Interfunktionen 8 among other places, Nauman sits at a table set with a red-and-white gingham tablecloth. His crisp dress shirt echoing the checkered pattering of the table surface, the artist is captured just as he is about to spread jam on pieces of white bread cut into the letters O, R, D, and S. The smears on the edge of Nauman’s plate suggest that a W has already been eaten and washed down by some of the milk beside him. Analogous to Ruscha’s primary interest in the phrase “twenty-six gasoline stations,” Nauman created a performative situation based on the phrase “eating my words,” an idiomatic expression of grudging acknowledgment at a speaker’s incorrect statement. Though much more carefully staged than either Polke’s or Fischli and Weiss’s Es Geht Um Die Wurst

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­ hotographs and indebted to philosopher J. L. Austin’s theory of “perp formative utterances” were spoken language—in situations like placing a bet, getting married, or christening a ship—functions as an action rather than a description,27 Nauman’s work takes a simple procedure, already metaphorically transposed through its particular phrasing, and literalizes it in a domestic scenario, staged for the camera.28 The idiomatic expression functions as a prompt for the staging of a scene, a recipe for action. Distinct from a documentary photograph of an act of artistic eating—as in images of Fluxus-related performances like Alison Knowles’s numerous instances of her Identical Lunch eaten many times since the late 1960s or Ben Vautier’s intrepid samplings of unlabeled cans of food in Flux Mystery Food (1963)—Nauman’s work stresses the equal intermingling of language, act, and image in its photographic capture. Not only does Nauman’s place setting offer one way of doing things with words, but also, with the relative humor of the situation, it stages a model of playfulness as an indeterminate space and medium where such connections can be found, even at the kitchen table.

The Sizzle and the Sausage Though elements of Polke’s and Nauman’s photographic strategies course through their own works, Fischli and Weiss handle their food slightly differently. Rather than a performance drawn from language and set upon a table, the Sausage Photographs stage an ironic view onto the everyday—perhaps even the middlebrow—through foods and household items transformed through loose narratives and broad cultural references. As seen in In the Carpet Shop, Fischli and Weiss set a range of bologna as well as blood and chasseur sausage in nine different piles, interspersing the meats with three small dog biscuits, atop an anonymous gray surface to create a generic commercial establishment (Plate 9.6).29 Poised before a pile of mortadella, three gherkin customers consider the aesthetic merits in the decorative patterning of the top slice of meat as a small radish, which Renate Goldmann suggests is the shop owner, looks on.30 Though numerous fingerprints and smudges across the gray surface—perhaps a countertop or linoleum flooring— 168

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bear witness to the fat and grease in the different slices of meat on view, the pure materiality of these foods is undercut by the deadpan absurdity of the scenario. Put differently, it is difficult, when given title and image, to not look at the crooked cornichon as anything other than bent over, eyes downward, contemplating the arrangement of pistachios and meat and wondering whether or not this pattern will succeed in tying the room together. Perhaps acknowledging their own wonder at the range of consumer goods on offer at the largest furniture store in Switzerland, Möbel Pfister in Suhr, which the artists visited in 1978 as they were beginning their artistic collaboration, the stacked cold cuts also stage the issue of an imminent, if banal and ultimately impossible, consumer choice.31 To consider which imagined carpet this gherkin family might choose requires momentary surrender, of course, to the conceit as a whole, but it also imbues the situation with the humdrum consumer complexities of preference, budget, use, and value. Neck craned toward the carpets, the gherkin’s choice is a layered one. Through narrative Fischli and Weiss foreground elements of choice in a manner distinct from, say, the Los Angeles artist John Baldessari, who himself spent a bit of time playing with food in the early 1970s. In a series of works entitled Choosing (A Game for Two Players) made between 1971 and 1972 with a range of vegetables including green beans, carrots, and rhubarb, Baldessari would, with the help of a friend, pick his favorite of a particular vegetable from three different examples selected for him. The game would go like this: a partner would pick three of a particular vegetable and line them up in a row; Baldessari would choose his favorite by pointing to it; the act of choosing, marked by the gesture, would be photographed; the rejected two vegetables would be removed and replaced by new ones and the process would continue as long as the stock of produce allowed. The photographs of fingers pointing at vegetables were bound as books, as in Choosing (A Game for Two Players): Green Beans (1971), or simply displayed as a series of photographs. In these acts of Choosing, Baldessari plays the role of artist, the grand a­ rbiter in matters of small taste, picking objects at apparent random and cheekily cross-threading a gastronomic sense of taste with a more high-minded sense of aesthetic refinement.32 As a sequence, however, Es Geht Um Die Wurst

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the photographs document the moves in a game, which generate the work. Through task-based procedures Baldessari uses structural logic rather than projective transfiguration to keep our taste in vegetables and the stable references in their apparent relations in a playful flux. Fischli and Weiss treat their assorted tableaux with a similar straightforwardness, but in the Sausage Photographs and related early works, narrative joins the permeability of language and the playful action of a game in a mixing of high and low subject matter. This is most clearly the case in Suddenly This Overview (1981) a series begun as 250 small, unfired clay sculptures that attempt a history of the world in a subjectively episodic fashion, including everything from monumental events and insights (Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press or Christ on the cross, for example) to apparently insignificant objects (a pot, a loaf of bread). The punctuated lightness of the series comes, in part, from “the simultaneity of the significant and the so-called insignificant, minor as well as major events.”33 Important historical or cultural events are often cued slyly, as in a small, crude sculpture of two people sleeping in a simple interior, titled Herr and Frau Einstein shortly after the conception of their son, the genius Albert, or in another, where two figures walk side-by-side along a brick wall, past a fire hydrant and garbage cans, this one a representation of Mick Jagger and Brian Jones going home satisfied after composing “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” The phrase “suddenly this overview” appears in Fischli and Weiss’s film The Least Resistance (1980–1981). The film follows Fischli and Weiss’s alter egos Rat and Bear, played by none other than the artists dressed in animal costumes, through various misadventures and schemes in and around Los Angeles. In conversation with Bear, Rat has an epiphany, a sudden overview, where everything locks into a broader order and total system and Rat achieves a measure of clarity about truth and knowledge.34 That this sweeping narrative would be refigured as an episodic, self-consciously partial series of sculptures that merge major and minor, public and private, and high and low comes as little surprise. It is precisely with this layered mixture, where the individual object and action is steeped in a productive multiplicity, that Fischli and Weiss are most at home.35 In the Sausage Photographs the domestic is pictured as a place of 170

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play and also of change. Many, though not all, images present aspects of the home where a change of state—like the bathroom mirror, the oven, or the refrigerator—is implied. Other photographs, like Titanic, take place in the bathtub, or build their scenes from pillows and bedding, like In the Mountains. From frozen to thawed, dirty to clean, fresh to rotten, sleep to wakefulness, and raw to cooked, the shifts along these poles, in their cultural, culinary, and bodily flux and fluidity are another sausage-like feature of the series as a whole. In picturing imaginative, simple movements between literal things and narrative projection, Fischli and Weiss suggest an essential instability, a variability of component parts that add up to a potentially surprising, if temporary, totality. Though they leave the fullness of that overview to later works, the logic held in the binding and play of disparate parts and their fleeting transfiguration not only uses sausages but also, in its photo conceptual tinkering, follows their example. To conclude, one final idiomatic expression: everything has an end, but a sausage has two. This phrase, Alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei is roughly equivalent to the English “everything has its end.”36 In the spirit of Fischli and Weiss’s work, however, it seems reasonable to ask whether the two ends of a sausage signal an impossible closure, holding open a space of potentiality, showing a mode of engagement with the everyday that sees new and old worlds fashioned from the goods at play behind every cupboard door.

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Chapter 10

Elz˙bieta Jabłon´ska’s Kitchen Interventions Food, Art, and Maternal Identity Barbara Kutis

Elżbieta Jabłońska gained critical acclaim for her work highlighting the experience of being a mother; she not only physically represented the mother in her art, but also deployed motherhood with a critical subjectivity that molded and defined her artistic actions. The artist’s strong emphasis on the maternal has caused Magdalena Ujma to proclaim, “[Jabłońska] discovered her artistic way due to the experience of being a mother. . . . It is her maternity that has given this particular shape to her artistic activity.”1 While Ujma tied artistic action to the experience of being a mother, Jabłońska’s art—particularly the ongoing performance series Through the Stomach to the Heart (1999–present), which features the consumption of food as the primary artistic act— extends beyond her biological status and posits a critical reflection of the cultural expectations of mothering and domesticity in Poland. The series itself has several components and the artist has provided individual subtitles for certain performances. As of 2012, the series included the artist cooking for gallery attendees in a makeshift kitchen that was given the same title, Through the Stomach to the Heart; performances titled Kitchen in which the artist cooks in the gallery using a disproportionately sized kitchen counter and table; and a series of photographs documenting artists and curators in their own kitchens (aptly named Polish Artists and Curators in the Kitchen). Through these acts, Jabłońska transforms the domestic space and labors of the 173

home into artistic endeavors, thus confronting misconceptions that the role of the female artist and mother, and the artist/curator and the everyday, are incompatible.2 By focusing on the domestic space of the kitchen, Jabłońska transgresses the distance between art and life, as well as the space between the public institution and the private home. In the performance projects of Through the Stomach to the Heart the artist prepares and cooks food for others to consume in the space of the museum or gallery. Her “art” includes the very act of eating, yet by examining the documentary photographs one also sees an interest in the aesthetics of the kitchen. In some versions of the performance the kitchen is makeshift, with unfinished wooden supports and reflective polished metal (or tinfoil) countertops. In others, the preparation spaces appear to be an enlarged version of an IKEA-style kitchen counter and table (Plate 10.1). The pristine white counter and table, though proportionally exaggerated, draws associations to the modernist white wall; the artist creates a neutral ground to highlight the preparation of food, its display, and its subsequent consumption. The distinction between the two “kitchens” is permanence: the makeshift metallic surfaces are temporary structures, while the white kitchen counter and table become objects of display for the exhibition’s duration, acting as mementos of the action that had taken place and the food that was consumed. By erecting and displaying a kitchen in the space of the museum, Jabłońska transforms the traditional exhibition opening to emphasize the creation, presentation, and consumption of food as a social interaction and artistic action. Each of these events demonstrates various aspects of a maternal subjectivity, which here are defined as performing domestic acts of cooking and caring for others, positioning visitors in the role of children, and exposing the invisible labor connected with the consumption of meals. Through these acts, Jabłońska appropriates the strategies of relational aesthetics and participatory art to confront the misconception that the roles of the female artist and mother are incompatible. By utilizing food as her medium, Jabłońska offers to care for others and performs acts that provide her a means to reconcile her roles as a mother and artist. She asserts these roles as dynamic and simultaneous, thus positing motherhood as a potential mode of artistic prac174

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tice. In doing so, she simultaneously transforms the act of cooking into an experimental process, akin to Michel de Certeau and Luce Girard’s conception of cooking in the practice of everyday life; it provides an opportunity for creativity and self-expression.3 Sometimes using fresh fruits and vegetables, and at others, premade pastries and drinks, Jabłońska utilizes the contemporary items that the exhibition sponsors and curators were able to obtain, which reflects the culinary choices available in contemporary life.4 Food consumption practices in Poland, Joe Smith and Petr Jehlička argue, provided expressions of “identity, tradition, community and family relations,” but consumers are not steadfastly traditional or solely interested in Western products.5 Rather Smith and Jehlička note that during socialism, “national food traditions and newly adapted practices helped to mark out and defend an independent cultural space that was beyond the realm of an otherwise all-pervasive state.”6 The modern consumers, like Jabłońska, utilize products in an ongoing negotiation between modernity and tradition; namely, by using what can be acquired at any given moment including prepared and prepackaged items as well as fresh items from the country. Jabłońska is interested in how identity is constructed, and how the consumption of food at an art opening might create social interaction among strangers that might change that notion of self and family. This is her primary interest in the series, and as such, the documentary images that display the artist rolling slices of deli meat, slicing kielbasa, or cutting vegetables are only fragments that aid one’s understanding of how the artist transforms the labor of the home into artistic endeavors in the space of the gallery. The food commonly prepared by Jabłońska ranges from the modification (cutting, rolling, arranging) of simple or premade items to the extensive preparation of traditional Polish cuisine. Jabłońska culls her recipes from her mother and does not openly divulge the recipes themselves.7 This causes somewhat of a problem for the art historian, not knowing exactly what the “art” was that was consumed; but the few documentary images that depict the artist cooking reveal, somewhat inadequately, the extent of her cooking—in at least one photograph leeks and green onions are prominently positioned near the potato the artist is cutting—all three vegetables are commonly used in Polish cuisine, such as soups, stews, and salads (Plate 10.2). Elżbieta Jabłońska’s Kitchen Interventions

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In other photographs, items for consumption are already heating on hotplates. These images, in conjunction with those that document the public interacting with or surrounding the artist while she dices watermelon reveal that Jabłońska’s project contributes to the discourse of contemporary food-based art practice in a very particular way. When the project turns to other Polish artists and curators in their kitchens, Jabłońska documents twenty-three individuals in the mundane activities of cooking and cleaning. In each the curator or artist is seen directly from behind, or slightly from the left or right as he or she cooks, cleans, or patiently tends to the meal being prepared. This part of the series, a complement to the artist’s own cooking actions, demonstrates her desire to convey the human and everyday aspects of artists’ lives, and suggest that actions within the home can be artistic activities as well. In considering these projects, I contend that Jabłońska embraces a “maternal subjectivity” that does not necessitate her own physical representation. In this sense, I draw upon Ruddick’s theory of maternal thinking, because of its focus on the diurnal activities—namely, thinking—in regard to raising and educating one’s children rather than the biological or sociological aspects of motherhood.8 Ruddick’s argument that the work of mothering “demands that mothers think” posits motherhood in terms of critical action, rather than essentialism or biological function, thus offering a way to read Jabłońska’s work as one of cautious critique, or what she terms, quoting Luis Buñuel, a “gentle perversion.”9 For these performances, Jabłońska’s “gentle perversion” entails the slight adjustment of the traditional practice of the “art opening.” Jabłońska’s transposition of domestic cooking to the public spaces of the gallery arose from her desire to have contact with her audience. She wanted to “observe them and try to help them,” and determined that cooking was a means to connect with others in a more meaningful way. Using the language of maternity, Jabłońska stated, “out of this need [to interact with others] and my willingness to help, the first action was born,” and thus she began feeding visitors during exhibition openings as her artistic practice.10 Such statements by the artist have caused critics and scholars to superficially confuse her role as a mother and her relationship to the art world, causing some to 176

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interpret her work as purely feminist and tied solely to her biology, much to the artist’s dissatisfaction. By reading her actions through a maternal subjectivity, the artist does not represent the bodily aspects of motherhood but uses the lived condition of it (daily chores, pleasure, frustrations, and thoughts) to inform her identity and particular position as an artist.11 And in Kitchen, which has been staged in the major European cities of Berlin, Kraków, Paris, Regensburg, and Wilno, Jabłońska “perverts” the notion of women being natural within such a space. She not only removes the kitchen from the domain of the domestic and places it into the space of what can be considered ­public—the art museum and gallery—but also, having raised the cabinet, table, and counter height, makes the action of cooking awkward and somewhat precarious (the artist must stand on a block to safely reach the counter) (Plate 10.3).12 Similarly, in documenting and exhibiting photographs of curators and artists in the kitchen, Jabłońska suggests that these cultural workers are not natural or unnatural within these spaces—they too reveal a certain awkward relationship to the kitchen and the stereotypes the space suggests. Jabłońska’s choice of title for the series provides a compelling layer of meaning for the acts that take place in performances. Przez żołądek do serca, or Through the Stomach to the Heart, references the proverb, which applies in Poland as much as it does in English-speaking cultures: “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” This sentiment also has a particular meaning in Poland, as it is often passed down from mothers to their daughters—or alternatively, by media outlets. The statement champions the merits of “home cooking” and the power women have to sway men’s affections if they cook well. Such proverbs reaffirm women’s place within society—to the private spaces of the home and the kitchen—and subsumes them under the patriarchal system of the family. This is a point of contention for Jabłońska. Such sayings evoke the notion of the Polish Mother—the stereotypical mother who cooks for the whole family, looks after the children, and encourages everyone to eat. This mother, according to Jabłońska, “is a busy body in the kitchen, while the others are having a good time.”13 Polish scholars assert that the “symbolic meaning” of the Polish Mother is still alive, as “women are still expected to s­ acrifice Elżbieta Jabłońska’s Kitchen Interventions

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their personal aspirations,” in favor of supporting their husband’s careers and their children’s needs above all else.14 Haunted by this stereotype, the items prepared by Jabłońska are not those created for her pleasurable consumption. Both the artist and the documentary evidence from the performances confirm that she does not partake in the eating.15 Instead, Jabłońska prepares the food, invites the audience to consume the items, and then stands back from her creation to observe the consumption. She then cleans up after them.16 Nothing perishable is left for display, thus emphasizing the preparation of food, its consumption, and the considerable time taken to clean up functions as the artistic act. Much like Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s transfer of the domestic tasks of cleaning in her performances Hartford Wash (1973–1974) at the Wadsworth Atheneum, critics have noted that the transfer of such “typical and obvious” actions of the housewife to the confines of the gallery “robs them of their supposed naturalness.”17 While Ukeles had this intention as part of her project, hoping to unearth the structures of power and art related to the care of objects, this does not hold true in Jabłońska’s case. To consider the kitchen as an oasis on the one hand suggests a positive and productive space of creativity, somewhat akin to concepts of the artist’s studio, while on the other reinforces notions of the woman’s space being the kitchen. To this end, Jabłońska’s project is somewhat ambiguous. The artist is clear to distance herself from the prototypical housewife. She has stated that the kitchen is not her realm, noting, “it is a special place in the home where we like spending time together, having tea, but tea is sometimes the only thing available in our kitchen . . . The kitchen is my mother’s realm and this is what my works are about.”18 Such a statement denies the act of cooking as a normal action for women, and reveals that the actions staged within the gallery really are performances for the artist, not simply a transfer of her domestic actions to the space of the institution. Thus, the artist reveals that the series is an exploration, if not a complete denial, of the notion that she embodies the Polish Mother. Perhaps out of a “maternal guilt” or simply from the perspective that the role is increasingly absurd, she performs the stereotype for the public because that is what they expect a mother to do—care for, and feed, others. Jabłońska also employs the kitchen with considerations of how the space is occu178

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pied. She notes, “kitchens have always been places of conversations and meetings, it was always kitchens that were the most interesting and fun, frankly a kitchen is a small paradise of a sort. Far from the rooms and offices [which are solitary and quiet].”19 However, the artist engages these notions with tinges of irony, such as changing the scale of her kitchen to make both her and the audience embody the child reaching for what they cannot see on the counter, or by labeling each item with its caloric value. In the former, the large scale of the kitchen table, on the one hand, may be perceived to counteract the pedagogical practices advocated by Maria Montessori, who encouraged the creation of a “prepared environment” in the home, such as a smaller table where the child could dine. However, on the other, it could be viewed as a return to the sensorial exercises and the discovery that the child experiences in the home.20 By applying Montessori’s idea of the training of the senses to Jabłońska’s Kitchen, one can determine that not only the sense of touch is evoked (through one’s limited scope of the food placed on the table), but also the sense of smell.21 The recognition of smells, as Montessori determined, deserved special attention as it enabled the child’s selection of different types of foods, determined nutritional life, and functioned as the origin of taste.22 In two versions of the performance held at the Sculpture Center in New York and the Inner Spaces Festival in Poznán, Jabłońska labeled each food item she prepared with flags denoting their caloric content and the activity required to burn it off—for example, one slice of cheese equals forty-six calories, which the flag informs takes “ten minutes of vigorous marching to burn off,” or one serving of carrot equals twenty-eight calories, which takes “thirty-two minutes of love-making to burn off.”23 By acknowledging the nutritional value of each item in terms of gendered action—marching as masculine, militaristic, and ordered; love-making as feminine, seductive, and spontaneous— Jabłońska could be suggesting that people choose between love and war as they consume, or it could serve as a reference to the multiple demands on mothers to be thin and attractive, but also to be full-­ figured and nurturing.24 In placing the creation of food items and their consumption as the primary artistic act, Jabłońska recalls the food-based work of Fluxus Elżbieta Jabłońska’s Kitchen Interventions

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artists, such as Alison Knowles, who similarly brought food inside the space of the museum in works like Make a Salad (1962).25 Performed at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, Knowles’s proposition, as she termed it, included musical scores by Mozart before and after the preparation of the salad, and included the aid of assistants who swiftly and rhythmically chopped vegetables for the salad.26 Restaged several times in the recent decade, Knowles’s project is similar to Jabłońska’s in the provision of food to an audience.27 Nevertheless, the use of assistants and the musicality of Knowles’s performance distinguish the project as one of shared labor, rather than the individual and silent (as in there is no musical accompaniment) labor of Jabłońska’s Kitchen. Jabłońska’s burden is isolated and individual, while Knowles’s shared and communal. Both encouraged the meeting of individuals through the act of consumption, and as women artists, this transposition of the gendered act of food preparation from the private to public space, asserts female creativity and the creation of food as an artistic act. Similar notions of food and art were explored by Daniel Spoerri, who in 1968 opened Restaurant Spoerri on Burgplatz in Düsseldorf after years of integrating foodstuffs, kitchen appliances, cooking, and eating into his artistic practice. In 1963 Spoerri began preparing meals and inviting guests to eat an intricate meal that was served to them by an art critic. This format made gallery visitors the true consumers of the art, literally, and the art critics as the “intermediaries between the products of the artist and the general public.”28 Spoerri would photograph the remains and debris of the meal as a tableaux-pièges or Trap Pictures. This methodology is somewhat akin to a later work by Jabłońska, titled Accidental Pleasure (2005–2006), in which she photographed and documented the leftovers or remnants of her family’s daily meals that become trapped in the kitchen sink sieve when washing dishes.29 For Jabłońska, the series revealed a beauty in the debris of eating, and was complete when she recorded 365, or one year, of photographs. The idea of capturing the aftermath of a dinner, for Spoerri, inspired more reconsiderations of the day-to-day necessity of eating. According to Renate Buschmann, “Spoerri discovered the act of eating as a focal point that brought societal and cultural significances to light.”30 In 1970, fueled by the success of Restaurant Spoerri, the artist began Eat Art Gallery where he continued to explore how food, 180

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while being vital to life, can radically change established traditions.31 To show individuals how this existed, Spoerri hosted Eat Art Banquets where meals were “artistically fashioned dinners,” sometimes providing inedible “food” that would draw attention to notions of nutrition, poverty, or the relationships among guests. The difference between Spoerri’s Eat Art practices and Jabłońska lies primarily in the ultimate intentions of their cooking. The literature on Spoerri rarely discusses paternalistic or familial notions of cooking, but rather considers it in terms of the individual—the poor man, the professional chef, critic, and artist. While both reconfigure the relationship between art and spectator, for Jabłońska the act of cooking figures an important part of the work as the connections to gender, domesticity, and notions of the Polish Mother are critical for the overall conceptual thrust of the project. In these performances, one author recounts, “everything must work perfectly: the food looks lovely, and it is served in a sophisticated way, just like the dishes shown in cookery books. After she prepares the food and invites others to help themselves, she always just stays in the background. She never leaves art objects, apart from the leftovers.”32 To clarify, Jabłońska’s art object is the food to be consumed, but she does not leave it in the gallery to act as an art object either. In essence, Jabłońska brings the dinner party atmosphere, with the proper culturally constructed notions of dinner party etiquette, to the gallery, in order to encourage her guests to meet, mingle, and enjoy themselves. Once the party is over, whatever is perishable is removed, and the Kitchen becomes the only object of permanent display. With the notion that the performance should encourage a meeting, Jabłońska similarly aligns herself with contemporaries such as Julita Wójcik. Wójcik’s Peeling Potatoes performance at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw of just a few years earlier is somewhat similar in terms of public interaction. In 2001, Wójcik donned an apron, sat on a stool in the gallery, spoke with viewers, and peeled fifty kilograms of potatoes. Sometimes, visitors (including men, women, and children) would squat on the ground and peel potatoes with her.33 Anda Rottenberg noted that this event aroused significant criticism. The work was discussed in a manner Rottenberg believed “that only a criminal deed of exceptional cruelty could arouse.”34 Mostly, however, critics questioned the act of peeling potatoes as an art form and if it Elżbieta Jabłońska’s Kitchen Interventions

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was a form that should be supported by taxpayer money. Recounting the controversy, Karol Sienkiewicz wrote, “Defenders of the ‘status quo’ protested that potatoes belong at home, in the kitchen, by the sink, over a bucket of parings. When brought to the gallery, which is regarded as a temple, a place endowed with a unique power of sanctifying, it endows the objects the rank of a ‘piece of art’ (i.e. relics), the activity became taboo. Potatoes and art (sacred, national) do not go hand in hand.”35 Likewise, Gabriela Świtek noted that the performance came on the heels of the 2000 Zachęta exhibition of the controversial Maurizio Cattelan installation, The Ninth Hour (1999), in which Cattelan depicted the beloved Polish pope John Paul II struck by a meteorite in the midst of the gallery. Wójcik’s performance created the “logical sequence: saber-meteorite-potatoes” that journalists and critics found threatening to their values, culture, and notions of art. Iza Kowalczyk’s comments on this work in her essay on Polish feminism gets to the heart of the Wójcik scandal. She writes: It’s a girl playing, and a willful girl at that: in the time of feminism, she assumes the part of a decent housewife peeling potatoes (2001), and what’s more significant, the event takes place at Zachęta—an institution dedicated to preserving our national heritage. But can one categorize peeling potatoes as belonging to national heritage? Thereby the event, apart from containing irony, acquired a critical, if not outright feminist dimension.36

If Wójcik’s performance deliberately and critically questions the place of women in Polish national heritage, so does Jabłońska’s. Her projects, however, have not struck the same level of outrage because, one, critics and visitors are now likely more accustomed to the integrative performances of contemporary artists; and, two, Jabłońska does not simply prepare vegetables; she cooks them and offers them for consumption, thus fulfilling the expectations of the audience and the culinary process. In doing so, Jabłońska engages with current discourse on relational aesthetics and participatory art, both of which have been notably debated and theorized by Nicolas Bourriaud, Claire Bishop, and Grant Kester. In the 1990s, Bourriaud proclaimed the existence of a relational art, that is, “an art taking as its theoretical horizon the 182

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realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space.”37 The Thai, New York–based artist Rirkrit Tiravanija may be considered one of the most prominent artists operating in a relational mode. In projects like Untitled (Free), 1992, Tiravanija moved the offices and packing and shipping areas of the 303 Gallery in New York to the public areas, and set up a makeshift kitchen, tables, and chairs for eating in the back room. Cooking Thai curry vegetables for anyone who entered during the show’s duration, Tiravanija gave the food to anyone who wanted it, and provided a place to eat.38 Through this action, “being together” became a central theme, thus emphasizing the crucial connective role of the gallery-goer or participant.39 This emphasis on free food and the interaction of people has caused scholars to draw on Jacques Rancière and his notions of democratic art. For Rancière, democratic art is the result of emancipation, and what he theorizes as the “distribution of the sensible.”40 In terms of emancipation, Rancière argues that art becomes emancipated and emancipatory when the artist knows that they cannot make others share their views, and when the object “renounces the authority of the imposed message, the target audience, and the univocal mode of explicating the world,” or “it stops wanting to emancipate us.”41 Rancière’s notion of the “distribution of the sensible” is that the distribution of the objects, affects, pleasure, and pains that are apprehended by the senses structures how an individual may perceive, think, and act. The distribution of the sensible divides, or partitions (to use Rancière’s term), the world and people. It works on two fronts: it “separates and excludes” but it also allows participation through sensory experience.42 But in terms of the aesthetic regime, we must consider the complicated relationship between art and life, or rather the ever-increasing blur between what is and is not art.43 For Jabłońska’s project, the merging of the artist, Polish Mother, housewife, and hostess denotes a redistribution of the sensible, a “recomposition of the landscape of the visible, a recomposition of the relationship between doing, making, being, seeing, and saying.”44 This emancipated form of art, that is, not necessarily food art, but art that eliminates the gap between both the institution and the social space, and the artist and the viewer, enables a direct exchange between the artist and the individual, which is key to Jabłońska’s project.45 Elżbieta Jabłońska’s Kitchen Interventions

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Like Tiravanija, Jabłońska seeks to create a situation, a relationship among “lots of people.”46 These artists are similar in their desire to give, which as Pierre Bourdieu has argued, is determined by the habitus, the internalization of collective practices that organize society.47 The act of giving food aids the artists’ negotiation with society, but it is similarly rooted within each artist’s cultural background. As Jabłońska interrogates the Polish Mother stereotype, Tiravanija’s work is often linked to his memories of his grandmother’s restaurant in Thailand.48 While linked to the experiences of women, the reenactments, if one chooses to call them such, are quite different. Tiravanija’s cooking enables an open dialogue, while Jabłońska’s encourages the visualization of the unpaid labor of the mother. As Marek Krajewski has noted, “the artist feasts her guests like the typical housewife does, but at the same time does so as an artist for whose sake viewers have come to the gallery . . . It is only here that she can serve others and be celebrated at the same time.”49 Thus Jabłońska’s cooking in the gallery is a means to simultaneously recognize the values of domestic and artistic action that has been historically erased or omitted. As a woman, it is imperative that Jabłońska does not continually cook for her audience; to do so would be to perpetuate the myth of the Polish Mother and eliminate her artistic identity. Jabłońska has very deliberately stated that these performances contain “very little or even nothing” of herself.50 To demonstrate this, she clearly limits the scope of her meal: it will take place at a certain date, in a certain place, and in a certain absurdist way—enlarging both the volume and scale of her cooking. She simultaneously performs and confronts the motherly role of domestic cook and host, and makes a private labor public. As the artist makes the work of the housewife/hostess visible, she simultaneously brings forth the notion of the consumption of food as a private affair, but one that can be extremely public—a spectacle to be observed and in which to participate.51 Regarding the entire series, she notes, “I gave public to an ordinary, everyday activity—­ eating. It was food that replaced lofty ideas included in the works of art. If wine and snacks are so essential, why consume them secretly as in Buñuel’s film [The Phantom of Liberty (1974)]?” This statement evokes the infamous scene from The Phantom of Liberty where the private act of defecation is made public (guests sit on toilets around a 184

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table, smoking and discussing important issues) and the consumption of food is made private: guests must excuse themselves to eat in a “dining room” that resembles a water closet.52 Jabłońska draws upon this reversal in her authorization of food within the space of the gallery. On this, she claims she “decided . . . to give official permission for secret consumption,” suggesting that while food is typically not permitted within the space of the gallery, it is often snuck in.53 Therefore, the artist’s series not only perverts understandings of gender stereotypes, but also the proper behavior within an art institution.54 Indeed, scholar Deborah R. Geis has argued that “the public space of performance allows women artists to interrogate the boundaries between the private and the public . . . [and where] entering the territory of public space through food can be a transgressive or defiant act.”55 Jabłońska, as the mother-artist, sanctions the forbidden act.56 The artist deliberately attempts to transform the standard exhibition to awaken one’s recognition of the everyday—from burdens of the Polish Mother, the disparity with the traditions of the art world, to the viewer’s consumption of food. She aims to expose the invisible work of the mother, but also the domestic duties of the artist and curator. Jabłońska’s series Through the Stomach to the Heart insists on revealing the structure of the everyday aspect of cooking, serving, and laboring for others. She takes the social structure of a woman cooking for her family, makes it an artistic act, and visualizes a labor that should be celebrated, praised, and thanked. By paying attention to these invisible roles, Jabłońska’s photographs of curators and artists destroy the notion of a “romantic artist” and stereotypes that may be ingrained about the living spaces of the artists and curators (Plate 10.4). Paraphrasing an interview with the artist, Jabłońska noted that artists are trained to be resourceful, to act as their own curators, managers, and leaders. They should be current and attend exhibition openings, lest they be forgotten.57 Interestingly, requirements of the artist that Jabłońska details do not include taking care of one’s family, cooking, or eating. These essential elements of life are what become stripped away from the notion of the artist and curator and perhaps it is through the visual image that she is able to reinsert this human element into notions of the artist. It is significant that these kitchens Elżbieta Jabłońska’s Kitchen Interventions

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are just as unremarkable as those that Jabłońska placed in the gallery. They are small, ordinary spaces with burners, sinks, and sometimes ovens; most are cramped with kitchen utensils, pots, pans, dishes, and drinkware. They all document a single worker, who is often represented by the work that they create—art, exhibitions, or writing—but rarely are they praised or documented within the domestic for the labor performed there. The domestic, though frequently the topic of public political debate, is often regarded as a private and personal space. Typically, one must be invited into it or exist as a part of it as a family. Therefore, it is not surprising that these individuals seem to be documented almost in secret. The rear-view of the individual positions the viewer as a voyeur, peeking into the lives of the mythic artist and the heralded curator. In most of the images, one has the sense that the person is in the midst of a solitary activity, which plays into the myth of their lonely artistic existence, but also reveals their individual labor for others. Food, as Jabłońska has reiterated throughout this series, is a means of generating openness and dialogue by providing direct contact. Similarly, kitchens are spaces of activity, debate, and dialogue—particularly during dinner parties. So what initially seems like a secretive activity can also be seen as one that encourages a relationship between the artist and the viewer. The viewer effectively becomes the guest in the artist’s home, providing a chance for both to explore the relationship between art and life. But Jabłońska does not stop at the photograph or its chance of display in the gallery. She incorporated these images into at least one edition of her Kitchen performance by printing them on napkins that were folded and made available during the action. Visitors were able to use one of these napkins to wipe their hands and protect their clothing, and likewise be confronted with the image of an artist or curator in the act of cooking. By creating functional art objects, Jabłońska further combines the artist and quotidian in the space of the gallery. Although Jabłońska’s desire to cook and care for others can be understood in light of theories of relational aesthetics and food-­ focused art, it is important to note that the artist has not claimed to be in conversation or even inspired by these ideas. Her projects can be distinguished from the food-based practice of Spoerri, Knowles, 186

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Wojcík, and Tiravanija due to her emphasis on the maternal associations of food. By using the maternal as a subjective, critical position from which to interrogate the presumed disparities of the Polish Mother and those of the institution of art, Jabłońska employs what I here term a maternal mode of artistic practice. She simultaneously performs the roles of the mother and the artist through her “perversion” and distortion of the private spaces of cooking. Jabłońska reveals that their traditionally assumed opposition is absurd. She asserts that the institutions of motherhood and eating, like the systems of display and dispersion of art in galleries, are structured on social assumptions and pressures that are no longer desirable and need to change to accommodate what is valuable in both sets of activities: the act of caring for others.

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part IV



Eating Out

Food Art in the Public Sphere

Chapter 11

Artists and Friends Daniel Spoerri’s Eat Art Gallery Cecilia Novero

Eat Art came officially into being when Daniel Spoerri opened his gallery in Düsseldorf in 1970. The gallery was to accompany the Spoerri Restaurant, an enterprise he had begun earlier, in 1968, and the idea of which Spoerri had had while abroad, during his stay on the Greek island of Symi (1966–1967). Similarly, the English label “Eat Art Gallery” was conceived abroad, this time during his stay in New York in the early sixties.1 Although the entrepreneurial experiment was short lived—Spoerri left the restaurant to Carlo Schröter in 1971— Eat Art as artistic phenomenon continued beyond these locales and beyond these years, as its revival in recent times demonstrates.2 At the Eat Art Gallery, a great number of Spoerri’s friends and artists exhibited their food multiples. Among the most notorious were Joseph Beuys and Dieter Roth. The latter especially had produced and continued to produce food multiples also independently of the Eat Art project. At the Eat Art Gallery, Roth exhibited, to name one work, his 1968 Portrait of the Artist as Birdseed Bust (Portrait of the Artist as Vogelfutterbüste). Roth identified this work by the acronym P.O.TH.A.A.VFB (more on this later). Besides Beuys and Roth, also Arman, César, Robert Filliou, André Thomkins, Roy Licthenstein, Richard Lindner, Ben Vautier, and George Brecht participated in the project and showed at Spoerri’s gallery. Each produced multiple works of one hundred copies. César, for example, proposed a series of “sugar thumbs.” Lindner baked a gigantic edible pop artwork, The Blue Bosom Angel (Der Blaue Busenengel). Among the happenings, Vautier went on 191

a “hunger-strike”: he sat in a box without food for twenty-four hours, and Beuys concocted an elaborate display of herring fish bones as “good” edible food, rather than garbage. The most memorable action according to participants was Claude and François Lalanne’s Dîner Cannibale. Beuys and the couple Antoni Miralda and Dorothée Selz, like Roth, had consistently used food to make their art. Beuys, for example, had focused on the energy quality of a few ingredients, such as fat and honey, while Miralda and Selz concentrated on shocking, artificial coloring.3 Unlike these artists who were quite accustomed to food as material, some of the featured artists at the gallery, for example, Arman, César, and Lichtenstein, were not used to execute artworks with food. Yet they responded enthusiastically to Spoerri’s suggestion that they contribute to the Eat Art Gallery. Those who agreed to collaborate with Spoerri thought that the material of food would match perfectly the principles that governed their regular artwork. For example, César saw sugar well suited for his expansions, ordinarily made of polyurethane. For Arman to be able to create food accumulations meant that his work with waste would come full circle. At the Eat Art Gallery the works exhibited were tested against the consumers’ taste buds and by ways of the stomach (at least some of them were), not just against the distant eyesight. Eat Art and the food-multiples take viscerally—and literally—the notion of art experience, which, in the case of in/edible art, may be body-changing (even threatening). Miralda and Selz remember, for instance, that the visitors/consumers told them with excitement how, after eating their colorful food, they urinated in color. These artists’ experiment/experience carried out almost literally Dada’s early theatrical provocations. For the post-aesthetic experience to matter, in the sixties and seventies, the food artists stress, it has to involve the whole body, both that of the artist and that of the viewer/consumer. Eat Art not only operates as an action (like performance art or body art) but also exposes art and the artistic experience to physical transactions. With Eat Art, individuals take the risk to “incorporate” in/edible art physically as well as intellectually. In other words, if individuals agree to engage art—and in order to do so they must go all the way, namely, eat it—they also accept the eventuality of being poisoned, and the possibility of finding in art an 192 Eating Out

uncanny sensual dis/pleasure. They also risk remaining unmoved by the intake of food art. Among the exhibitions at the Eat Art Gallery that took it upon themselves to critically investigate the edibility or digestibility of art, as well as the effects of being “indigestible,” were—besides Joseph Beuys’s Supreme Fried Fish-bones (La gebratene Fischgräte)—Robert Filliou and Emmett Williams’s Spaghetti Sandwich, as well as Ben Vautier’s 24-Hour Fast.4 The premise of these actions was first to rethink taste in art by displacing the aesthetically “good” onto the alimentary “good”— or “bad” or “poor” for that matter—and then to gauge the effects of this displacement on notions of art, especially in relation to consumption. As Spoerri had once put it in his Auto Theater (1959): “if I find beer good when I drink it, can I find beer good when it is art? An extension of this would then be to ask: if I find an artwork ‘good,’ would I find it as good if I also had to eat it? What allows one to discriminate between one kind of good and the other?” Such questions are at the core of the Eat Art Gallery projects in general, and especially the few analyzed here: these artists’ multiples and performances continue the philosophical inquiries about the neoavant-garde art’s ways of testing the conceptual and physical relations between aesthetic and nonaesthetic experience, and the boundaries separating both, which Spoerri had initiated with his Grocery Shops and Catalog Taboo (both 1961). Among the goals of Eat Art, in sum, is the critical investigation of (post-)­aesthetic experience, of the meanings and limits of neo-avant-garde art, the actions and effects of which explicitly situate themselves within the philosophical discourse of what may constitute art at different times. In this regard, the food multiples at the Eat Art Gallery engage art through the close otherness of the culinary discourse. While the issue of quality is never central (Eat Art is not about tasting “good” food), the Eat artists wish to ask to what extent the value judgment one expresses upon tasting a tomato—Spoerri’s example—in fact compels the consumer to at least ponder how he or she approaches and values art, according to what parameters. Interestingly, the term that critic Alain Jouffroy had already coined when discussing Spoerri’s trap-paintings in the early sixties is well suited to describe the art exhibited at the Eat Art Gallery. The term

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was nourriture sauvage (savage diet).5 While referring to the actual poor food that artists such as Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Robert Filliou, and Jean Tinguely among others consumed in the sixties and seventies, Jouffroy’s notion, which he uses in 1988 to think back to that earlier time, clearly invokes Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Savage Mind (La Pensée Sauvage, 1962). Jouffroy intends to de-mystify and displace both Western art and its systems of knowledge by bringing home, once again, the wild and savage art, after the historical avant-garde had appropriated it. The critic, with his reference to Lévi-Strauss, rereads the “primitive” through the lens of its transposition, and redefinition, within the intensified industrial processes of advanced capitalism and consumer society. The concrete logic of the savage mind, which Lévi-Strauss illustrated through his concept of bricolage and which for Jouffroy translates the neo-avant-garde artists’ wild diets (for example, the Spaghetti Sandwich) resists the naturalized and abstract cultural orders and discourses pervading Western industrial culture.6 Nourriture sauvage debunks the classification systems and the distinctions between aesthetic and culinary taste in art. At the same time, the internal opposition between lavish (good) and poor taste is also questioned. As is the case with bricolage, the wild diet deconstructs binary oppositions such as original versus derivative, high versus low, self versus other, including the divide between historical avant-garde and European modernism, and avant-garde and neo-avant-garde.7 By adopting and adapting quite literally, as it were, Lévi-Strauss’s original title, La Pensée Sauvage, Jouffroy’s idea of nourriture ­sauvage —a wild thought and a wild diet—highlights the concreteness of materials and solutions in this art, an art that, as Lévi-Strauss had pointed out of this other thinking, makes use of what is at hand. (The pun that Jouffroy exploits in the anthropologist’s title lies in the fact that, in French, pensée means both “thought” and “pansy,” the flower, just like the nettles Hundertwasser put in his soup and used in his performance.)8 These materials include not only those that are found, but also those that come from the remnants of preceding systems, such as—in the case of neo-avant-garde artists—are the traces, and actual leftovers, of the historical avant-garde.9 Yet, the basis of the nourriture sauvage (as far as objects and food are concerned) is always in

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the scraps and remainders of industrial and consumer society. Hence, nourriture sauvage does not call for a return to nature or primitivism in art but rather for a concrete, yet reflective recourse to food as potentially other practice of taste. Interpreted as bricolage, the savage diet of the neo-avant-garde indicates that food functions in the art of the time as its raw material, the raw material out of which the neo-avantgarde writes a philosophy and politics of poverty and detritus.

Richness in Scarcity, Poetry in Poverty: The Spaghetti Sandwich and 24-Hour Fast Through their Eat Art actions Robert Filliou and Emmett Williams share their art’s poverty, and the poverty in their life, with their audience. Poverty, in this context, means leaving behind high professionalism and a culture of one-dimensional specialists. Through poverty Filliou embraces what, in 1962, he called the revolt of mediocrity, a concept similar to Beuys’s well-known notion of “expanded art”: “A refusal to be colonized culturally by a self-styled race of specialists in painting, sculpture, poetry, music, etc. . . . This is what La Révolte des Médiocres is all about. With wonderful results in modern art, so far. Tomorrow could everybody revolt? How? Investigate.”10 The “revolt” Filliou and Williams conceived involved a poor mediocre art, the task of which was an investigation into new, undefined possibilities of creativity and aesthetic judgment. Filliou, for example, marked his works with a stamp that offered him three possibilities to evaluate a work: “Bien Fait, Mal Fait, Pas Fait” (Well Done, Badly Done, Not Done). The “Badly Done” was in his view the most stimulating of the possibilities. Accordingly, the work’s imperfections and even perhaps amateurish traits allowed it to be removed from the world of serial and perfect commodities, and avoid a designer’s style.11 Williams and Filliou’s Spaghetti Sandwich—the co-invention that they proposed as a multiple at the Eat Art Gallery in 1971—best exemplifies Filliou’s idea of “revolt of the mediocre.” The latter concept approximates Herbert Marcuse’s political critique of capitalist organization as one finds expressed in One-Dimensional Man (1964) and, more specifically, his notion of “The Great Refusal.” 12 During the show,



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the visitors were called upon to eat the two artists’ in/edible (mediocre or mal fait) food on which both of them had fed and that, now, in turn, at the Eat Art Gallery, fed their art (Plate 11.1). As Williams recollects, the origins of the Spaghetti Sandwich went back to a “bleak period,” during which, in spite of their happiness, both Filliou and he often went hungry. At this time, to be able to devote their energies to art, they took up various small jobs, and attended art openings “where the drinks flowed freely and the canapés were gratuits.” When possible, they accepted all the help they could get from friends. Their life was all but “specialized,” all but one dimensional. Out of this “happy” dispersion of creative energy—for example, in flux—came the Spaghetti Sandwich. Filliou described it as the most humane and dignified food to a Paris-Match journalist: “You can talk about art, music and poetry all you want, but remember, with The Spaghetti Sandwich you can feed an entire army. And the astronauts. The cosmonauts as well!”13 A culinary anathema (who would ever squeeze together spaghetti and bread in a sandwich?), the Spaghetti Sandwich is purposefully disrespectful or ignorant of eating habits, of the laws of a balanced nutrition and of bourgeois taste. However, it generates a brief poetic instant, the impetus of an artistic creativity found in everyday ingredients that come together in unorthodox and informe agglomerates of dubious “good” taste but considerable energy. The alliteration of the two words (spaghetti and sandwich) in this one-line composition echoes the tautological food that adds carbohydrates to carbohydrates, spaghetti to bread in a sandwich that itself becomes a catalog of similitude, rather than sameness.14 The co-invention Spaghetti Sandwich was a happening. It was food for art as social energy rather than an art-object/food-commodity. Perhaps it also re-appropriated the content, matter, and alienation of advertising: the sandwich-men. Williams, in his autobiography, offers a genesis of the happening. As a token of gratitude toward some friends who had lent him their tiny flat while they were abroad, Williams cooked up an enormous batch of the spaghetti sauce for which I am famous, and put it in the refrigerator as a surprise for Sharon and Erik [Dietmann] upon their return. Unfortunately for Sharon and Erik, Robert and I decided to sample the sauce. It 196 Eating Out

was very good, even cold. We spread it on bread, and ate it in this fashion several times, and even invited some of our friends to do the same, until there was very little sauce left for Sharon and Erik. But no matter, the Spaghetti Sandwich was born. I think that this background material is sufficient to convince the historians of art of the truth of the co-inventors’ declaration, silk-screened on linen napkins for the Eat-Art “revival” edition of the Spaghetti Sandwich in 1971, that it was indeed “born from necessity and consumed forthwith” eight years earlier.15

This sandwiched-spaghetti-space of convergence embodied the “leftover spaces and temporal structures that have remained mysteriously outside an ever-increasing process of commodification,” while at the same time this space of improvised poor commensality and co-inventions was also a non-form of cultural experience and a form of countercultural experience.16 The Spaghetti Sandwich squares with Fluxus’s association with the “low” arts of popular culture—the two-word poem is after all an instantaneous gag. It also differs from the iconic status of American food in pop art.17 Unlike the latter, the Spaghetti Sandwich exists in the “action”—the event—of collaboration, the so-called co-invention that emerges in the joy taken in the unexpected production and consumption of this poor but excessive food. Devoured voraciously in good company, the Spaghetti Sandwich constitutes an instant of experience that carves itself out from within the state of “poverty of experience” in consumer society. Vautier’s performance 24-Hour Fast (1970) also addressed “poverty” and constituted a reaction to it. Vautier (aka Ben) locked himself up in a box without food and presented the absence of the artist and of his art—which was on view at the Hans Mayer-Denis Renée’s gallery next door in an exhibition of print-artists—as the only viable form of edible art, art which in the end makes itself invisible. Ben forced the viewer into an act of fasting when he pointed to his invisible presence (his erasure) within the gallery. The erasure occurred through the medium of writing. Writing that in the gallery substituted itself as a trace for the artist’s and the visitor’s act(s) of consumption. A blackboard announcing his absence in his own handwriting stood on top of the box that contained him. At the same time, in the gallery next

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door where his work was on display, another blackboard announced that his absence there was due to his absent (i.e., concealed) presence at the Eat Art Gallery. Like writing itself, the box is another container of absence, or of deferral, in this case, the deferral of the “Eat” artist. Further, it must be noted, the Eat artist in fact is fasting and not producing, or rather producing an action that consists in abstention. Ben takes on the position of Franz Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist,” the story of an act of self-starvation. Indeed, this artist’s art is to stage his own disappearance. In other words, the spectacle lies in this art’s and the artist’s self-erasure; its duration coincides with the process of vanishing of both art and artist from public sight; this art thereby negates entertainment, while realizing itself in the morphed form of writing—the story one reads. In Ben’s case, the Eat artists are those artists who subtract their production from the industrious production and performance principles of advanced industrial society and who, thereby, provoke hunger in their viewer, for example, an appetite for an experience that is not yet available or that has already been erased and needs (re)imagining. In short, Ben’s 24-Hour Fast “resuscitated and articulated the individual subject’s limited capacity to recognize the collectively prevailing conditions of ‘experience.’”18 Ben’s action demonstrates how important the dialectics between visibility and invisibility are in the neo-avant-garde of the sixties and seventies, in particular Eat Art’s insistence on food or eating performances that offered to the viewer/consumer the opportunity to engage an art of time that in time would leave behind only a trace of itself.

Nauseating Fetishes: Arman’s Candy Accumulation, Roth’s Chocolate Sculptures, and César’s Sugar-Thumb When Arman, César, and, among others, Richard Lindner conceived their edible accumulations, sculptures, and pop icons for the Eat Art Gallery, these followed the general artistic principles regulating most of their production. So, in the case of Arman’s vitrine on show there, it may be instructive to read the presence of food precisely through Arman’s principle of accumulation. Accordingly, one is prompted to 198 Eating Out

ask: if Arman’s work in general presents itself as a repeated series of acts of accumulation that are all different with respect to their objects yet continuous as gestures, what is changed or highlighted in this work through the juxtaposition of food and accumulation? Arman’s accumulation at the Eat Art Gallery—titled Candy—­ displays “Barbie dolls’ legs” made of marzipan. As is typical of Arman’s art, these are amassed in a Plexiglas box. The title takes an English proper name—which is importantly also a common noun for a sweet—and thereby renames the Barbie doll. These boxed legs titillate the consumer’s fetishistic and child-like desire and are even more provoking due to their explicit edibility, their candy-nature, as the title emphasizes. As fetishes to be ingested, the dolls’ legs are the appropriate means to momentarily disavow sexual difference, and fill up the anguish about “lack” and “void” (castration anxiety). Displaying themselves as fetish-commodities to be incorporated, the boxed marzipan legs call for a comparison, and contrast, with Arman’s exhibition Le Plein (Full Up, 1960). While Candy’s accumulation entails an element of desire and pleasure (albeit one imbricated with anxiety); the latter, on the contrary, is grounded in repulsive and nauseous excess. In effect, Le Plein constituted Arman’s own answer to Yves Klein’s exhibition titled Le Vide (1957, 1958), both performances taking place in the same gallery (Iris Clert) in Paris: “For two days, Arman and Martial Raysse piled, accumulated, heaped up bandy-legged furniture . . . chairs, tables, bidets, old bicycles. . . . The passers-by could see a spectacular mass of garbage in a 3.5 meter-high shop-window.”19 The visitor to the gallery could only enter the latter from a side entrance: the heaps of garbage blocked the main entrance or main access to this accumulation. In addition, the art collector was left with nothing but detritus to buy. Tellingly, the invitation to the exhibition was a sardine tin filled with garbage and also containing a text by Pierre Restany announcing the event. Art critic Francoise Choay wrote in the December 1960 issue of Art International: “There is nothing left to buy in this gigantic heap that is truly a gesture, an event that will return to nothingness without letting any collector profit from it. . . . This is a dissertation, grounded in humanism, on a certain state of decomposition (ours)” (quoted in Arman, 195). Candy’s accumulation of sweet legs in Plexiglas reinforces the present “state of

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decomposition”: not unlike the shop window of the gallery filled with garbage, the boxed marzipan legs also bar access to their definitive consumption by the mouth. Candy both excites and blocks desire, which it condemns to remain caught in a limbo of frustrated expectation. The consumer is left with a watering mouth yet perpetually unable to touch or eat the object. The inaccessible fetish or the substitute counter-fetish—the sugary legs in Candy and waste in the gallery Clert—leave the fetishistic consumer (or collector) exposed to his or her own “void,” or lack. The consumer is forced into the position of anxious voyeur: he becomes a viewer left to confront his own fetishistic gaze, a gaze that traps him. This is a viewer who is unable to give way to his desire to consume and, thus, in the process, unable to destroy—or disavow—difference. In the case of the art consumer of marzipan Barbie legs difference means sexual difference as well as the difference that supposedly distinguishes the love for art from the desire to possess commodities and eat food. This viewer faces a glass that returns to him his own voyeurism. But what about the women consumers or viewers of Candy? How can they relate to these dolls’ legs, namely, to these metonymies of metonymies of themselves, that is, women’s legs replicated as Barbie’s legs replicated as almond-paste doll’s legs? The desire to devour the alienated body, to incorporate it and make it one’s own, is again blocked. Women are excluded three times by this language of desire, hence by the sugary legs: they have not “cooked” the legs, they cannot eat the legs, and the legs are not theirs. The pleasure of eating, as well as the pleasure of their other sexuality, is not here (to be found between those legs that Spoerri once identified as the site of reproduction; see below). However, the almond legs promote and stimulate—again, through their sweet and kitschy edibility—a woman’s desire to devour and repossess these reproduced parts of her self, a desire that remains dissatisfied. In short, they confront her with the possibility that she could make herself into her own cake, to become the artist-maker of herself.20 In facing Arman’s sweet replicas of women’s legs behind Plexiglas, a woman viewer is inclined to acknowledge the sugar-coated sadism present in art, the sadism that turns women into “beautiful”—tasty— 200 Eating Out

fetishes showcased and offered up for public consumption.21 In Candy, this feminine is less eternal than perishable, less beautiful than nauseating in the excessive and uncanny accumulation of a sweetness that is in fact left to first disturb and then rot.22 While evidently different in nature and kind, Arman’s Candy— with its references to castration anxiety, fetishism, and the threatening aspects of desire exploited by consumer culture—is reminiscent of Hans Bellmer’s dismembered and opened up dolls’ bodies. (Bellmer was a German artist on the margins of Surrealism.) As Hal Foster remarks, Bellmer’s dolls—all individual variants of fragmented female bodies—speak to a subject that in viewing them faces his sadistic and masochistic desire, desire which entails its own dissolution, now projected onto the dolls (Compulsive Beauty, 109). After the mass annihilations of World War II and in the society of mass production, Arman’s accumulations of in/edible (comestible but inaccessible) dolls’ legs expose especially the subject’s wish and fear of disintegration as fully administered and mastered by consumer society. This is a society that reproduces, fetishistically, such misogynistic wishes as integral to the condition of failed collective subjecthood, as critic Benjamin Buchloh puts it.23 More generally, Arman’s Candy explores the notion of excess: adding sugar to the sugary image of the doll, Candy turns into kitsch and parodies the doll’s ritualistic function of domestication. Candy accumulates the excess of the doll’s reinstatement of the laws of sexual and social reproduction, of the values of the traditional and patriarchal family structure. Excess exposes the ideology of reproduction, for Candy is only made of legs that, as Spoerri told Arman, point to the greatest multiplication that exists, human multiplication in birth. In Spoerri’s words: “the greatest accumulation of beings: and it all happens between women’s legs!”24 In an earlier version of this statement, Spoerri had underscored the threat posed by human multiplication that Arman’s accumulations of legs made visible: “Arman, my rabbit, it is right between the legs that the greatest accumulation is produced, which will make the world explode. Let us hope we will be able to laugh.”25 The multiplication of accumulated legs, reproduced here with edible materials, raised the dilemma of the ratio between human reproduction and food production (resources), to which Spoerri

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alludes in the quote. The friendly address, “rabbit,” points to the fast multiplication rate of humans, whose sexual behavior is set on a par with that of rabbits. Ultimately, Spoerri implies, human reproduction, which alone guarantees human existence, paradoxically, may come to threaten human existence. (Overpopulation, as overproduction, was a concern that was strongly debated in the sixties and seventies.) The 1970 Candy may also be compared to Dieter Roth’s own doll drowned in chocolate (Doll in Chocolate, 1969). In Roth’s sculpture, a doll is submerged in a chocolate-filled cylinder with only the doll’s two legs emerging upside down. Here chocolate exceeds the boundaries of its own sweetness thus also invading the territory of commodified sentimentality. In other words, the chocolate’s sweetness suffocates the sweetness of the doll, domesticity, and family values. Roth’s food more generally “eats” up its own contexts, territories, and the cultural meanings to which it has been traditionally confined (Plate 11.2). Roth’s food is also used for the effects of its mutability in time. Hence, Roth’s choice of chocolate but also of yogurt, sour milk, or cheese. A case in point was his notorious Staple Cheese (A Race, 1970). In Los Angeles, for instance, Roth had exhibited thirty-seven suitcases filled with cheese that in the month of May started to “run,” producing an unbearable stench and larvae in great quantities. The US health authorities threatened to shut down the exhibition. Luckily, the curator was successful in preventing it.26 To return to chocolate, which remains a central material for Roth, it must be noted that the artist interferes with and disturbs chocolate’s cultural and commercial meanings by way of association or of excess, not without a childlike gaze. For example, chocolate is confused with excrement while it also has strong positive connotations. It can stand for spontaneous delight, a game, or an ironic statement. More often, it becomes a threatening flow of boiling lava—an oppressive mass—that suffocates with its own bittersweetness: chocolate immobilizes and gobbles up toys, knickknacks, garden gnomes, and souvenirs.27 The ambivalent aspect and function of chocolate as art—its ­pharmakon-like qualities—are highlighted in Spoerri’s own homage to Roth: Among Spoerri’s Bread-Dough Objects (used for the opening exhibition of the Eat Art Gallery) is a Small Oven (1970) flooded by an

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uncontrollable rising of bread dough, as if it were flowing from every opening of the stove and from every pot on top of it. Roth too had proposed a Stove (Herd) in 1969 from which chocolate spilled over. Unlike Spoerri’s, this was not in miniature format and reminded one of the stove Roth used for his chocolate productions. Roth contributed all of his chocolate sculptures until that time to the Eat Art Gallery, in addition to his Spice Windows (Gewürzfenster, 1970), and the Rabbit Dropping Rabbit (Karnickelköttelkarnickel), made for Spoerri’s gallery in 1971. Spice Windows focused on smell and through it on this sense’s mnemonic qualities: those visitors daring enough to open the upper surface of the window frames, or, more simply, who smelled the fragrances that escaped their encasing anyway, not only experienced the exhibition space every time differently depending on the smells freed but also could be inundated by resurfacing and unexpected memories. The Rabbit Dropping Rabbit was more attuned with the excremental nature that Roth ascribed specifically to chocolate, a scatological attribute that for Roth also related to the cycles of life and death. Dirk Dobke describes Rabbit Dropping Rabbit: He [Roth] had the mould, which is vaguely reminiscent of the forms for chocolate Easter bunnies, tightly packed with rabbit ordure by the Basle sculptor Walter Moser and left to dry. Each of the total 210 copies had a label based on a drawing attached at the bottom, which was signed and numbered by Roth. The Karnickelköttelkarnickel was and remains the only multiple in which Roth took excrement, as the concluding stage of the organic process of disintegration, as his artistic material.28 (Plate 11.3)

Not only did Roth use chocolate to comment on the natural processes of decomposition, as he used excrement in, for example, the rabbit sculpture above, but also through chocolate’s association with excrement, he wished to suggest the regenerative powers lying in the putrid and dung (as in the rotting cheese). Spoerri himself explains this when engaging Roth’s Garden Gnome as Squirrel Feed Sculpture (Gartenzwerg als Einhörnchenfutterplastik, 1969), on view at the Eat



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Art Gallery. This was another critical adaptation of Roth’s already ironic appropriation of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), namely Roth’s P.O. TH. A. A. VFB (1968) (Plate 11.4). The Garden Gnome is fully immersed in a dark brown substance— chocolate, although this is not immediately obvious—which makes it difficult to identify the gnome as anything at all, were it not for the tip of the gnome’s recognizable red hat. Submerged in what looks like its own excrement, the gnome appears to function as a sarcastic indictment of German petit bourgeois customs (the spiessig way to keep house, car, and garden). Spoerri, however, offers a more existential interpretation of this work. He focuses on the regeneration of the life cycle to which the gnome points through the processes of eating and discarding. Spoerri explains that for Roth chocolate is tantamount to excrement, excrement to fertilizer . . . and so on until an entire cycle is formed: from fertilizer the grass grows, and animals eat grass and we eat animals, don’t we? And again we produce excrement. . . . And garden gnomes are tantamount to humans, ridiculous little humans who are there and move on and about, right? And these are cast in chocolate and they drown in their own excrement, to put it brutally. And then they are offered to the birds as food, so that again they transform into nourishment and fertilizer, into something positive.29

Spoerri also addresses Roth’s gnome as the site of a potential critique of institutional art. Responding to a teacher’s statement that Roth’s gnome could be viewed as a symbol of waste in the societies of plenty, in which chocolate used to be a luxury good and now is readily available, Spoerri asks: “why is it that if we see art made of chocolate we think about art’s superfluity and about waste, but we don’t think the same when we think of traditional materials of art, such as stone or chalk or even canvas? We don’t think that art is waste when it makes use of textile for making canvases instead of clothing.” He concludes that hence, Roth’s use of chocolate makes us question what and how we define what is superfluous and what not, and to what extent we distinguish some art from waste but not other forms of production and consumption. Like P.O. TH. A. A. VFB, the Garden Gnome is a sculpture-multiple 204 Eating Out

intended for the outdoors and for its consumption by the weather and the birds. Both will set it free from its kitschy and petit bourgeois cage. Whereas the Garden Gnome indicts a certain bourgeois Germanness as cultural kitsch, the former work consigns Joyce’s Künstlerroman to literary kitsch. Both works are then suited, for Roth, to be recast in chocolate. More broadly, the Garden Gnome is Roth’s way to demolish the art of self-portraiture, which he engaged on multiple occasions. Not only did the use of chocolate in both his Self-Portrait and Self-Towers (Selbsttürme, also displayed at the Eat Art Gallery), for example, help him to deface himself—and the artist as mere ­mortal— for they show the young man as an aging, old man, but also this organic and fast-decaying material now serves the artist to accelerate the process of aging of the artwork itself. Here Roth avails himself of a carnivalesque (grotesque) narcissism, pertaining to both the artist and the beaux-arts. This kind of reflexive sarcasm appears often in Roth’s work, especially as it relates to literature: Roth was indeed very fond of books, and he devoted much of his career to expanding the medium of print, printmaking, and bookbinding. In other instances, Roth had turned printed materials or literary works he disliked into sausages, such as Günter Grass’s Dog Years (Hundejahre, 1963), Martin Walser’s Halftime (Halbzeit, 1960), tabloids and magazines (The Daily Mirrors, Der Spiegel). On these occasions, Roth physically re-processed the contents of these texts into something apparently digestible but, in fact, indigestible because inedible. Roth simply substituted books made into pulp for the pork and then spiced and prepared the sausages according to canonical recipes.30 The first literature sausage he ever made was a gift for Spoerri in 1961, while Hegel’s Complete Works in 20 Volumes concluded the series in 1974: twenty sausages were hung in two rows on a wooden frame as in a slaughterhouse.31 The literature sausages ironically and paradoxically purified—rescued—the eyes (that read books and look at art) by turning them into base organs, directly connected to the mouth (that takes in and tastes) via the intestines (that also make up the skin of the sausage) (Scheisse: neue Gedichte von Dieter Roth, 1966).32 Food multiples, such as Roth’s chocolate sculptures, and Arman’s Candy, playfully intensify some of the points these artists made

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through their art, which they now offer up for a seemingly immediate but at second glance mediated and self-reflexive form of consumption. In Arman’s case the edible yet inaccessible accumulations—preserved in Plexiglas—accentuate the effects of all his preceding inedible accumulations to which they add themselves and which maintain both elements of evanescence and futility. Most evidently, the edible multiples by Arman, Roth, and César, while different, are all intended to investigate Spoerri’s injunction to eat art; for example, to engage the contemporary post-aesthetic situation of neo-avant-garde art’s production and consumption. César proposed for the Eat Art Gallery sugar thumbs and compressions of candies, both reproducing his bronze sculptures in edible form, just like Arman and Roth. Like the latter, César thereby ironized on the role of the artist, while at the same time intending to value artistic energy. Unlike Arman’s work, protected by Plexiglas, César’s thumbs could be eaten, and in fact were offered to the public to suck on. While the thumb and the associated narcissistic pre-Oedipal desire to suck one’s thumb that the thumb elicits (usually considered the attribute that turned humans into homo faber, that is, into the quintessential artist) point up the narcissism of the figure of the artist, the sugary nature of the thumb and other sculptures César also proposes may help to interpret such narcissism less as reinstatement of an individual creative self than as an erotic approach toward the world.33 Let me elaborate. César’s narcissistic instances are better interpreted through the lens of Marcuse’s revisions of Freud. As Freud stated, Marcuse argues, sublimation starts with a reactivation of narcissistic libido, “which somehow overflows and extends to objects. The hypothesis all but revolutionizes the idea of sublimation: it hints at a non-repressive mode of sublimation which results from an extension rather than from a constraining deflection of the libido.”34 In this regard, Marcuse writes that the narcissistic experience of the world annihilates the principle of performance if one regards such experience as imbued with Eros (eroticism). Eros redirects the Nirvana principle from its association with death to the redemption of life. Thus the opposition between subject and object is negated and existence is understood as the satisfaction that unites mankind and nature without the violence of con206 Eating Out

quest. This libido can change into the desire for new modes of being or, better, new modes of production to which, I would add, edible art alludes. And this is the energy that informs César’s Sugar Thumb, namely, the artist’s finger proffered to the consumer who, invited to suck on it, thereby sucks and feeds on its creativity. Indeed, Spoerri noted César’s excitement and happiness during his experimentations with sugar as an artistic medium. Spoerri remembers that while working César would repeatedly exclaim: “This is the language of matter!” Accordingly, César’s Sugar Thumb, alongside his narcissistic play with masks and bread (more below), may very well be used to figuratively embody Marcuse’s words: “Beyond any immature auto-eroticism, narcissism reveals a profound affinity with reality that may generate a comprehensive, existential order,” thus integrating the narcissistic I with the world. This, for Marcuse, is an act of resistance against a world order based on libidinal repression, resistance exercised by both Narcissus and the poet-artist Orpheus. Marcuse writes: “This Refusal aims at reuniting with what has been separated. Orpheus is the archetype of the poet as liberator and creator. . . . In his person, art, freedom and culture are eternally reunited.”35 From within this framework, offered as sacrificial art and proto-cannibalistic gesture, the Sugar Thumb is an act of liberation of art from its constraints. With it, art returns to the extended capacity to mould and move about in the world of homo ludens—homo faber, to adopt Pierre Restany’s words on César.36 The sweet narcissism for which the edible thumb could stand then reflects the image of a human-made art and, in addition, an art that is made in the image of these artists’ own art, as much in the case of César as in that of Arman. Arman, César, Lindner, Claude and François Lalanne, and other occasional contributors to the project of Eat Art, “narcissistically” reproduced their own artworks—and themselves in the explicit case of François Lalanne—as edible, which meant that in the end the artists had to eat them(selves) too (not just the audiences).37 Furthermore, because most of these multiples were made for the Eat Art Gallery after Spoerri’s Last Supper in Milan (1970), their narcissistic reproductions also reproduced Spoerri’s own imagined edible versions of each artist’s artistic principle that Spoerri had already proposed at that crucial dinner. From within this ­framework, César’s edible thumb

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can be read as a metonymy of a narcissistic art that, while eating and reproducing itself over and over again (the thumb was reproduced in different sizes and materials in time), at the same time is non-­egotistical, communal, and self-consuming rather than self-monumentalizing. In this light, César’s edible thumb epitomizes art as the renewable and constantly renewed desire for art making, that is, art making as essential to human beings and human societies. César is well known for his recurrent self-portraits of which, in 1973, he offered multiples in bread dough that had been baked by the most Parisian of all French bakers, Poîlane. The bread portraits demonstrate a certain ironic play on narcissism, not unlike Roth’s. At the opening of the exhibition Tête à Têtes at the Gallery Creuzevault (1973), his bread head was sliced and distributed among the present viewers, multiplied as the body of Christ. However, instead of Christ’s body this one was a model of a deformed edible head, partly actor’s mask, partly emperor’s effigy—César posing as the homonymous Roman emperor—partly a malleable mirror image in between the temporary and the grotesque. In effect, the bread head is just one of the multiple heads that César had initially cast in polyvinyl and then reworked for this show, distorting and extending their facial features into a vast panorama of warped physiognomies (some of these he then casts in bronze). In these images self and other merge into indistinguishable new and hybrid morphologies, as if each gave birth to the other, without the need for any “real” original and/or authentic face. César added to these heads other materials from textile to found objects that he fixed in wax or resin to stress their lack of homogeneity. Also in the case of those bread heads not for consumption César manipulated the thin surface of the bread, already emptied of its soft dough (and thus resting on emptiness as it were), and consolidated it with fiberglass, thus transforming bread into a durable substance and yet bearing the traits of the imminent disintegration that threatens archaeological artifacts. Among César’s formative experiences for his early iron sculptures was a trip to Pompei, after which he sculpted his Nu assis Pompei (Sitting Naked Body Pompei, 1954). In Pompei, he saw how sculptures of the people who died during the eruption of the volcano were made out of the empty holes in which the bodies had originally left an 208 Eating Out

imprint. Sculptures of once-existing bodies were made out of emptiness, and rose like ghosts centuries after their burial. These figures, perhaps the antecedent to his self-portraits, were the material product of an absence. The bread head (to be eaten) stresses the absence out of which the presence of sculpture or art (and of the self) emerges. In 1957, César interprets this paradoxical materiality through the dialectics between absence and presence, between otherness and identity: I start from an idea that is in me, from nothing and I set out on an adventure until the moment when I find myself face to face with a thing that is foreign to me. This is why it is reality, reality that is detached from me, that exists in its own material, in its own content, in its own space. . . . A kind of internal pressure is in it and on the verge of explosion. I have the impression that it is someone else who is demanding to exist, to be whoever s/he wants to be. . . . A work can always become something else.38

The proliferation of reality as both the product of a self-adventure and the auto-generative impulse of matter inform the creative narcissism of César’s Thumbs and self-portraits. The spontaneous encounter between the artist and the uncontainable rising of matter—like Spoerri’s Bread-Dough Objects—is even more palpable in the artificial mousse expansions that César created during a series of happenings in the sixties (e.g., at the Galerie Mathias Fels, in 1967). César himself, like a magician cum cook, pours the liquid polyurethane on the ground from heavy bins that he manuevers with a few dynamic gestures: in less than a minute this industrial substance, soft as whipping cream, first becomes alive, like lava descending from a volcano, and then solidifies into a chance shape. Industry transforms into nature—a cataclysmic force—through a few movements of the hand, a hand that in this case allows matter to paradoxically form itself into informe in/edible substance. César sliced his in/edible meringues and offered them to the viewers, expanding the expansion of matter to encompass, and include, the public. César often compared his sculpting (or nonsculpting) with the art of baking and cooking: “It is as when I cook, I choose, mix, take away, put back in, season etc.”39 According to him the coulades were the result of the “collaboration” among air, time, matter, the artist-cook, and the diners-viewers.

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Besides Spoerri’s friends and artists who contributed occasional edible art multiples to the Eat Art Gallery, other artists also used food systematically in their art without necessarily participating in Eat Art (e.g., Piero Manzoni, Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, and especially Antoni Miralda). But to examine this other food art is beyond the scope of this chapter. In contrast, in considering the artists who gathered around Spoerri at the Eat Art Gallery, this essay aimed to show two interrelated points: first, Eat Art—through the interface of the culinary—investigates and probes the “aesthetic” functions of art after the avant-garde, after, that is, the emergence of the event and the disappearance of the art object—eroded by the commodity; second, the essay intimated that the introduction of “real” food as art becomes a way for the neo-avant-garde to grapple with the temporality of and in contemporary art. In conclusion: by setting itself up as the waste of a fast-­ transforming capitalist consumer society, and through its excessive display of “poverty,” Eat Art critiques history-as-progress. Eat Art, this chapter argued, presents itself as a minor language within contemporary art. This language derails artistic historical classifications and stable orders (including the divisions between avant-garde and neo-avant-garde) as well as the economic ones presumed in capitalism (e.g., the stability imagined to exist in the logic of exchange value). It also undermines stable notions of traditional, national, and subjective identity. In becoming minor, that is, in choosing to speak a minor language of dis/taste, Eat Art infiltrates the museum and “contaminates” its space (a space for visual consumption). Further, it transforms this space into a temporary site of collective production and consumption of art. In the irreverent manner of Dada, Eat Art leaves its waste in and for the museum to exhibit, aestheticize, and even turn into an original work, without origin.

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Chapter 12

Express Yourself Al’s Café in Context Rachel Federman

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, artists across the country raised their voices against the Vietnam War, as well as the art world’s entanglements with it. In New York, the Art Workers’ Coalition and its offshoots challenged museums on several fronts. Organizations such as the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and Women Artists in Revolution demanded equal representation for women and minorities.1 Without funding or institutional support, artist activists in Los Angeles reconsidered “ideas of ‘space,’ the ‘theatre,’ the disposable and transitory life of the streets.”2 They staged interventions on La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles’s gallery row, covering artworks with antiwar posters and holding protests during the popular Monday Night Art Walk, when galleries stayed open late. In 1966, the Artists’ Protest Committee, a group that formed in 1965 during a meeting at LA’s Dwan Gallery, erected the Artists’ Tower of Protest at the intersection of La Cienega and Sunset Boulevards. Designed by Mark di Suvero, the sixty-foot tower, which stood for three months, was surrounded by small panel paintings created by hundreds of artists.3 The street was not only the site of antiwar and civil rights protests; for some it also signified opposition to the mass media. In his 1972 essay “Requiem for the Media,” Jean Baudrillard writes that the street is “the alternative and subversive form of all the mass media, because it is not, like them, an objectified support for messages without response, a distant transit network”; rather, it is “the cleared space

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of the symbolic exchange of ephemeral and mortal speech, speech that is not reflected on the Platonic screen of the media.”4 Baudrillard considered the graffiti that was painted on walls during the protests of May 1968 to be emblematic of détournement, writing: “It’s transgressive not because it substitutes another content, another discourse, but because it responds there, in place, and breaks the fundamental rule of all media, non-response.”5 In 1969, Allen Ruppersberg took his work to the street with his seminal environment Al’s Café, renting a storefront space in the PicoUnion area of Los Angeles. Al’s Café’s independence from traditional spheres of art presentation—museums and commercial galleries— typified efforts by artists at that time to distance themselves from institutions and to seek out more democratic modes of presentation. Al’s Café provided Ruppersberg with a steady stream of income, thus liberating him to some extent from the demands of the commercial art market. Moreover, the low prices of his “meals” made them accessible to a broad range of “consumers.” Contrary to the characterization of the street outlined above, however, Al’s Café emphasized performance over spontaneity, and offered a poetics of popular culture that challenges Baudrillard’s model of nonresponsiveness. Fellow artist and Al’s Café patron Allan McCollum has written: “In my memory, it was Al who reminded our troubled generation that simple, normal, everyday rituals of human commerce (horrors!) contained a significant complement of decency and joy that needed to be recognized and appreciated—not in spite of, but along with whatever else might have been wrong with the world in those especially uneasy years.”6 By creating publics around the quotidian rituals of eating out and, with Al’s Grand Hotel (1971), overnight travel, Ruppersberg seemed to confirm sociologist Richard Sennett’s observation, that “Convention is itself the single most expressive tool of public life.”7 Although Al’s Café and Al’s Grand Hotel were not, strictly speaking, conventional, the behaviors that they inscribed were: reading a menu and ordering a meal from a waitress; checking into a hotel and receiving a key. By breaking down these familiar environments into a series of performative gestures, Ruppersberg realized the aim of many who took to the streets during the Vietnam era, merging a theatrical sensibility (art) with the public sphere (life).8 212 Eating Out

Gonna California Allen Ruppersberg’s desire to move to Los Angeles was sparked by a family vacation in 1956. The visit included all of the usual sights, most notably Hollywood and Disneyland. Both of these places had particular resonance for Ruppersberg, who had decided by age eleven that he would become a Disney animator: “After that trip there was never a question in my mind that I was going to California as soon as I was able.”9 In 1962, he moved from Ohio to Los Angeles to study commercial art at the Chouinard Art Institute, which received support from Walt Disney. Ruppersberg recalls that Disney occasionally visited the school, which had many of the film studio’s former animators on its faculty.10 After switching to a fine art track, Ruppersberg completed his BFA in 1967, receiving his first solo show at the Eugenia Butler Gallery in January 1969. The work that he showed there, Location Piece (1968– 1969), is emblematic of the artist’s unique engagement with the cultural and geographic conditions of his adopted city. When visitors arrived at the gallery on La Cienega Boulevard, they were met by several scattered objects. However, these were not the main attraction; a sign at the gallery redirected viewers to a Hollywood location about two miles away. The real exhibition was at 7507 Sunset Boulevard, an office building where Ruppersberg rented several spaces on the top floor.11 There, visitors encountered a room-size, three-sided construction of canvas-covered plywood boxes. A deer skull hangs behind a pane of glass at the far end, and rocks and leaves are strewn on a platform beneath it. “Essentially, it’s a big set,” Ruppersberg has remarked.12 The combination of natural and man-made elements in Location Piece can be found in a contemporaneous series of sculptures in which the artist filled small aquariums with found objects, such as leaves, rocks, or a bird’s nest. In a statement that suggests familiarity with Robert Smithson’s “non-sites” of the same period, Ruppersberg has said, “the objects usually represented something about Los Angeles or Southern California. I began bringing back to the gallery ‘locations’ I had found outside of it.”13 Lacking the maps and descriptions that are integral components of the non-sites, the aquariums instead commemorate personal journeys to unknowable sites. Ruppersberg Express Yourself

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has emphasized their theatricality above all, comparing them to “a miniature stage set: a self-contained, well-lighted world with an audience peering into it.”14 Both Location Piece and the aquarium sculptures engage in a form of displacement, or dislocation, underscoring Ruppersberg’s sense of his practice at the time: “I prided myself with the idea that my shows could be carried around in a briefcase.”15 These theatrical manifestations of the artist’s idiosyncratic experiences of Los Angeles and its environs presage the major themes of Al’s Café, which he staged later that year.

Al’s Café Every Thursday evening from October 9 to November 13, 1969, Ruppersberg operated Al’s Café out of a storefront at 1913 West 6th Street, near downtown Los Angeles. The neighborhood, which was about half a mile from Chouinard, was, in Ruppersberg’s recollection, “a nowhere neighborhood.”16 Decorated with Americana culled from his extensive personal archive of postcards, posters, calendars, and other ephemera, the environment was a convincing facsimile of a typical American restaurant.17 Just beyond the door there stood a wood and glass cigar counter displaying a cow skull resting on a bed of straw, among other items. Hanging on the wall behind the counter were a sign reading “Donut Tree,” a calendar, a felt pennant, a Jesus icon, and a sign advertising ice cream cones for fifteen cents. The café proper was located on the mezzanine above the entrance level.18 There, diners sat at metal-topped tables or at the counter, where Ruppersberg acted as chef and impresario (Plate 12.1). He had scrounged the restaurant’s fittings and many of its decorations from the defunct Pacific Ocean Park (POP) in Santa Monica, where he and other artists rented studio spaces or lived at the time.19 Several of Ruppersberg’s aquarium sculptures were scattered among the tables and on the countertop, where they functioned as lamps. The shelves behind the counter were lined with knickknacks: vintage signs, glass bottles, enormous pine cones, a cow’s skull. Ruppersberg painted the back wall of the café with a cartoonish cloudscape; he inhabited it with Marvel comics figurines, which were suspended from the ceiling like mobiles, and an electric sign advertising Eskimo pies. McCollum 214 Eating Out

recalls: “This was Al’s Café, the American café of all American cafés, looking as if it had been nurtured for forty years by a caring caféowner, filled with memories to be shared with generations of patrons. It was a place where any American would have felt at home. It was exorbitantly familiar.”20 The simulacral mise-en-scène of Ruppersberg’s café surely owed something to its proximity to Hollywood. McCollum’s characterization of its familiarity as “exorbitant” conjures Hollywood’s tendency to privilege communicability over naturalism. As William Cameron Menzies, a prolific art director of Hollywood’s Golden Age, once said, “in many cases, authenticity is sacrificed, and architectural principles violated, all for the sake of the emotional response that is being sought.”21 Though no script was provided—except insofar as the menu might be considered a script—everyone involved in Al’s Café, from Ruppersberg to the waitresses and patrons, had a clearly defined role to play. At the time that Al’s Café opened, the local art scene had experienced several recent setbacks: Artforum departed for New York in 1967, and the influential Ferus and Dwan galleries closed in 1966 and 1967, respectively. Nevertheless, it was a heady time in Los Angeles: the presence of Ger van Elk, Bas Jan Ader, and Guy de Cointet, all of whom were part of Ruppersberg’s close circle, reinforced longstanding ties between Los Angeles and Europe.22 California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) opened in 1969, with a faculty that included Allan Kaprow, John Baldessari, and Nam June Paik. Hal Glicksman inaugurated an important program of site-specific art at Pomona College; and Gemini G.E.L. acted as a powerful enticement to established East Coast artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg, both of whom had spent time in Los Angeles earlier in the decade as well.23 Despite the vibrancy of the art scene in the late 1960s, Los Angeles’s expansive geography sometimes made it difficult for artists in different communities to meet one another. Located near Chouinard, Al’s Café was an extension of the extraordinary artistic community that had existed there, bringing together disparate strands of the local milieu.24 Artist and musician Terry Allen, a friend of Ruppersberg’s from Chouinard, recalls that Al’s Café “was the first time I met artists from Venice, from the [San Fernando] Valley, from Pasadena. I was Express Yourself

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living in Silverlake and Hollywood . . . you had heard about these guys, you’d see work periodically, but it was the first time I’d ever really met them, and I think it was one of the first times, as a group, those people met each other.”25 Al’s Café also attracted such art world luminaries as Rauschenberg and Kaprow. Although Al’s Café was, as McCollum has written, “the American café of all American cafés,” its familiarity stopped short of the menu. The plastic-encased jacket, printed with garish landscape images, was utterly generic, having been purchased from a restaurant supply house.26 Its front cover shows El Capitan viewed from Yosemite Valley, one of the most recognizable views of Yosemite National Park. Inside, however, one finds such strange offerings as “Toast and Leaves” and “Simulated Burned Pine Needles a la Johnny Cash Served with a Live Fern,” both “from the broiler.” Appearing under the heading “Al suggests” are such delicacies as “Rock Varieties Smothered in Pine Needles” and “Angeles National Forest Special ‘A Gourmet’s Delight.’” At Al’s Café, “BLT” stands for “Branches, Leaves and Twigs,” and desserts like “A Dish of Bubble Gum and Raisins” and “Cotton Covered with Star Dust” are listed under the tellingly misspelled heading, “Deserts.” The beer and coffee were consumable, but little else on the menu was. Instead, for the cost of a hamburger ($1.75), a patron of Al’s Café received a small sculpture assembled in an aluminum foil pie pan, made-to-order by Ruppersberg. This pricing policy distinguished Al’s Café from Oldenburg’s The Store (1961), which is perhaps the work’s closest precedent, although Ruppersberg was not aware of it until later.27 Whereas objects at The Store sold for prices in the hundreds of dollars—for example, the 9.99 (1961) hanging in The Store’s window sold for $399.95—most items at Al’s Café were in the $1 to $3 range.28 Accessible prices, together with the café’s community-building function—the sale of coffee and beer encouraged even those who did not purchase “meals” to linger— contributed to the work’s attraction. In fact, it was almost too successful, as Ruppersberg recalls: “The place was becoming completely overcrowded every week, the waitresses couldn’t do their job, and the experience was getting lost.”29

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Excavating Los Angeles Ruppersberg’s earliest works attest to his interest in the specificity of California’s geographic and cultural history: the rocks, leaves, and other artifacts that comprise Location Piece and the aquarium sculptures were gathered during his travels “from the desert to the sea,” as Ruppersberg likes to say, quoting the trademark greeting of longtime Los Angeles news anchor Jerry Dunphy.30 Just as Location Piece insists on the physicality of Los Angeles, a city whose specificity is often subsumed by its legend, so, too, does Al’s Café engage the region’s singular topography.31 The “John Muir Salad (Botany Special)” takes its name from the Scottish explorer and conservationist who cofounded the Sierra Club and acted as its first president. Muir lived most of his life in California, helping to establish Yosemite as a national park in 1890. “Simulated Burned Pine Needles a la Johnny Cash Served with a Live Fern”—a dish that consists of a pile of sand, a sprig of plastic pine needles, and a fern in a small planter—commemorates a very different relationship to the wilderness (Plate 12.2). On July 3, 1969, several months before Al’s Café opened, the Los Angeles Times reported that Johnny Cash paid $82,000 to the US government to settle a suit for damages caused by a forest fire that he had accidentally ignited in 1965. According to the article, the fire, which was allegedly the result of a defective exhaust system on Cash’s truck, destroyed 508 acres of the Los Padres National Forest.32 Cash’s alleged carelessness, and the destruction that it wrought, emblematize long-held concerns about the impact of tourism and development on the landscape. Anxiety over the loss of the American, and especially the western wilderness, reaches back to the late nineteenth century, as evidenced by the founding of the Sierra Club in 1892. Tellingly, this was just two years after the US Census Bureau announced the disappearance of a contiguous western frontier line. After World War II, leisure and consumption patterns, facilitated by growing household incomes and improved automotive mobility, brought new challenges for conservationists. In 1944, fewer than 120,000 people visited Yosemite National Park; ten years later, that number exceeded one million.33 It had originally been the intention of Muir and the Sierra Club to make the national parks accessible to the public, but excessive Express Yourself

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auto tourism and the profit-driven development that it encouraged threatened to wreck the very landscape that visitors came to see. Ansel Adams, who is best known for his iconic images of Yosemite, embodied this paradox. His dramatic photographs were widely distributed and much imitated—as evidenced by the images on the Al’s Café menu jacket—contributing to increased tourism to the park. At the same time, as a board member of the Sierra Club during the 1950s and 1960s, he actively opposed measures to increase access to national parks.34 This Is the American Earth (1960), the first of the Sierra Club’s Exhibit Format book series, lamented: “The throng that comes grows larger, needs more, and forest and meadow make way to accommodate them.”35 The book contrasts Adams’s majestic images of Death Valley and Yosemite National Park with William Garnett’s photographs of Los Angeles blanketed by smog and buried beneath tract houses. The presentation of Los Angeles as the appalling “after” in this cautionary narrative underscores the particularly fraught place that Southern California occupies in environmental discourse, as well as in popular imagination. The fact that Los Angeles is as famous for its notorious smog as it is for the natural advantages that lured the movie studios there in the 1910s undergirds its popular image as a despoiled paradise (but a paradise nonetheless). In McCollum’s estimation, Ruppersberg “presented nature as a commodity for consumption, without the pretense of any pure ‘natural’ vision.”36 The relationship between consumption—whether of natural resources or of celebrities—and destruction is the subject of a number of dishes at Al’s Café, including “Simulated Burned Pine Needles a la Johnny Cash Served with a Live Fern”; “Double Decker,” in which a toy bus bearing an Esso Extra Petrol banner rests on a bed of smoglike cotton; and the “Patti Melt,” which the menu describes as a “Patti Page photo (or reasonable facsimile) covered with toasted marshmellows [sic].” In one version, a signed publicity photo of the singer and actress Connie Stevens (apparently interchangeable with Patti Page) is obscured by five marshmallows that have been toasted to the point of burning, giving the assemblage an improbable air of menace. Rupperberg’s creation of dishes that could not be physically consumed by the café’s patrons may in fact be considered a form of protest. Los Angeles’s ambivalent—some might even say abusive—­ 218 Eating Out

relationship to its natural resources also characterizes aspects of its relationship to the built environment. Most Angelenos remember the summer of 1965 not for the forest fire that Johnny Cash ignited, but for the fires of the Watts riots. According to Joan Didion, “For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end.”37 Watts had once been connected to the city by the Pacific Electric Railroad. Beginning in the 1920s, streetcars began to fall into disrepair, eventually to be replaced by a freeway system that disproportionately affected diverse communities such as Watts. The California Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots called what happened in Watts “not a race riot in the usual sense,” but “an explosion” brought on by a surge in population, poverty, unemployment, ineffective schools, and mistreatment by law enforcement officials.38 The report found that all of these issues were exacerbated by a sense of isolation that was the result of “costly and inadequate transportation from within the south central area to other parts of Los Angeles.”39 The freeways had the further effect of rendering the communities that they bypassed invisible, as views were obstructed by walls or landscaping. Comparing this structuring of space to that of Disneyland’s carefully choreographed environs, historian Eric Avila writes: “This kind of visual screening sustained ignorance of, or indifference to, the surrounding built environment and negated the sense of passing through the city’s landscapes of work and community.”40 The freeways, Avila argues, responded to a fundamentally touristic conception of the city as a series of isolated nodes— Dodger Stadium, Disneyland, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—rather than to the complex realities of daily life.41 Further evidence of Los Angeles’s capacity for self-immolation are the neighborhoods of Chavez Ravine, where Mexican American residents were evicted to make way for Dodger Stadium, and Bunker Hill.42 Once an enclave of the well-to-do, “with more showboat Victorians than anywhere else in Southern California,” by the 1920s Bunker Hill had begun to show its years.43 Many of the once-grand Victorians had been subdivided into rooming houses and were subsequently occupied by immigrants and the elderly. Although the neighborhood’s problems were not so different from those of nearby Pico-Union, where Ruppersberg staged Al’s Café, Bunker Hill, situated Express Yourself

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on a hilltop in downtown Los Angeles, had the misfortune of being “dangerously conspicuous.”44 Viewed as “a social and physical impediment to the commercial expansion of the prosperous and burgeoning central business district,” the neighborhood became a central focus of redevelopment efforts, eventually resulting in the destruction or removal of the neighborhood’s homes.45 Ruppersberg recalls: “I used to go over there after school and just scrounge, and take anything that was available because nobody cared. . . . I would put the top down and go over there after school and the cranes would be wrecking one half of the building and I would be on the other, picking up anything I could because they just left everything and ground it up.” He concludes: “If they’d left it there and restored it and kept it going as a neighborhood it would be hard to beat, but that’s not L.A. style.”46 Art historian Cécile Whiting has described the landscape paintings of Los Angeles artist Llyn Foulkes—whose sources are vernacular photographs like the ones on the jacket of the Al’s Café menu—as representations of sublime nature, but “only as Los Angeles’s memory of a lost past.”47 Ruppersberg dispenses with the sublime altogether, focusing instead on nature’s humbler manifestations—rocks, branches, leaves, and twigs. Their presence in his café attests both to nature’s continued survival in the face of overpopulation and industrialization, and to its vulnerability, the possibility of its imminent erasure, or consumption. Constructed from fittings scrounged from the abandoned restaurants of Pacific Ocean Park and located in “a nowhere neighborhood” just west of the ruins of Bunker Hill, Al’s Café also inscribed a different kind of erasure: that of the built environment of Los Angeles. “Fossiles [sic] are extra on all meals,” the menu of Al’s Café states, evoking the prehistoric fossils captured by the La Brea Tar Pits in Hancock Park, Los Angeles’s original oil field. Many of the dishes that the menu advertises suggest the fruits of an excavation. “Al’s Burger— Sky, Land and Water” consists of two glass vials resting on a bed of dirt (Plate 12.3). The vials, which presumably contain the sky and water of the dish’s title (a reference, perhaps, to Marcel Duchamp’s 50 cc of Paris Air of 1919), resemble those used by archaeologists to store samples. That Ruppersberg routinely sources many of his materials 220 Eating Out

from his own prodigious collection of ephemera only enhances the identification of this body of work—which extends from the dishes to the café itself—with an archaeological mode of inquiry. Allegorical themes emerge from this “excavation”: destruction and regeneration, nature and artifice. These binaries characterize Los Angeles itself. As we have seen, its Arcadian image has always been countenanced by a dark underbelly, the noir side of the “sunshine and noir” formulation.

America, Only More So Al’s Café embodied California’s many contradictions, but also its compelling ordinariness. On its opening night, Terry Allen performed the country tune Gonna California, whose narrator sings about going to California to “change my luck” and “drink away my heartache to the Hollywood glow.” The lyrics are self-consciously clichéd, but the story itself is not, as legions of Americans, especially mid- and southwesterners, made precisely the journey Allen describes in the middle decades of the century. Allen, who hales from Lubbock, Texas, is among them. Ruppersberg describes Los Angeles as “just a conglomeration of small towns from the Midwest, with Hollywood laid over top of it.”48 His own midwestern roots are deep: “I come from a historical family. My relatives settled the town I grew up in [Brecksville, Ohio]. My mother was a part of that . . . she was a D.A.R. [Daughter of the American Revolution] So that kind of history was always embedded in our growing up; the fact that this little town, we had been there for 200 years.”49 The experiences and tastes of newcomers were felt deeply in California, which exerted a strong influence over the rest of the country in turn. It consistently ranked as the place Americans would most like to live and vacation during the late 1950s and early 1960s.50 In fact, many Americans did live there; in 1962, California became the most populous state in the nation. The California lifestyle, defined as much by precocious suburbanization as by Hollywood glamour and surf culture, was disseminated to the rest of the country through magazines, music, and movies. In 1959, writer and conservationist Wallace Stegner wrote that the West Coast was “not a region, but the mainstream, America only more so”: Express Yourself

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ethnically we are more mixed even than the eastern seaboard cities; in a prosperous country, we are more prosperous than most; in an urban country, more urban than most; in a gadget-happy country, more addicted to gadgets; in a mobile country, more mobile; in a tasteless country, more tasteless; in an optimistic society, more optimistic; in an anxious society, more anxious.51

To the question of whether the region contributed to national culture, Stegner’s response was emphatic: “We are the national culture, at its most energetic end.”52 To put it another way, the West Coast, and California in particular, is “exorbitantly familiar.” California was “America only more so” with respect to the Vietnam War as well. Los Angeles “hosted the largest defense aerospace and electronics complex in the world,” with “hundreds of thousands . . . employed in the production of bombers, missiles, surveillance satellites, and the like.”53 Moreover, it was the last stop for many soldiers en route to Vietnam. California was a fulcrum for antiwar activism and counterculture, but also for grassroots conservatism, as evidenced by the election of Ronald Reagan as governor in 1966.54 In fact, the imposition of the latter ethos over the former precipitated the demise of Al’s Café: suspicious of the long-haired types who were converging on 1913 West 6th Street, plain-clothes LAPD officers became occasional patrons, resulting in the closure of the café for failure to obtain a license to serve alcohol. The binaries that Al’s Café invoked—destruction/regeneration, nature/artifice—were defining themes of the Vietnam War, whose devastation gave the lie to the illusion, widely promoted since the end of World War II, that the possession and display of power were sufficient to keep the country out of war.55 As Cold War anxieties about communism shaded into the so-called credibility gap—the widely held belief that “the Administration does not tell the truth, that it has misled the American people on the war in Vietnam, and other vital issues”—there emerged a more generalized and pervasive distrust of authority.56 Ruppersberg’s archive of vernacular objects and images represent the almost alchemical transmutation of America’s postwar affluence and anxieties into culture. His cunning combinations of objects at Al’s Café draw out these themes, demonstrating the ways

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in which the artifacts of popular culture can be made to speak for, as well as to, consumers. In The Fall of Public Man, Richard Sennett argues that the modern pursuit of individual authenticity has come at the price of effective public expression: “In a society with a strong public life there should be affinities between the domains of the stage and street; there should be something comparable in the expressive experience crowds have had in these two realms. As public life declines, these affinities erode.”57 Al’s Café commingled the domains of the stage and the street, thereby compelling the affinity that is, in Sennett’s estimation, the sign of a strong public sphere. To enter into Al’s Café was, in a sense, to play at being a customer. Following Diderot’s “The Paradox of Acting,” in which the philosopher pronounces the superiority of a practiced fiction over spontaneous emotion, Sennett contends that “the more natural the expression between two people, the less reliably expressive they will be.”58 Ruppersberg’s highly theatrical, “exorbitantly familiar” café ensured that everyone who entered knew her role, and was therefore capable both of expressing herself and of being understood. In this respect, Al’s Café was a counterweight to the credibility gap that characterized most Americans’ relationships to institutional authority at that time.

Once Upon a Time in Los Angeles In 2010, Ruppersberg produced a work entitled Once Upon a Time in Southern California (LA in the 70s) (Plate 12.4). The work is comprised of five horizontal panels that intersperse black-and-white photographs of various mom-and-pop restaurants with newspaper clippings. The clippings are arranged sequentially, but certain lines repeat from one to the next, creating a stuttering effect. Together, they reproduce a 1979 Los Angeles Times article entitled “Ready for Diners, Never Opens: Restaurant Feeds Curiosity.”59 Penned by David Larsen, the article tells the story of “a neighborhood legend,” the Original Spanish Kitchen, a once-popular eatery on West Beverly Boulevard that opened in 1938 and closed its doors ­twenty-three years later. It had been closed ever since, “sitting there all dark and dusty, chairs inverted neatly on the

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tables, piles of plates awaiting the diners who never come.” The proprietor’s widow was reportedly leading a hermit’s life above the restaurant; one neighbor remarked that “Her skin looks like that of somebody who hasn’t been out in the sun for years.” As the story unfolds, a community emerges around this enigmatic figure: a recent graduate of the Hebrew Academy next door had often witnessed the old lady taking out her trash; the manager of a music store relates that in earlier years a white-haired woman was sometimes seen peering through the front door of the restaurant from the sidewalk; the thrift-store employee across the street reported that somebody took food to her every day (“All we see is a hand at the door”). All the while, Larsen writes, “in ghostlike silence, a tableau sits as it has, frozen in time. . . . The blinds are raised, and everything inside is all there for anyone to view. For nearly 18 years now people have been doing just that. The longest playing show in town.” In contrast to the photos that accompany the Los Angeles Times article—a close-up of the building façade and an interior view of the restaurant—the photographs that Ruppersberg includes in Once Upon a Time in Southern California (LA in the 70s) are views from across the street or from inside a car. By stressing the perspective of the passerby or the neighbor, this work seems to suggest that a community, like the one described in the article, surrounds each of these locations. The community that Larsen describes is distinguished by the “mystery restaurant” at its core, which functions as a dramatic locus. Although Larsen emphasizes the stage-like quality of the deserted restaurant, even evoking a raised theater curtain (“The blinds are raised”), it is in fact the surrounding community, and not the restaurant, that is the true subject of his story, its curiosity sustaining “the longest playing show in town.” Al’s Café might be viewed in parallel terms, as the dramatic locus around which its viewers/patrons congregated, an expressive community capable of nourishing itself.

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Chapter 13

Ways of Eating Tradition, Innovation, and the Production of Community in Food-Based Art Laurie Beth Clark

and Michael Peterson

On November 8, 2006, the New York Times published a “revolutionary” new technique for baking bread, developed by Jim Lahey at the Sullivan Street Bakery.1 The “no-knead” technique involves quickly mixing a very moist dough with a small amount of yeast, and letting yeast and time do the work of developing the bread’s gluten. In most versions, the wet dough is almost poured into a preheated cast-iron pot and baked with the cover on to capture the steam released by the moist dough, producing a puffy interior and a very crisp crust. This was widely acclaimed as revolutionary and hailed as the first advance in bread making in hundreds of years.2 The coming together of a traditional practice with an innovative technique was what made this recipe so sensational. It is a good example of the ways that the traditional and the avant-garde are not distinct but rather mutually defining, intertwined practices. In this essay, we are considering what we can learn about food by looking at it through the binary of the traditional and the avantgarde, as well as what we can learn about those two ideas by looking at them through the lens of food. We’re particularly curious about how these two different sensibilities are deployed in performance art, but we are also interested in the ways these approaches permeate other

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food c­ ultures. We’ll consider food in everyday life, in new gastronomy, and in performances, both art world and theatrical, with our examples influenced by our own experiences and practices as artists, primarily in a United States cultural context. We have a special focus on the ways that food is used to create and/or invoke community, which we show to be a complicating factor in our understanding of the dyad of the avant-garde and the traditional. We will elaborate several dimensions of the construction of food as either “traditional” or “avant-garde,” with an emphasis on the subject of communal dining—eating together. How is food deployed to invoke tradition? How is food constructed as traditional? What is meant when food is interpreted as “avant-garde” (whether using that term or not)? In a previous essay on the use of food in social practice art, we argued that often the symbolic role of food is overemphasized, at the expense of what food does.3 We assessed “the problematic relation of food and generosity” and in particular the common assumption that food and feeding signify generosity when food is actually often a tool for constructing more specific and nuanced relationships. We argued that food is not inherently tied to generosity and that the use of food in relational art is not necessarily a sign of “generous” relations. Further, we argued against the implication that a generous relationship, or a sociality of hospitality, is necessarily not a “critical” one. Here, we build on this fundamental clarification or opening up of the meaning of food and feeding and explore multiple meanings of food as it is constructed and interpreted. When we use the term traditional in this context, we mean to invoke conventional behaviors, such as the bourgeois Western practice of dining together, whether as a nuclear family on a daily basis and/or as an extended family (broadly construed to include one’s social network) on holidays. Under this heading, we might consider foods that are familiar (family recipes, national cuisines) and that are generally considered comforting. But we also want to attend to what we will call “neo-traditional” dining. This includes a DIY embrace of “the good old ways,” but also haute cuisine’s recent fixation on the preparation of expensive versions of “comfort foods” and a trendy embrace of formerly disparaged cuts of meat (sometimes known as “nose-to-tail” cuisine).4 The slow food movement champions the political merit of 226 Eating Out

traditional values of local produce and farm-to-table consumption. While cultures associate traditional foodways with both conservative and progressive values, tradition typically performs a resistance to change and a celebration of repetition. Although Levi-Strauss’s nature-culture distinction between “the raw and the cooked” can seem simplistic, we can still note some ways in which traditional foods, even if intensely cooked in age-old fires, are considered to be closer to their raw ingredients. While industrial food production in the West sought to use industrial and chemical complexity to streamline and simplify the mass production of food, and while traditional modes of food processing, such as sausage making, are still processed foods, there is a general alignment of food tradition with simplicity, and of avant-garde food innovation with complexity (not withstanding the many labor-intensive traditional dishes developed through reliance on unpaid domestic labor). Coming back to our opening example, in the West probably the food most closely associated with tradition is bread. There are thousands of breads traditional to specific nations and cultures. Bread in Christianity is symbolically associated with Christ’s body. And it is not only in Christianity that bread is seen as archetypally, and fundamentally, a metonym of the body. Bread is the food “of the people” and is associated with both populist social movements and with the reduction of the “body politic” to a consumer of bread and circuses. Except for its association with political pandering, bread is wholly wrapped up in a “virtuous” traditionalism; bread is rarely constructed as “backward” or conservative. Many types of bread are also celebrated for their simplicity and purity, from sourdoughs to old-world pizza recipes; there are certainly complicated breads, but even those complexities of preparation tend to be about the aggregation of repetitive simple labor, such as the careful layering of croissant or filo doughs. Perhaps the fundamental aura of bread means we should not be surprised that bread in the West is a particularly resonant food in the construction of community. When, in a recent performance, we polled a group of activist artists for recipes associated with resistance and activism, bread was the most common response.5 Our collective cookbook featured recipes for challah, pan de sal, Indian fry bread, cornbread, tortillas, and the aforementioned recipe for no-knead bread.

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Bread manages to have both universal and local dimensions, often concurrently, marking the communality of eating through shared sustenance (things you share that nourish you) and through cultural differentiation (distinctive food communities). “Breaking bread” is an archetype of eating together, of community, and bread’s importance is more about consistency, continuity, and improvement over time than about the radically new. Even the no-knead bread technique is notable primarily for applying a modern incentive—convenience—to a slow traditional food, and subsequent variations on the recipe have focused on improving the benefits of slowness for flavor and texture (principally by extending the dough’s resting time, or by adding ingredients such as beer that could be said to “contain” time). Good bread almost always means patience, tradition, and memory; rather than “arty,” really good bread is usually “artisanal,” which is an expression of cultivated tradition. By contrast, the avant-garde embraces change, radical newness, and perpetual innovation. We use the term “avant-garde” in this context not in a historical sense but in an aesthetic and experiential one.6 We use avant-garde to refer to food used in ways that are unfamiliar, discomforting, and/or alienating (in the Brechtian sense). We invoke with this term food performances, whether in restaurant or art contexts, that use new techniques (and sometimes new technologies) to render familiar dishes unfamiliar, to create recipes for foods that have never been seen before, and that draw attention to the problematics of food itself. In this last sense, even the politicization of food may be done as an avant-garde practice, when it denaturalizes the act of eating.7 But we may also think here of relatively benign alienations that are celebrated in the “new gastronomy” or “molecular cuisine.” This brings us to the important and perhaps obvious point that tradition is not static, but rather is preserved by perpetual renewal through rehabitation. From a postmodern perspective, neither the traditional nor the avant-garde are more contemporary. Rather they are to be understood as contemporaneous, mutually defining ways of being/eating that are differentially deployed in conjunction. It is important to remember that the avant-garde in art is now a long-­ established tradition and a highly conventional mode of behavior. While the avant-gardes of various cultural spheres are now established 228 Eating Out

traditions of practice, it is nonetheless true that the meanings associated with this term continue to suggest relentless experimentation, inverted expectations, innovation in food choice and preparation method, trendiness, cutting-edge invention, as well as embrace of discomfort in performance (to the point of rudeness), violating taboos, and an apparent indifference to the desires of the audience. A popular cultural example of unfamiliar eating is the genre of “food challenges” on the television show Survivor (and other reality TV shows) where contestants compete by eating increasingly “revolting“ dishes: insects, arachnids, animals in a fetal state, highly odoriferous fermented products. That these foods are in fact often the traditional meals of the nations hosting the episodes demonstrates the highly contextual definitions of these terms. For example, in the afterword to her memoir about cooking and eating in China, Fuschia Dunlop realizes that while she ate caterpillars without a second thought in China, she found them repellent when one appeared in her spinach back in England.8 In performance art, one of the ways that food is denaturalized is by not being eaten. When Karen Finley covers her body with egg and chocolate, we can understand this as a paradigmatically avantgarde gesture, in that it is intended to intervene in the audience’s consumption of Finley’s nudity. Food here is being used not to entice or seduce but to distance and alienate (not in the Brechtian sense). Similarly, when Bobby Baker hurls roast beef, chutney, brandy, ­treacle, sugar, eggs, beer, flour, milk, currants, fish pie, and yogurt onto a sheet in Drawing on a Mother’s Experience, we can also call this an avantgarde use of food. Foods intended to nourish are violently displaced by the performance context into representations of emotional trauma. Likewise, in Megan Katz’s performance, when audience members watch others eat their own favorite foods while they themselves go hungry, Katz is using food as signifier of unfulfilled desire that is extremely uncomfortable for all concerned. But food in performance can be eaten and still be avant-garde. Barbara Smith’s Ritual Meal (1969) medicalized the act of eating and produced alienation and unease in the attendees. Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett quotes Jenny Klein’s description of wine served in test tubes that created contextual associations with blood

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for red wine or urine for white and could never be put down without spilling. “The eating utensils were surgical instruments. Meat had to be cut with scalpels . . . Pureed fruit was served in plasma bottles.”9 Projections of digestive and circulatory processes covered the walls and ceiling. The soundtrack of a beating heart filled the house and resonated through bodies, creating in the sixteen dinner guests a feeling of anxiety. Smith’s piece is avant-garde in its seemingly hostile attitude toward its audience, but it also makes clear that food might function formally and as a relatively abstract medium. While avantgarde artists of the time frequently created alternative communities as part of their work, Ritual Meal furthers a different, less welcoming, avant-garde tradition; Smith replied to a question about how hospitality figures in her work by saying, “Not really in a party-giving sense. The great humor and liberation of the 1960s was that any material whatsoever could be the medium for artmaking: wind, food, water, detritus, etc. Food could be used as paint and as important symbol, as a startling contrary experience and as cosmic exploration [. . .] or ritual ceremony.”10 In a much more lighthearted—and community friendly—project, Jeannine Shinoda crafts flip books from bologna (Plate 13.1). Working in a meat science laboratory on the campus of the University of Wisconsin, Shinoda has devised a system for embedding words and/ or images within loaves of processed meat. The texts she embeds are revealed as the loaves are sliced. Shinoda then serves the slices on white bread with mustard, lettuce, and cheese, dropping the unexpected slice into the retro trappings of a traditional sandwich. Here, strangeness is brought to food visually in a way that is comic rather than threatening, and the homey, comfort-food quality of the unique food artwork gently encourages a consideration of what food is and how it is produced; when the word PURE or the word BALONEY slowly reveals itself in slices of meat, Shinoda balances the associations of sausage making (unsanitary conditions and mysterious ingredients) with her meticulous performance of cleanliness and her scrupulous attention to her recipes. In new gastronomy, avant-garde status cannot be achieved through disgust. One of the limits is that the meal needs to be delicious as well as innovative; these meals just cost too much not to be 230 Eating Out

tasty. It’s quite common for restaurants to use beauty, whimsy, and cleverness to distinguish avant-garde meals from traditional ones. But defamiliarization remains an option, and one of the most widespread techniques for making a familiar food new is to deconstruct it. Contextually, this may be a transposition from a chef ’s strategy of trying to reverse-engineer a dish by taking it down to its identifiable components, but for scholars trained in critical theory, this term has an additional meaning.11 “Deconstruction” as a term met a similar fate in food marketing as it did in literary criticism, perishing from being left out on the counter too long. But there was a period in the United States, from about the mid-1990s, when the most obvious avant-garde food gesture seemed to be to take any traditionally composed dish and pull its components apart into high-end tastes. Since 2011, chef Grant Achatz at NEXT restaurant in Chicago has offered thematic dinners that pay homage to various traditional cuisines while innovating on these forms. Interestingly, NEXT has emphasized the theatrical framework of their meals by selling fixed-priced season tickets for events rather than allowing diners to reserve meals or select dishes—­reconstructing the menu as script, while many of the dishes are deconstructed to their component ingredients. For example, in 2014, for their dinner reenvisioning Chinese diasporic cuisine, the most common ways that traditional Chinese dishes were made modern was by taking them down to their component pieces, from dehydrated and grilled bites of beef and broccoli presented side by side to “dragon’s hair” rolled candy presented in mounds alongside multiple filling options. The word deconstruct itself has faded as a food fad, but NEXT demonstrates that deconstructing is still one of the major gestures of food avant-gardism. If critical deconstruction sought to reveal the metaphysical presence that gave meaning to seemingly material certainties, what does deconstructive cuisine reveal? Ironically, it might be that the materiality of human hunger underwrites even the refined appetites that spend fortunes consuming foams, froths, and flash-frozen confections made from traditionally simple ingredients. What good food deconstructions often offer is the “heart” of the substance, a pure and laboriously simple flavor. This connects such meal components to the meat-based

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“reductions” that were the original product driving the founding of the institution of restaurants in France, and it’s worth noting that the goal of this reduction-to-essence was nutritive and medicinal before it was aesthetic and gestural.12 Deconstruction in the culinary sense prioritizes component parts over the communal whole. Symbolically, then, the dishes in any new gastronomic context favor autonomy over community. But this symbolic statement of autonomy may be more than overridden by the hegemonic menu structures. Restaurants like NEXT eliminate choice from the menu almost entirely, with servers as representatives of the chef telling you what to eat and when and how to eat it; even dietary restrictions are accommodated more by avoidance than by substitution. As a result, all diners at this type of restaurant on a particular night are in fact going to eat the same meal, taking us back to an era of s­ ingle-channel television or set banquet service. This could seem related to the fad in recent decades for high-end dining to be arranged at shared (communal) tables, but NEXT’s operational efficiency depends on the opposite—on staggered seatings of known quantities of guests. On the other hand, our few experiences of actually eating at NEXT all included a great deal of subtle and outright connection with previous tables; you might converse with diners on one side about what was coming up, if they are ahead of you in service, but you might also compare notes with diners “behind” you about dishes you’ve already had that they are just now experiencing. This highlights the way that even the fanciest and most avant-garde restaurant experiences create not simply isolated individual consumer-spectators, but intra-connected partaker-audiences whose experiences are in a significant sense shared and mutually dependent. But even if community is part of this way of eating, the rarefied cuisine of deconstructive dining does raise the question of whether avant-garde food, or highly innovative or experimental food, is ultimately the province of the elite and the wealthy. In a majority of situations this is no doubt true; it is the rich who have the time and money to pursue the new and the shocking, while those who work to support themselves must remain closer to food, in one Marxist sense, as the “reproduction of labor.”13 But in many contexts, food is the occasion for experimentation and innovation even for those of lesser means. 232 Eating Out

In the rural South of Michael’s childhood, church groups and community organizations routinely produced and circulated cookbooks that are both traditional and celebrate their members’ innovative experiments. Our own cookbook for Progressive Dinner was modeled on these “ladies’ auxiliary” cookbooks. Other contexts also provide opportunities for vernacular innovation, even if the norms of such community might also punish deviance. And there are food communities not dominated by the wealthy where the dynamic interplay of tradition and innovation is central to their culture. For example, the United States home beer-making community includes brewers from a range of class positionings, and while “craft brewing” can have an elitist or “hipster” connotation in some contexts, in many others it is a working person’s (usually working-man’s) hobby. Brewing is a highly traditional practice, with time-honored taxonomies of beer styles and techniques, but the profusion of both commercial small-scale breweries and of serious homebrewers has meant that experimentation—and sometimes extreme applications of bitterness, sourness, or unusual additives—has become a relatively democratized practice, and truly weird beers are celebrated as well as sometimes derided. Comparing two series of beer-based performance artworks is instructive of the variety in how traditional and avant-garde strategies play out in social artworks. While the title of Tom Marioni’s Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art suggests that he embraces Allan Kaprow’s credo of life/art, Marioni’s avant-garde roots emerge in the elaborate rules and restrictions he placed on the event itself, in an almost antagonistic tone reminiscent of ­manifesto-prone avant-gardists such as the Futurists. The artistic control Marioni asserted over the nature and structure of the events function to maintain his status as artist and his claims of authorship, and they contrast productively with the collaborative and antiauthorial ethos of many younger artists making food events. Drinking Beer with Friends is a canonical relational artwork—frequently cited and even reenacted with varying degrees of fidelity—but it is rarely examined in critical detail. So celebrated is this piece that Marioni nominates himself as a leader in social art making, writing: “This was a social artwork. I am

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the author of this idea. In the ’90s the idea of social interaction in an art context became an art movement.”14 This possessive tone is found also in the list of rules that structure subsequent iterations of the project in Marioni’s salon titled Society of Independent Artists (Marioni has been “dining out,” so to speak, on this work for his entire career). As quoted in artist Kathan Brown’s memoir, the rules include: The management reserves the right to refuse service to anyone who doesn’t know where they are or what is going on. People bring their own drinks. No drinking from beer bottle except in character. Bartenders can invite up to 3 guests. Guests do not invite guests without checking with Tom. No theater people except famous movie stars. No art students except those who can pass as professionals. No art collectors except in disguise. People should sign guest book at the bar. Hours 5 to 8 PM, except on special occasions.

Brown continues: “I asked Tom to explain the ones that start with no. What does drinking ‘in character’ from a beer bottle mean? ‘A cowboy would never drink out of a glass,’ he replied. Why not theater people? ‘Because they are too theatrical.’ What would be a disguise appropriate for art collectors? ‘That they don’t announce they are art collectors.’”15 The value of this example is not that Marioni is somehow “ungenerous” and therefore more “critical” than some similar social projects, but rather that community is a social relation—which means that it is always a negotiation. We consider Drinking Beer with Friends to be avant-garde because of its adoption of a defiant, almost authoritarian attitude toward participants as the price of admission to the art clubhouse. Marioni’s humorous (but enforced) rules make explicit that sociability and community are social constructions. In the craft beer journal Mash Tun, Bryce Dwyer writes a sophisticated account of beer-based art, putting Marioni’s project in the context of the histories of the actual beer he has served (Anchor Steam, later Pacifico) and contrasting it with Eric Steen’s Beers Made by Walking (2011, ongoing). Steen invites brewers and others to go on 234 Eating Out

nature hikes focused on watershed issues and local plant life, then produces beers inspired by that experience to be shared with the public. As Dwyer writes: “Beer primarily serves Marioni as a readymade product, a convenient tool used to lubricate social encounters. But for Steen, it is also a well-crafted substance with a specific history that possesses the remarkable power to both loose people up and bond them together.”16 While Steen’s work may seem both more complexly social and more “generous” than Marioni’s (and reasonable critics might prefer either work over the other), what’s important here is that the form of community structured by each is the works’ artistic form and medium as well. While a certain critical antagonism is key to Marioni’s construction of the community he is after, so too Steen’s socially cooperative art brewing is impossible to make or understand without attending to the construction of community it relies on. It is easy to see how communitarian values of eating, the ways in which dining (or drinking) together is presumed to create community, are aligned with traditional values. In the United States, eating together has served at times as a symbol of so-called traditional family values, but communal—community—eating is also a staple of liberal and progressive discourses about society. In the particular mythology of the “bread line” or the soup kitchens of the Great Depression is an image of community feeding, of social welfare or of mutual aid. More difficult to imagine is an avant-garde communitarianism, most especially because avant-garde thinking is often associated with individualism, independent thinking, and solitary geniuses. (It is worth stressing that this is a narrow depiction of the avant-garde, and ignores numerous important attempts to form alternative communities as avant-garde challenges to the establishment.) Community is the source of the social norms against which the avant-garde presumably revolts, and so the avant-garde gesture “Épater la bourgeoisie” must target a presumed community that it rejects. For this reason, social practice art presents an interesting challenge to the avant-garde/traditional dialectic, as its embrace of sociality and conviviality seems to be the “next big thing” for the last couple of decades. It seems likely that consumer capitalism has reshaped the ground on which avant-gardism marches; at least in the United States the context of materialism, consumerism, and persistent modern alienation mean that communitarian gestures (perhaps

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especially those involving “real” food) maneuver around the cultural opposition by looking backward to once conventional practices. Emblematic of this problem is the deepest rift in the theorization of relational or social practice art, the debates between Claire Bishop and Grant Kester, where Bishop aligns herself with the antagonism central to modern art. And she seems to make food-based performance the scapegoat of her argument, dismissing most relational performance as “curry for refugees.” Her foil in the debate, Grant Kester, champions the resurgence of conviviality as a form of art and celebrates sociality in performance (including many that are food based) as a progressive value—interestingly positioned as both traditional and avant-garde.17 As we think about the invocation and deployment of community in contemporary food-based performances, it is important to attend to the heterogeneity of the term. Far from monolithic in conception, community may be engaged citationally, heterotopically, provisionally, or instrumentally. To cite community is to stage an instance of it. Think of the most conventional theatrical events—the family that dines together (whether in Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters or Richard Greenberg’s The Assembled Parties) is a fictional community, a picture of a community, rather than an actual one. Citational community demonstrates a relationship between characters rather than enabling a relationship between persons. It refers to communities that exist elsewhere than here. Even highly avant-garde performances stage citational communities, refering to an idea or history of community. An example of this would be the tableaux in Richard Gough’s Last Supper series, which provocatively gesture toward rather than actually engender conviviality. The Last Suppers (staged in Amsterdam, Florence, Aberystwyth, and Madison) explore the cultural significance of food through visions of eating and edible artworks. Moving through a complexly syncopated maze of perfomative scenes, audience members both saw and were seen in formations that suggested sociability, but these events were structured as resonant “snapshots” that act on the imagination and in memory rather than doing their work interpersonally. The Last Suppers deliberately cited (and contradicted) the idea of community rather than producing it. 236 Eating Out

Considering the table as a kind of stage might suggest a focus on elaborate spectacle, but to consider dining as staging can also prompt us to consider what else can be “rehearsed” over a meal. Heterotopic communities are those that can exist only in the alternate world of the performance and do not carry beyond its boundaries (such performances might also be called hypothetical). For example, there is a heterotopic community constructed, albeit fleetingly, in Douglas Rosenberg’s Community/Social, created for the opening of the Forest Art exhibition outdoors in a state forest in the northwoods of Wisconsin (Plate 13.2). Musicians, dancers, and lots of pie were key ingredients. As Rosenberg describes it: This project appeared virtually unannounced [. . .] at a very public beach at the edge of the forest. As the pie was served and the music began, local people and families who were camping at the beach were drawn to the site and soon began dancing and enjoying the locally made fruit pies. The participation of so many non-artists from the area was a lovely surprise. I made a point never to mention art in any conversations I had and only to refer to the event as a “social.” In the end that is what it became.18

Rosenberg’s project carries symbolic meaning, but for the artist the occasion has a certain self-sufficiency, located in the construction of a temporary aestheticized community. In our earlier essay on the role of food in performance, we might have cited this work as exemplary of food “occasioning” an artwork, using food “and especially the host-guest relation, as a context, a starting point, or even an excuse for exploring other dimensions of social relations.”19 Here community is both the role and meaning of the food and music, and the project’s “artness” was deliberately subsumed by its sociality. That community is heterotopic, existing only because of the performance frame and dispersing when the performance ends; campers return to their individual tent sites and nuclear family grouping without even an exchange of phone numbers. The value of this temporary bond, however, is in its capacity to model alternative social relations. Provisional community is the form most often invoked in relational performance. It acts in the real world as though it is the first

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instance of a real relationship among players that could potentially become a long-term relationship (that potential often remains conceptual, implied by a one-off enactment of community). Much relational performance falls under this heading, including the best-known performances of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s curry meals in galleries. Such events allow participants to gather for the purposes of developing bonds that have the potential to exceed the performative frame. In fact, the events go out of their way to reduce or eliminate their performative matrix and to blur the boundaries into the real world. Beginning in 2006, Australian artist Mick Douglas collaborated with the Cultural Transports Collective in Melbourne to stage a series of “Ride-on-Dinners” served at locations across the city to participants on bicycles (Plate 13.3). The project reimagines transport and food through the creation of temporary mobile communities of eating in “temporary swarms.” The published “recipe” for staging your own bicycle-based exploratory urban dinner announces as the first of its suggestions “self-authorising generosity”: Your desire and the hunger of fellow riders is all that is needed. You will be part of a temporary swarm of individuals each taking responsibility for your own actions. Ring your bell as you freewheel past centralised authorities and concerns with permissions and permits. Join the gift economy. Give what you want to give.20

While the anarchist spirit of these rolling community dinners might align with an avant-garde antiestablishment spirit, the work deploys constructions of community—the household visit, the bike ride, the neighborhood—in ways that position tradition’s convivencia against central authority, industrial food, and petroleum-fueled transport. Like much of contemporary art and protest in this age of globalization, we can find in this work a feeling of nostalgia for traditions of togetherness combined with innovative direct actions that stand opposed to conformity. Our own work as Spatula&Barcode often relies on the provisional communities formed around shared meals. Perhaps the clearest example of this are the picnic baskets of ¿Quién puede convencer 238 Eating Out

al mar para que sea razonable? in Maldonado, Uruguay, which we proffered to heighten the bond between artists and scientists we hoped would form long-term collaborative relationships, but which were available as a simple pleasurable social moment with no further outcome demanded. Arguably, the international Internet meals we organize also work this way, with participants bonding over identical (or matching) snacks consumed simultaneously at a great distance in projects titled Wish You Were Here, In/of the City, and the aforementioned Progressive Dinner. All these projects created provisional communities of colleagues, using food to bridge vast distances. Most often the participants are glad to have met but occasionally they lead to longer friendships and working relationships. Finally, instrumental community, the most actual of the relations in our continuum, refers to works structured so that the performance itself is being used to leverage long-term changes in the social relations among constituents. In contrast to the extremely well known provisional communities that Tiravanija has created in galleries, The Farm, his ongoing project in rural Thailand, has created an actual “sustainable” community where artists live and work.21 Theaster Gates’s project, Soul Food Pavilion, provides ongoing opportunities for members of the Dorchester Projects neighborhood to form new social bonds over traditional soul food meals. There is another kind of community that emerges in performance making (whether food is involved or not), which is the community of shared labor, a sense of camaraderie that can be enhanced by intensity and stress. It is analogous to the sociality of some restaurant kitchens. In spite of rigid hierarchies, restaurant kitchens can forge intense bonds. In the best situations, the warmth of shared labor is shared with diners. We had this experience at Fat Rice in Chicago, where staff in the open kitchen cheerfully sing out “86” followed by the names of the dishes they have run out of,22 and at the tiny restaurant Koya, in London’s Soho, where we sat inside the kitchen with a restaurant regular and tasted virtually every dish on the menu, and at many Japanese restaurants around the world where everyone one stops work to greet customers’ arrivals and departures in unison. These sorts of experiences inform our own ongoing series of “Cooking with . . .” projects, which capitalize on the camaraderie of the kitchen through

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the ­performance of cooking (rather than eating). The sociality of food preparation most often relies on proximity, but in 2014, we also “cooked with” Xin Wang, though she was in a gallery in Shanghai and we were in kitchen in Wisconsin. The complicated pleasures and pressures of intercultural communication and the production of unfamiliar recipes in front of a gallery audience gave this event a condensed version of the kinds of intimate social relations that can be formed in working restaurant kitchens. Of course, just as in the theater a production can create a fictional sense of ensemble for the benefit of an audience, so in food settings we should recognize the varieties of affective labor that can go into producing the feeling of a food workplace as a communal space. And almost all commercial performances of food community in the United States are underwritten by the often much more alienated and much less remunerated labor of dishwashers and prep cooks. Still, we wouldn’t throw out the aesthetic/social value of what we would call “ensemble aesthetics,” and so we want to value even if we also deconstruct the temporary food communitas achieved by certain kinds of commercial dining. The fact that money changes hands, or that the eaters turn over several times a shift, doesn’t prevent such temporary feelings of community from having at least an aesthetic value. As a contrasting example, we might consider the “front” put on by charitable food providers. In Erving Goffman’s sense of the term, a “front” is the inevitable presentation that one organization offers to a group of people with which it interacts, usually hiding or at least not foregrounding the work that goes on in the “back” of such a situation as a soup kitchen or other free meal provider.23 Such considerations are also informed by the larger biopolitical context of food itself, which is far from a benign medium for the working of avant-garde and traditional aesthetics. Even less overtly violent elements of our societies’ food policies, from agricultural legislation to food stamps to safety inspections, should not necessarily be viewed as essentially or even primarily benign social acts, or motivated by communitarian feelings. Extreme examples of feeding that means the very opposite of community can be found in the use of diet control as a key element in cruel interrogation regimes, and in the use of force-­ feeding apparatus in combination with restraint chairs for prisoners 240 Eating Out

on hunger strikes, whether in Guantanamo Bay or in “supermax” prisons around the country. For a historical example, recall the force-­ feeding of suffragettes on hunger strikes, which enacted the very lack of citizen status they were protesting. While we’d rather not call force feeding “avant-garde,” the very discomfort of doing so reminds us of the often-neglected military history of the term. Patrick Anderson has written thoughtfully about both the political gesture of the tradition of hunger strike and the aesthetic embrace of this action by avant-garde artists; his book So Much Wasted is particularly valuable for calling attention to the way performances of starvation are struggles over individual agency and communal identity.24 We should also not lose sight of the tremendous violences that can be involved in making traditional foods exotic, as populations are forcibly displaced from their homelands. Historically we need only think of the foodways we now commonly enjoy that were the results of African, Jewish, and Irish diasporas; those foods exist in their contemporary forms in part because of slavery, pogrom, and famine. The violence of embracing cuisines of conflict was recently highlighted by the temporary closure due to “credible” death threats against Conflict Kitchen, the Pittsburgh restaurant that for five years has served the foods of countries with which the United States is in conflict: Iran, Afganistan, Venezuela, North Korea, Palestine. Michael Rakowitz has attended to the violence of displacement in multiple food-based projects, including Enemy Kitchen (2004) and Return (2004). Most recently, he has been cooking masgouf, a traditional Iraqi dish, using invasive carp in the Great Lakes region in a project called Every Weapon Is a Tool If You Hold It Right. He prepares these meals together with Iraqi refugees and Iraq war veterans to “encourage gathering and communing” (Plate 13.4).25 As eaters, we take as much pleasure in traditional cuisines as we do in innovative menus. Similarly, as artists, we find both avantgarde and traditional strategies useful in developing our food-based projects. Under our collaborative identity as Spatula&Barcode, we’ve made food-centric performances in Canada, Croatia, Germany, the Netherlands, Morocco, the United States, and Uruguay. We’ve sent participants shopping in farmers’ markets, staged a festival of oneto-one performances in coffee shops, cooked dumplings made from

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invasive plants over a camp stove in the forest, and even asked audience members to do the work themselves over charcoal grills and compost heaps. We use traditional food sharing to build an atmosphere of congeniality and generosity and this attitude, in part, defines our work. But while participants may “feel good” when they are fed, our actions have much more specific aims, and food in our pieces is most often used to direct attention or focus investigation, rather than “merely” to nourish our audiences, sometimes with instructions and “rules” as controlling as Marioni’s. In one semiprivate performance we explored varieties of “aesthetic relations” through thirty-two ways of eating melon, some of these cozy, some confrontational. In others, we used food politically to signify national or cultural identity and/or to draw attention to food politics. As Spatula&Barcode, we’re as interested in the denaturalizing strategies of avant-garde performance as we are in renewing traditions. In Grim(m) Essen, produced in Darmstadt, Germany, in 2012, our source materials, the 242 fairy tales written by the Brothers Grimm, could not have been more traditional (Plate 13.5). After comprehensively mining the tales for references to food, we took groups on walks in the forest, staging food-themed tableaux from the tales and sharing the featured foods: field greens from Rapunzel, lentils from Cinderella, chicken from Hansel and Gretel. The opening tableau, which featured some of the gorier elements of the tales, like the deer heart from Snow White, set the frame for making unfamiliar the tales that our audience believe they commanded—as did the inclusion of lesser-known and more bizarre stories like Fitcher’s Bird, where the protagonist disguises herself as a bird using honey and feathers. Our conversations en route about hunger during and following the world wars fit well with the recurring trope in the fairy tales of the daily challenge to put food on the table. If Grim(m) Essen was our most traditionally grounded work, it’s possible that Sensorium (2014) is Spatula&Barcode’s most avant-garde work. In Grim(m) Essen the traditional content and our concern with molding spectators into small ambulatory communities meant that our avant-gardist impulses winked through rather than dominating. In Sensorium we led from all our research and experience into just how nontraditional food and eating could be. The project was 242 Eating Out

constructed as a bespoke dinner for presenters at a conference on embodied knowledge and the importance of all the senses to cultural research. The Spatula&Barcode meal featured dishes based on the sense organs—eyes, ears, tongues, skin, and brains—which gave us ample opportunity to challenge diners’ culinary limits, as well as dishes that stimulated the senses. While a dinner following a symposium is a traditional mechanism for building scholarly community, this meal meant to make learning corporeal and somatic, and emphasized shared experience of strange and strangely combined ingredients. Our pig-brain soup may have been derived from a very traditional Sichuan dish, but the act of serving and eating it was arguably as much in line with the historical avant-garde’s interest in exoticism as a challenge to bourgeois placidity. Looking at the use of food in social practice art calls our attention, again and again, to the construction of communities—however temporary and provisional—in these works. Attention to community as concept and as an artistic medium completely scrambles the facile binary of avant-gardism versus traditionalism. To some extent this binarism overlays the debates about whether and how social practice art should be critical or agonistic, and to that extent we believe that food and community offer a kind of heuristic for reading social practice, one that reveals the importance of shared experience even in some of the most confrontational of artworks, and one that reveals creative criticality within seemingly simple and even heartfelt gestures.



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part V



Not for Art’s Sake

Ethics, Ecology, and Sustainability

Chapter 14

Joseph Beuys Gastrosophical Aesthetics Harald Lemke

Food has long been ignored in Western philosophy. This is quite a strange fact. Should food be something that is of no interest for human life and moral reason? To be sure, one of the central themes of philosophical ethics deals with the “Socratic” question of “how we should live.”1 There is certainly nothing more urgent than the moral question of whether a better way of living is possible than the current one: a lifestyle that, through its insatiable and unequal hunger for resources, is quite literally devouring the very means of its survival. When considered in the context of growing social and environmental problems of food and hunger, the disparity between the rich and the poor and the global importance of the ethical and political relevance of food is even more underscored. This observation is the starting point of food ethics or what I call “gastrosophy.”2 Thus facing the global food crisis, philosophical ethics can be carried over into the gastrosophical approach: is there a better culinary life possible than the one we are currently cultivating? How “well” should we eat, so that our eating culture is good for all, for humanity as a whole and for the future of planet Earth (all nonhuman life)? Since the way we eat is one of the most powerful factors of how humankind interacts with nature, gastrosophy plays a central role in bringing global, social, and environmental ethics into our everyday behavior. The theoretical problem here consists of elaborating a conceptual framework for food ethics that can define “good food” as good for

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all and as common wealth. An increasing number of scientists and activists are searching for answers to this important question.3 To enter the ethical debates about good food from a different ­perspective—in shifting toward art and aesthetics—this paper discusses the work of German artist Joseph Beuys.4 I will particularly focus on his works that artistically express a philosophy of food. The Beuysian art conceptualizes food in a number of ways, three of which are examined in this paper: (1) self-cooking both as an important change maker and as a convivial and creative activity available to everyone everyday; (2) the use of foodstuff as material for artistic work; and (3) the production of food as an essential issue of global economy and politics, particularly with regard to the fundamental link between agriculture and eating culture in terms of ecologically sustainable relations to nature. 

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In portraying Joseph Beuys’s food aesthetics, I seek to present the lesser-known side of this artist as a food ethicist. Despite being a remarkable gastrosopher, Beuys is mainly known as a performance artist, first and foremost, acknowledged for the legendary “actions” and “interventions” such as the “I Like America and America Likes Me” (1974) or the “7000 oaks” project (1982), which made him one of the key figures of German postwar art.5 These pieces will be discussed later in this paper. The public’s imagination with regard to Beuysian aesthetics was seized not by food, but by (inedible) fat and felt: many of its objects and installations relied heavily on the natural or symbolic use of these two materials. The most influential conceptual innovation associated with the name Joseph Beuys, however, is undoubtedly “der erweiterte Kunstbegriff ”: Beuys’s redefinition of art as a free and creative activity that goes beyond the traditional understanding of fine art. Challenging traditional interpretations of art that imprison human creativity in a “narrow” art world, Beuys’s philosophy sought to “widen” our notion of what artistic activity is all about. Instead of producing objects and works that are meant solely for exhibition in the artificial reality of museums—artworks that have little to do with our everyday life praxis—Beuys extended art to life. Consequently, creative activity 248

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would consist of an “art” of “living” that works as counterculture or, in Beuys’s terminology,6 as “social sculpture”: the latter implying the idea that society and societal reality are to be regarded as a creation to which all individuals can contribute as autonomous creators of their daily life and common wealth. In other words, the extended notion of art essentially reinvented art and artistic activity as a social-sculptural way of living—as a way of modeling, forming, and creating a transformed lifestyle that everyone is able to achieve by becoming active in this “revolutionary” art of living. “We are the revolution” (1972, La rivoluzione siamo Noi), a multiple that displays Joseph Beuys as a single person styled like a civil fighter, as a hero of social disobedience marching toward us, the public, emphasizes this post-marxist ideal of revolutionary action. As this paper seeks to show, Beuys presented the art of cooking and eating as a perfect example of such a counterculture and everyday life aesthetics of social change. For his conceptual extension of what could and should be art in the realm of food, he became one of the first influential figures in the expanding field of Eat Art—a field in which numerous contemporary artists are engaged (Kunstforum International, 2002). Before further exploring the details of Beuys’s (contribution to) Eat Art, a short biography is supplied; not only because these details may be unfamiliar to readers, but also to illustrate the personal and social context that led the artist to problematize the food system and our way of eating as something important and revolutionary with respect to the future of human society.

The Person Born in 1921 in Krefeld, Germany, Joseph Beuys manifested a great interest in science and art in his youth, and contemplated a career in medicine before becoming a war pilot in 1940. In addition to being seriously wounded several times during the war, he was held as a prisoner-of-war by the British for several months toward its end. His experience of recovering from wounds (he claimed to have been wrapped in felt and tallow by Tartars trying to keep him warm after he was shot down in the Crimea) profoundly influenced his art. On his

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return from the war in 1945, Beuys abandoned his plans for a career in medicine and enrolled instead in Düsseldorf Art Academy to study sculpture. He graduated in 1952, and in the years to follow he focused on drawing and reading, his interests ranging widely from philosophy, science, poetry, and literature to myths. Düsseldorf in the 1960s had become an important center for contemporary art, and Beuys became acquainted with the Fluxus group, a group that put emphasis of performance and process (“flow”) as artistic practice.7 The group’s public performances acted as a catalyst for Beuys’s interventions or “actions” and for his ideas on how art might play a more important role in society. In 1972 Beuys was dismissed from his professorship at the Kunstakademie of Düsseldorf for opening his classes to all comers in defiance of university restrictions on the numbers of students allowed to attend lectures. This led him to found the Free International University of Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research in the same year, with cooperation from Nobel Prize for Literature recipient Heinrich Böll. Beuys’s charismatic presence coupled with his unconventional artistic style—he incorporated ritual movements and sounds along with materials such as food, fat, felt, copper, iron, earth, blood, and even dead animals in his works and performances—earned him great notoriety from the 1960s onward. Using workshops, discussions, and “teaching happenings” as part of his oeuvre of extended art, Beuys’s objects, installations, and performances won him an increasingly wide audience: his international reputation grew after a large exhibition of his work at the New York Guggenheim in 1979. During the same period, he extended his activities increasingly to political concerns and public calls for wide-ranging social reform or “evolutionary revolution,” as he preferred to call it. Beuys also became involved in the creation of several activist groups. Two organizations that owe their present existence to Beuys have been particularly influential: the Free International University of Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research and Die Grünen, the German Green party, of which Beuys was a founding member. Beuys designed one of the first voting pamphlets for Die Grünen, helping in this way to understand their political identity as social sculpture. He also accepted nomina-

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tion as a Green party candidate. Through these activities, Beuys fully participated into the German ecological movement’s transformation to a political power. He was unusual in this respect, being one of the small number of internationally reputed left-intellectuals including philosophers Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault who sought to support the new social movements of the 1970s and 1980s with their philosophical and artistic expressions and arguments. Beuys died in Düsseldorf in 1986, having spent the last years of his life engaging in constant activity, participating in dozens of exhibitions, and traveling on behalf of these events.

Becoming a Cooking Artist My portrayal of Beuys as an Eat artist or a gastrosopher begins with a comparison with Andy Warhol, another influential and unrecognized food artist, in that his pop art deals with food, cooking, or eating. Warhol is far better known internationally than the German social-sculptor: famous all over the world for the offset reproductions of Campell’s Soup cans, which became the ultimate—if semi-ironic— icon for food standardization and mass (taste) production of Western fast food society. No such image springs so readily to mind in the public imagination with relation to Beuys’s artworks, despite the fact that Beuys created comparably strong paradigmatic pictures to match Warhol’s soup can images. One such image by Beuys (that I consider to be a direct counter-piece to and critical comment of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup art-concept) is a television documentary bearing the title Jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler or Everybody Is an Artist. The now-famous documentary shows Joseph Beuys preparing food in the kitchen of his studio in Düsseldorf, where he has a huge cooker installed. He is filmed as he carefully cleans fresh vegetables, slowly peels potatoes, and slices carrots one by one, in the preparation of a simple wholesome meal. Beuys’s cooking activity, the food-­ making process, and the final presentation of the meal he prepared as (gastrosophical) artwork were the only portions of the documentary to be broadcast on television. The image presented by these sequences was doubtlessly stronger and more provocative in that time: here was



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the well-known avant-garde (and male!) artist Joseph Beuys, simply cooking and exhibiting this ordinary everyday activity to the general public through television as art. In recent decades, practical cooking programs on television and media images showing the preparation of food have become popular worldwide. Beuys, however, was one of the first “TV cooks,” extending (by broadcasting) the notion of art to present the culinary praxis as a social happening and as a revolutionary activity of living (cultivating actively) human creativity day by day.8 It is important to understand that Beuys’s conceptual intentions were completely different from the television cooking programs promoted by the cultural industry today. Jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler, the title of Beuys’s cooking documentary from 1979, is revealing in this respect, setting out in manifesto-like terms the most intriguing idea of his philosophy. By inviting everyone to become “an artist” and reinterpreting the “art” of cooking as home cooking and the self-­preparation of an ordinary everyday meal, Beuys positioned the activity of cooking centrally within his philosophy of extended art.9 Later, his extended notion of art would become mostly associated with spectacular actions like his legendary Coyote teaching sessions or the highly symbolic planting of 7000 oak trees at the 1982 international art exhibition Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany. I would argue, however, that Beuys’s philosophical concept that art and creative life-praxis should be a constitutive part of our everyday, good living finds its most perfect representation in his “art of cooking,” where the preparation of food offers a genuine type of creativity. A creative activity like cooking depends on an art of living that arises through interaction between the self, the social, and the natural and economic world.10 In particular, cooking for and dining with others create a social sculpture of genuine conviviality: a good social life that is ethically (for all involved) good because it consists of the joyful experience of shared tasteful meals as a daily performed and artistically cultivated aesthetics of life. Beuys was not the first to emphasize these things. He was, however, one of the few artists and thinkers to cultivate such an ethically good cuisine and conceptually dignify such a way of eating as a good art of living. And his gastrosophy amounts to the insight that

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food ethics and the ideal of good eating binds together ecological and cultural issues. Lucrezia de Domizio Durini, friend and biographer to Beuys, makes the following comment on Beuys’s personal culinary praxis: “In his studio in Düsseldorf he prepared food just as he created his works of art. If his friends or collaborators, or important cultural figures, arrived by any chance when it was getting close to lunchtime, the artist, standing beside his huge cooker, would start to weave his culinary spells. In the meantime, discussion would rage.”11 Artistic approaches in the recent food art movement can be onesided in that they specialize on only one of the various factors of food culture. For example, the Critical Art Ensemble focuses exclusively on the public debate of genetically modified foods or the food artist Sonja Alhäuser does not address self-cooking at all or Carsten Höller and Rosemarie Trockel work “A House for Pigs and People” dealing with only one facet of our current foodways.12 By contrast, Beuysian gastrosophy has a global reach that aesthetically conceptualizes food in a number of ways, three of which will be examined in this paper.

Foodstuffs as Art Objects Beuys extensively used foodstuff as material for his art. He has yet to receive adequate recognition as a key figure among those modern artists (like Daniel Spoerri, Dieter Roth, Sonja Alhäuser, Anya Gallaccio) who use food as a material in their works. Like almost no one else before or since, Beuys incorporated them as symbolic as objects, commodities and consumer goods, and natural sources of human energy. One example, an object entitled Zitronen-Batterie or Capri battery (1985) deals with food energy issues through the depiction of a lemon fruit that is directly connected with a battery. A second object, a skeleton of a fish entitled Ia gebratene Fischgräte or a Perfectly Grilled Fishbone (1965) used the leftovers of a fish meal to indicate that artworks should be understood as mere leftovers of the real activity involved in their creation, that artistic fulfillment lies in the process or performance of creation (grilling or cooking in this case) rather than in the artificial presentation of an exhibited object (fish skeleton). In contradiction to the traditional notion of art, Beuys wants us



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to realize that exhibited art objects (food leftovers) are nothing more than traces of the personal activity and skill or art that preceded them (perfect food preparation). Honigpumpe am Arbeitsplatz or Honey pump at the working place (1977) was one of his most famous installations. This piece used a pump driven by two motors to force honey through a seventeen-­meter-high pipe into a distribution network traversing a series of rooms being used for a hundred days as a place of work—for talks, speeches, and discussions held among working groups and citizens’ action committees from a number of different countries. Honey pump at its place of work symbolized Beuys’s role as a supplier of food for thought: he symbolically fed the thinking process in which participants and visitors alike would join. By creating an “organism” that consisted of pipe lines transporting honey from one working place to another, Beuys mimicked the way in which the blood that flows in our bodies sustains our ability to work and think. His concern went beyond the proper nutrition of the utopian body; by using honey as an energy stream, he showed his metaphoric opposition to the prevalence and power of money in the mainstream of modern society and its functioning. The use of honey was not coincidental. Honey, for a gastrosopher such as Beuys, resonates symbolically with popular visions of a good life, where humanity enjoys an abundance of food that is enough for all: the biblical promise of a “land of milk and honey.” 

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The above represents just a few examples of the countless works in which Beuys used foodstuffs as material and symbols. Other artworks made use of apples, beer, sausage, bread, butter, alcohol, dried meat, eggs, peas, cookies, fruits, potatoes, garlic, dough, herbs, German soyasauce, coffee, wheat, milk, olive oil, oranges, rice, salt, cake, chocolate, mineral water, bacon, tea, soya beans, sugar, mushrooms, lard, and so on. By choosing these ordinary foodstuffs and transferring them into the art world, Beuys valorized them as important things. In one meaningful installation, he substituted Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason with Maggi-Würze, a brand of German soya-sauce, to indicate that a notion of human reason and autonomy should be tasteful rather than pure. One way to ensure its good taste is to philosophize about real 254

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culinary taste and food as crucial elements that indicate how well we “shape” a way of living that is good for all. Clearly, Beuys’s choice of foodstuffs was motivated less by personal preferences than by his desire to deliberately and systematically raise our awareness of everyday life and the creations of daily life with which we deal constantly, such as the way we eat and how this impacts nature, society, our bodies, and cultural life. The artist did not restrict his gastrosophy only to the use of food objects and alimentary materials for installation purposes. Instead, Beuys extended his creativity conceptually to engage with the environmental aspects of the world of food (as we shall see in the following section).

Political Economy of Agriculture and the Art of Farming By introducing economic questions to the creation of art, Beuys’s activity applied a radical and philosophical rethinking of the ethical purpose of global economy to his social revolution. To think about world politics means for Beuys to think, above all, about food, or to think about something like salad. He explains: “What we use in our kitchens today is contaminated, everybody knows that . . . The question is, why is that? It has to do with capitalism. How, then, did capitalism emerge? And is there a notion of creativity possible at all, if the products we make, especially those products coming from nature, from agriculture, are already degenerated and ruined like this? Everything seems to be out of order: a new direction is needed. This is where it all starts . . . it starts with the salad we eat.”13 In other words, all the food we buy and prepare provides a starting point from which each and every one of us manipulates the global food chain for better or for worse. In this sense, all food carries ethical and political implications in terms of what and how we eat.14 The famous installation Wirtschaftswerte or Economic Values (1982) took up these gastrosophical reflections from a more theoretical point of view. The installation consisted of a metallic shelf rack stacked with alimentary products such as packaged wheat, dried beans, canned food, and other foodstuffs, presenting food goods as an important factor of the economic system. By choosing in ­particular

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products produced in (at that time still existing) East Germany, Beuys touched upon questions concerning possible alternatives to the capitalist economy of industrial agriculture. Beuys elaborated on this theme through a number of workshops and series of talks in which he initiated discussions about the particularities of the capitalist economy or the theoretical possibilities of a political “third way” beyond West capitalism and East socialism that would contribute to social justice and a sustainable future. In this context, Beuys was one of the first in the 1970s and early 1980s to integrate environmental ethics into global economic thinking.15 His most well-known and ongoing environment-related social sculpture is undoubtedly the 7000 oaks project, initiated in 1982. In this urban intervention, Beuys called for the planting of seven thousand trees throughout the greater part of the city, each paired with a columnar basalt marker rising some four feet high. The project’s title, Stadtverwaldung statt Verwaltung, was both ironic and playful: “Stadt-Verwaldung” indicating a utopian harmony between urban culture (Stadt) and nature/reforestation (Wald, Verwaldung); and “statt Verwaltung” intended as a criticism of the predominance of bureaucratic politics (Verwaltung) that paralyzes democratic participation and the art of a political everyday life. Through this work, Beuys extended artistic activity to both environmental problems and urban development. 

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A similar trajectory emerges in a number of his lesser-known activities that dealt explicitly with agriculture and the ecological revolution. During a talk, for instance, Beuys would apply his gastrosophically extended notion of art to economic questions concerning organic farming practices and the work of a small-scale farmer (i.e., food producer), considered by Beuys to be an essentially artistic creativity and thereby an ethically good activity. As he explained, “a person like a farmer realizes something truthful when he makes a product that is tremendously important for our life by cultivating the earth, [then] one has to recognize such a person as a creative being in this field of human activity . . . one must accept him as an artist.”16 Usually, if we think of art that deals with the environment and nature, we have in 256

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mind something like Land-Art aesthetics or Earthworks where the artists situate artworks in natural surroundings, or integrate those surroundings in the making of the artwork. Beuys, however, drew public attention to agriculture and the necessity of applying environmental and ecological thinking to agrarian food production by highlighting the crucial societal position held by farmers and the impact of their (or this kind of) work for human’s relation to nature and Earth’s resources. In a performance that took place in March 1977, he planted potatoes in the front garden of a gallery in the center of Berlin. With a backpack on his back, he became “a farmer” who ecologically cultivates his land. Beuys dug up the harvest at the end of the international art show Documenta the following October of the same year and “exhibited” a form of an ethical praxis that is now known as sustainable urban gardening or city farming. For Beuys, being or becoming active in organic agriculture and farming or urban gardening as an art of living for everyone demonstrated a political ethos. He comprehended the delicious potatoes harvested in the front garden of the Berlin gallery literally as the natural fruits of an active resistance and counterculture against industrial agribusiness and conventional farming methods. The cultivation of one’s own vegetable garden and a cultural transformation of capitalist modes of (food) production—an idea that existed already in the gastrosophical thoughts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx or Herbert Marcuse—meant to reclaim control over our own life and to ensure a way of producing our food along wholesome lines and ecological sustainability that transforms modern mass production and the inferior quality of its industrialized and standardized products.17 Beuys’s farming activity was not just limited to occasional performances in the art context. He took his agricultural aesthetics very seriously, articulating his theoretical and philosophical concern for environmental ethics through the practical maintenance of a small vegetable garden next to his studio in Düsseldorf, some farming at a small house in the countryside of Veert (the Netherlands), and again on a piece of land in Tuscany, where he practiced the art of gardening or outdoor food production (as the extended practice of indoor food preparation or the art of cooking) as an art of living. A close friend recalls the almost kitsch idyll of Beuys’s Tuscan country life: “Here

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Joseph Beuys turned into a farmer, into a true man of the country. He looked after his plants, prepared the manure heap, made compost with bio-degradable garbage, tidied the lumber and pruned the plants. . . . He burnt things that were of no use and then used the ashes to put in his organic compost heap. He picked vegetables and herbs from his vegetable garden in order to prepare his delicious dishes.”18

Foundation for the Rebirth of Agriculture The central position of small-scale organic food production in Beuys’s Wirtschaftsbegriff or notion of economics (as a component of his extended notion of art) is reflected in many of his environmental actions. One ambitious program in this respect was the Foundation for the Rebirth of Agriculture research project, initiated during the opening of a branch of the Free International University in Italy in 1978 and continued in 1984 under the title Difesa della natura or Defense of Nature (Beuys 1988). The project proposed to investigate alternative methods of food production and green biotechnology that would enable the global economy to be run in accordance to the aims of social justice and sustainability. The Foundation of the Rebirth of Agriculture was thus related to Beuys’s humanistic belief in the capacity of political movements like the emerging Die Grünen, which he hoped would likewise foster an ecological revolution in the near future. In each case, Beuys saw the transformation of modern industrial society as depending to a great extent on the basis of real change in agricultural production and the consumption patterns of society—the latter reflected ultimately in the way we eat. His complex interventions for a culinary counterculture and an alternative economy to global capitalism included a trip to the tropical Seychelles in 1984, where he worked together with farmers to initiate the first steps to an agrarian reform.19 In this way, the philosophy of a “revolutionary art” of living prefigures crucially the pursuit of justice and sustainability in global agriculture that today’s critics of free trade want to see put high on the World Trade Organization’s agenda.20 Likewise, in many recent environmental and farmer’s movements and nongovernmental organizations throughout the world, the kind of engagement in civil society envisioned by Beuys finds its place today. 258

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This societal convergence proofs the transformative implications (of his art) of natural farming and sustainable food production. 

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In closing, I return to the provocative image of Beuys as a TV cook. By performing the unspectacular activity of peeling potatoes and serving soup, he attributed a concrete ethical (counter)culture to his concept of an art practiced day by day. In creating a “social sculpture” of convivial dining with family and friends, Beuys manifests a gastrosophical self-cultivation as a good cook and ethical eater. The Beuysian art of cooking and eating bypasses the conventional reverence for haute cuisine and the chef as the only expression of culinary aesthetics.21 A work titled Der Chef (1964) clearly demonstrated his revolutionary use of the traditional phrase “good cook.” He redefines the making of good food by emphasizing self-determined or free-style everyday home cooking as an art of living through which anyone can become a chef de cuisine. As Beuys notes: “The chef in the term Küchenchef signifies the human head. The word chef derives from the head. Everyone has such a head. Everyone has his chef. Everyone has the possibility to determine what is going on. Therefore, the word Küchenchef implies the component of self-determination. This is the meaning of Chef.”22 If we understand the individual’s cooking activity as his or her personal creativity (as opposed to his or her not-cooking or culinary passivity), the “art” component of this activity consists of the individual’s activation of his or her potential “culinary self ” through the daily practice of such a creative self-determination. To do this, it is not necessary to work as a cook in any gastronomic business or to become a professional who produces complicated, expensive, and time-­consuming masterpieces. Instead, Beuys encourages us to realize that a simple and yet (for those who eat and like it) good-tasting meal by using (ethically produced) good ingredients provides ample expression of the Beuysian-like “art of good eating” that anyone could create and live day by day. This, of course, is valid for everyone of us only insofar as ethically produced (ecological, sustainable, regional, decently paid) food and all other necessary preconditions for an everyday ethics and aesthetics of good eating culture are given and available to our free disposal. However, whether or not this is the case,

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is neither a question nor a topic that Beuys’s gastrosophical aesthetics tries—or is capable—to answer. To tackle those far-reaching issues of gastro-politics goes beyond the scope of this paper regarding the neglected approach to food in the work of one of the most radical and influential artist in contemporary society. Living creativity in accordance to Beuys’s gastrosophical aesthetics leads us back to a performance titled Sauerkrautpartitur (Sauerkraut Score). First performed in Tokyo in 1969, the sauerkraut action started with a music stand on which a loose sauerkraut portion was arranged in place of the score. His “music” thus positioned, Beuys would conduct music on stage according to the “sauerkraut principle.” The principle is simple: instead of slavishly obeying aesthetic rules and repeating the recipes of musical scores that dictate what is played, the replacement of the score by sauerkraut allows the musician to improvise freely and be artistically creative. Here, as in Beuys’s cooking-art, sauerkraut-aesthetics indicate that artistic activity does not depend on a skillful performance of something that tradition or convention denotes “art.” On the contrary, anyone can become an artist because art should be (at least in Beuysian terms) nothing more than free creativity, available to everyone to be practiced in daily life if societal conditions are given and cultural resistance of individuals is possible. The Sauerkrautpartitur happening has another implication. By using sauerkraut, a quintessentially German dish, the work alludes subtly to and subverts the cultural (and racist) stereotyping of Germans in culinary terms as “krauts”—a term that suggests that Germans lack both a creative culture and lived aesthetics of food. If creativity is not to be subjected to unnecessary rules and prescriptions, the principle intuition . . . instead of cookbook (as Beuys calls one of his works) can be applied to the culinary art of living to set cooking practice free from the unimaginative and uncreative applications of recipes. Beuys’s slogan “everyone is an artist” in this way configures an aesthetic utopia in which any individual is able to develop his or her own belle cuisine and personal taste as to what makes good food. The act of cooking becomes art, not because the meal is made by a professional cook or by a cooking artist, but rather because the individual preparing the food is an art of an ethical life that engages in the social sculpture of culinary counterculture. Commercial gastronomy 260

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has to meet certain aesthetic forms and complexities to be appreciated and economically supported as a valued work of culinary art. By contrast, the gastrosophical aesthetics as taught by Beuys consist of becoming active in farming and creating meals, using politically sustainable ingredients (local, organic, fair trade, biodiverse), fostering culinary self-determination in composing something tasty, and enjoying this good food convivially with befriended others. The more people become eating artists like Joseph Beuys, the more we attain a revolution of our current food culture and its crisis.



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Chapter 15

Provisional Objects Alison Knowles’s Bean Rolls Nicole L. Woods

How can everyday life be defined? It surrounds us, it besieges us, on all sides and from all directions. We are inside it and outside it. No so-called “elevated” activity can be reduced to it, nor can it be separated from it . . . It is at the heart of the everyday that projects become works of creativity. —Henri Lefebvre1

Addressing the “event” of Fluxus retrospectively, George Brecht, artist, collaborator, and close interlocutor of fellow Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, argued that it was small multiple works such as her Bean Rolls (1963–1964) that signaled the subversive potential of the entire Fluxus paradigm. For Brecht, these small, humble offerings clarified and gave concrete evidence to a conceptual shift in the post-WWII era. Proposing that they deployed similar strategies, though they did not share an officially sanctioned aesthetic program, Brecht noted that Knowles and other like-minded Fluxus artists were sustained by “something unnamable in common,” which had a “nourishing” effect on the development of “original, and often uncategorizable” objects and events in a “strange new way.”2 Indeed, by 1964 the peculiar character of Fluxus works—scores, 263

performances, and multiples—seemed to necessitate careful recognition and defending. For instance, American poet Emmett Williams’s score, Voice Piece for La Monte Young (1962), simply asks if the experimental musician and composer, La Monte Young, is physically present. Its pithy proposition, its negation of the conventions of musical notation or instrumentation, and its solicitation of seemingly banal information or direction was similar to Benjamin Patterson’s Two Movements from Symphony No. 1 (1964) and Young’s own Composition 1960 No. 2 (1960). Effectively closing the distance between performer/ spectator, Patterson’s Two Movements asks the gathered audience if they “trust” him. Based on a quick survey of their answers, in the affirmative or negative, the audience is then instructed to self-divide into two groups who sit in the dark as coffee grounds rain down among them. In Young’s elemental word piece, the textured nature of sound is amplified by directing performers to “Build a fire in front of the Audience.” These performances, and Knowles’s seminal Proposition: Make a Salad (1962), whose score simply requires any performer to make the meal, are exemplary of a renewed interdependency between artistic practice and audience interaction, intervention, and production. This return of the historical avant-garde and its ludic strategies of engagement, now positioned as the “neo-avant-garde,” shared certain dispositions with Fluxus works, namely: their oscillation between the strange and the serious; their minimally appointed (albeit still theatrical) aesthetic; their subtle and explicit attentiveness to larger social and political realities; and their inherent disruption of extant orders of high art.3 In Brecht’s account, this productive mixing of disciplinary borders is uniquely suited to Knowles’s small canned readymade Bean Rolls, which he aligned with the more “professional anti-culture and down-withs” events staged by artists like Henry Flynt.4 Indeed, Knowles’s Bean Rolls presents the viewer with modest, cheaply produced containers and contents (culled from other contexts), anticipating and advancing the polemics of postwar reproduction, exhibition, and distribution—especially as it proposes a consideration of the banal rituals and routines of daily life. In other words, as Henri Lefebvre characterized it, of unearthing the creative potential of the everyday. This essay is explicitly concerned with understanding the conditions of Knowles’s aesthetic approach to the everyday in the early 264

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1960s. It draws upon previously unpublished documents and archival materials, including several interviews with the artist herself, and is primarily motivated by two questions. First, why are some of the most experimental artists in the 1960s, Knowles among them, drawn to the subject of food as an object of contemplation, consumption, and display? Second, how does the expansion of the multiple, via a rethinking of the Duchampian readymade, play into these new forms and tropes? By examining a sampling of work premised on Knowles’s embrace of the provisional—an openness to indeterminate outcomes, objects, and experiences—my research reveals the ways in which Knowles effectively redefines the conditions of artistic and domestic labor.5 Using beans and the processes of daily life to propose an alternative model for understanding exchange value, materialism, and the limits of commodity culture, Knowles marks a specific connection between artistic practice and the rituals and rhythms of the body in social space—one that was fortified by the cultural milieu of New York in the 1960s.

Alison Knowles and Fluxus in New York Upon returning to New York in the spring of 1963 from their tour of “new music” concerts and performances in Western Europe, Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, George Maciunas (who returned slightly later), and many others found the artistic environment for collective practices markedly different from their experiences abroad. Not only were there fewer venues to supply actual space for performances, but at times the artists also discovered a kind of institutional hostility toward their aesthetic concerns and sensibilities. Fluxus artists, and like-minded practitioners, managed to remain visible on some level within the avant-garde scene by organizing small festivals, environments, and exhibitions at Carnegie Recital Hall, Thibaut and Kornblee galleries on Madison Avenue, Hardware Poets’ Playhouse, Judson Memorial Church, and Rutgers University in New Jersey, among other places.6 Despite these modest successes, it was under certain practical and financial constraints that the number of performances began to decrease as the publishing activities of Fluxus began to increase. In 1963, Maciunas moved into a shabby warehouse at 359 Canal Street, located near the vestiges of a number of SoHo businesses that still

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catered to light industrial manufacturing. Here Maciunas established “Fluxhall/Fluxushop” (1964–1966), a catchall storefront, performance space, and mail-order business dedicated to various Fluxus activities.7 Maciunas designed, manufactured, and promoted Fluxboxes, Fluxyearbooks, and the occasional Fluxus newspaper, Cv V Tre, giving a decidedly professional gloss to ordinary objects often meant as elaborate gags. Concurrently, Higgins started a small independent publishing house called Something Else Press, which he operated from the Chelsea brownstone he shared with Knowles and their two daughters.8 For the next decade, Higgins, who had extensive training in printmaking and book crafting, began to edit and publish some of the most important neo- and historical avant-garde texts, manifestoes, novels, and anthologies of poetry of the half-century, including 1966 reissues of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of the Americans (1925) and Richard Huelsenbeck’s Dada Almanach (1920), and first editions of his landmark “Intermedia” essay (1965), Claes Oldenburg’s Store Days (1968), John Cage and Alison Knowles’s Notations (1969), and the invaluable Great Bear Pamphlets, among many others.9 It was the physical and conceptual presence of Something Else Press in her home, not to mention Knowles’s own training at the Manhattan School of Printing in the early 1960s, that would presage an interest in developing alternative outlets for her own artistic development, especially around the idea of synthesizing text-object-­ performance genres into a critical practice. One such alternative came in the form of collaborative events she performed with other Fluxus practitioners, most memorably the “free street theater” performances with French Fluxus artist Ben Vautier on Canal Street, faithfully preserved for history by Maciunas in photographs, letters, and broadsides.10 Knowles participated in several events for George Brecht and Robert Watts’s Water Yam festival (1963–1964), including “making a salad” and selling hats at the Smolin Gallery, advertised as “fantastical, fabulous, whimsical, fairylike of materials ranging from found objects to glass. Something to see; something to wear; something to use in your house as sculpture.”11 Knowles was also the featured performer in Ben Patterson’s score Solo for Dancer (1962)—which called for a “dancer” to pull their body up from the floor by a rope pulley suspended from the ceiling)—at Douglass College in New Jersey in 266

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1963.12 Such feats of cooperation and physical exertion accentuate the spirit in which Knowles was trying to forge an awareness of her body and artistic labor enacted through performance. Basing her activities on the inherently provisional or contingent nature of the aesthetic process, she created artworks sensitive to considerations of context and site-specificity. It was within this collaborative context that Alison Knowles’s Bean Rolls was first commissioned as an original-editioned multiple in 1963 by George Maciunas for an early publication of Fluxkits, and would quickly become a signature piece within the extensive traveling attaché cases of collected and prefabricated works. Each multiple was fashioned by Maciunas to be sold separately or together, yet the conceptual impetus behind each work was the sole purview of the artist enlisted with the task.13 Fluxkits were thus elaborate collectibles, assembled constructions of found vinyl cases or wooden crates that acted as boxed treasures (or roving museums) in an explicit homage to Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-Valise works (1935–1941). Within each discrete case was an assortment of other cases by thirty-nine or more artists—paper folders, plastic and cardboard, or thin metal cylinders—that efficiently housed the contributions inside. Largely humorous, ironic, playful, and irreverent, the objects also spoke to more serious questions and critiques in the 1960s surrounding the “authenticity” of artistic labor.14 Knowles, and other Fluxus artists, were at once relinquishing individuality in favor of collective accumulation and dispersed authorship. Articulating an investment in a more explicit political program than most were then comfortable with, Maciunas declared in a letter to German artist Tomas Schmit that a prime motivator for the Fluxkits was the eventual “destruction of the authorship of pieces . . . mak[ing] them totally anonymous— thus eliminating artists’ ego.”15 As such, the Fluxkits also disclosed a central paradox of their shared efforts: artists retained a conceptual signature or aesthetic trademark even as they carried the special branding labels Maciunas designed around each artist’s name. This slippage between an artist’s individuated value and practice is evident in Knowles’s contribution: a canned book of printed scrolls and dried beans bespeaking stories, myths, and recipes unearthed like anthropological haikus yoked from their original context and ­presented in

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poetic fragments. In these cases, the artist’s (literal) hand reasserts its authority to reform banal materials as works of art. Given that no artist participating in the Fluxkits operation could control or determine how a viewer would handle (or reject) their offerings, the contingent and ephemeral is prized over the timeless and precious. In this way, the chance-derived, provisional nature of Fluxus objects and performances worked to reframe and repurpose prosaic materials and experiences of the domestic everyday, enlarging them to include historical tropes, such as the surrealist objet trouvé and, of course, the Duchampian readymade. While in conversation with broader conceptual efforts toward dematerialization in the 1960s, what seems radical about the departure from more conventional art materials is the obdurately multifunctional, multisensorial choices Knowles makes in Bean Rolls (tin can, paper scrolls, inked words, food in the form of dried beans), which activate not only the discerning eye, but also the ear, mouth, and hands. To render found objects in this way underscores the value of imaginative play, and more importantly, it destabilizes the structure, or trajectory, of linear narratives. It is critical to emphasize that Knowles’s seminal contribution to the Fluxus program post-European performances was integral to the kind of creative energies bent on forging new modes of representation, and thus, seeking to question the very organization of cultural capital. Ultimately, then, this essay argues that Knowles’s adoption of quotidian materials productively aligns with a variety of historical, theoretical, and artistic themes of the 1960s, including an emerging feminist and participatory practice that marshals the polemics of the body and its material traces. As it were, Knowles’s deployment of food as a substrate for the commodified organism of visual art marks her as a key figure in the emergence of a user-generated artistic practice in the postwar era and beyond.

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Bean Networks It suffices that a book be possible for it to exist. —Jorge Luis Borges16 [Maciunas] asked, “What could you do a book about, a little book?” At that time, I was cooking for people at our house, and I usually had bean dishes going for many meals. I said, “I’ll do recipes about beans.” [. . .] It was an artist’s book, a canned book in fact.” —Alison Knowles17 Alison Knowles’s Bean Rolls is a mass-reproducible work consisting of three-inch square, tin tea cans filled with a variety of beans, each accompanied by fifteen or more printed scrolls with information regarding the history, etymology, myths, rituals, songs, proverbs, and preparation of beans. Originating from her interest in experimental cooking, the materials were chosen for their ubiquity and cheap availability, and the mini-texts of bean history were selected from an extensive, yet fragmented, review of materials Knowles conducted at the New York Public Library. Literally culling the card-catalogue files for random content, Knowles discovered a rich taxonomy of names: Early Red Valentines, Early Mohawks, Long Yellow Six Weeks, English Canterburys.18 Approaching the project like a field anthropologist, amassing bits and pieces of information that could be recreated, including illustrations from the L.L. Bean catalogue, Knowles would later explain that this particular work was the catalyst for a career-long “voyage of research into the world of beans.”19 As in the early performance piece, Proposition: Make a Salad, this designated “canned book” (as Knowles describes it) continues to draw attention to a multisensorial experience (visual, tactile, auditory) in the blurring of artistic practice and the meditative absorption of the domestic sphere. Making sly reference to the rather tenuous historical and political moment in which the Bean Rolls were conceived and produced, Knowles included, on a number of scrolls, the printed phrase, “Ich bin ein bohne . . .” [“I am a bean”] or “Ich bin ein star . . .” [“I am a star”],

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recalling the “Ich bin ein Berliner” [“I am a Berliner”] expression of solidarity famously uttered by President John F. Kennedy to a West German audience in June 1963 at the height of the Cold War.20 In reconsidering Knowles’s work in the early 1960s, the moment of capitalism’s flowering, Judith Rodenbeck notes that Fluxus multiples, like Bean Rolls, “transvalue[d] the production and consumption of food into art activities” through a positioning of “material simplicity.”21 Indeed, Knowles and other Fluxus artists wanted to explore the potential pleasure of found objects as expressly multidimensional, and package them in cheap mass-distributed containers. By playing with these containers, Knowles’s canned book transforms art’s conceptual and material borders to expanded arenas of value and exchange. Which is to say, in pushing the frameworks of the “event-score” and chance procedures to include processes of the domestic everyday, Knowles’s critical practice would develop into a sustained exploration of different distribution systems and economies of exchange—­ biological, political, historical, artistic. Bean Rolls reorders the archival material preserved in the library’s network of storage and retrieval (card catalogue) into another system of representation (hand-printed paper scrolls) to a different system of containment (tin boxes). As such, Knowles’s canned multiple arrests the temporal flows of distribution and bean data by enabling multiple chances for consumption and distribution by the viewer/reader. This is most evident in the sheer accumulation of bean data, meticulously collected, then edited down to a series of a priori fragments without context or citation, the traces of which are then photocopied and published. Through this process, Knowles productively mixes multiple technologies at once: first, in the appropriation of the scroll form—an ancient custom of organizing and transmitting knowledge, often related to religious observance, ritual, and social gathering; second, in the bibliographic system of ordering knowledge intended for discovery and consumption in the public library’s hidden cabinets; and third, in the graphic notation of the modern printing press, which allowed the artist to reorder the bean data in any configuration she pleases—recipes overlap proverbs, myths nestle songs, dried beans clatter on contact. The Bean Rolls is a complex codex, an activation of the text and texture that offers a continuous lesson in the routes of perception: rolled and unrolled 270

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(tactile), seen and unseen (visual), heard and unheard (auditory), read and reread (cognitive). It is important to recall that Knowles specifically conceives of the Bean Rolls as a book—a text to be consumed but not read in any traditional way. The reader/viewer is not meant to grasp an infinite knowledge of everything there is to know about beans, but rather the potential to learn and experience something about beans as total knowledge of any subject is itself impossible. A fragmentary introduction of bean history (or world) that can never be fully ascertained, is akin to Jorge Luis Borges’s enigmatic story of the universe disguised as The Library of Babel (an English translation that first dates to the early 1960s), where life and death, time and space collide: Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future . . . the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue . . . the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books . . . the library is unlimited and cyclical.22

Practically, the cyclical nature of the multiple is evidenced by the capacity for Bean Rolls to be reusable as actual storehouses of food, in that the scrolls can be removed and replaced by larger quantities of beans, constituting a veritable (and portable) stockpile of goods, and thus, fitting with postwar fantasies of infinite plentitude and sustenance. The preserved legumes contained inside oscillate between the scarce and the plentiful, and their attendant recipes envision a capacity to make and remake with vast gustatory and culinary variation. More crucially, the meditation of multisensory knowledge on beans or other related topics is furthered by the variability implied in the dimension of sound through the aleatory potential of dried beans scraping tin, uniquely evoking the Cage’s lessons on percussive instrumentation.23 Enabling a directly tactile encounter with a work of art, Knowles’s Bean Rolls offered an operational manipulation of the materials at hand: in the uncurling of tightly packed scrolls; in the shaking of the tin can; in the popping open of the top and letting the objects spill out. Upon closer examination, Bean Rolls indicates a

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conceptual parallel to Duchamp’s readymade Box with Hidden Noise, a key work Knowles observed at the “Art of Assemblage” exhibition (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1961). The power of Duchamp’s indeterminate sound box is immediate. Duchamp’s sonic readymade was first fabricated in 1916 with the help of friend and benefactor Walter Arensberg, and remade by Arturo Schwarz in 1964. An unknown object placed in a ball of twine, pressed between two copper plates, and secured by thick bolts, Hidden Noise is inscribed with an enigmatic text written in French and English. Evoking the hidden domain of classified information, of secret encounters of a privileged few, he instructed lucky handlers to simply “listen to it.”24 Like Duchamp’s furtive gesture, then, Knowles’s own metal readymade was not only intended to be heard—“hard little pallets making music inside the sealed can” by rattling and scraping against tin walls and paper skins—it was also meant to be read in its own right.25 To accentuate this audio-visuality, Knowles composed a score for the piece, Proposition #12: Simultaneous Bean Reading (1964), which calls for six to eight performers to open the canned Bean Rolls and carefully uncurl the scrolls, reciting them aloud to any available audience. Premiering at the Café au Go Go in New York City the same year, a single performer determined both the duration and the length of each reading by “cutting out large sections of the rolls” with scissors.26 Knowles reinscription of value in the form of intermedial relations powerfully “engage[s] a person in exploration without awareness of time or place,” argues Fluxus historian Hannah Higgins, resulting in a performativity of work that is “simultaneously conceptual and Event-like.”27 I would like to suggest an expansion of this merging of concept/ event, by noting that the work decidedly operates on three competing archival registers: as text in the incorporation of words, information, paper, and score; as object in the canned form of mass-produced box and potentially percussive instrument; and performance, in the social rituals of eating, collecting, and playing. Moreover, the experiential capacity of art-as-event is tied to perceptible shifts of the daily labor of the living artist by visualizing the activities that made working possible; in this case, eating as a biological necessity for her own creativity. By visualizing the subject of food in both organic and inorganic 272

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exchange systems, Knowles gives new resonance to the circuitous practices of postwar materialization, in both private (art) and public (use) economies. The global body politic referenced directly in Knowles’s Fluxus objects, not the least of which includes multiregional/national varieties of legumes in Bean Rolls, is also decidedly post-Duchampian readymade in the elicitation of infrastructures of the multitude while attending to private moments of vitality and nourishment.28 The Bean Rolls also elicit the direct experience of the beholder in the calculation of every tinned lid being lifted, every tight scroll uncurled and read, and every bean examined and consumed—at least in terms of potentiality.29 The touching, the shaking, the opening, the unfolding, the reading, and the eating are all activities that isolate and recontextualize the indeterminate space of the everyday.30 That Knowles’s artistic practice, visual and auditory, is profoundly tied to the avant-garde tropes of Duchamp, Cage, Brecht, and others, however, should not elide the consistency of her participation in the rearticulation of postwar objects. For example, while Knowles chose to emphasize the textured nature of sound and visuality, Brecht elected to silence beans by individually taping three to piano keys in Incidental Music (1961). Not coincidentally, by the 1970s Knowles had become so associated with the form and content of food (and the processes of biological life) in her own right that other artists began to compose works for her—poet Jackson Mac Low composed a poem entitled “A Bean Diastic for Alison Knowles from an Earlier Bean Poem,” while Cage penned a global reminiscence on the subject of eating inspired by “thirty-eight variations on a theme by Alison Knowles.”31 The transposition of the language of cooking and the language of art she helped to establish is seen in later works such as Bean-See Also Bein for George Maciunas (1965–1978), a performative text-work that captures a linguistic index of “Bean” surnames extracted from a 1965 New York City telephone book, including attendant contact numbers, which are then composed as an instructional score: “A poem for two voices, one reading the name preceded by the other reading the number. An audience can be substituted for the second reader.”32 In 1982 she constructed a room-sized installation work called The Book of Bean, which first opened at the Franklin Furnace and then subsequently traveled to New Jersey and Philadelphia, and combining

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walk-in pages, beans, found objects, poetry, sound, and light.33 The Giant Bean Turner (1995–2000) is another large bean sculpture created from wet paper pulp and fiber flax which is dried en plein air and contains unknown quantities of different bean varieties whose rush of sound is amplified by the crevices of encrusted paper in action.34 Smaller, portable versions of the bean instruments are found in her Time Samples (2006), a series of found, repurposed objects with plastic tags linking them to fictional writers, poets, composers, and others. We might ask what kind of audience, reader, viewer are all of these bean works, installations, and boxes intended for? Which is to ask, what kind of public does Knowles imagine here? In terms of spectatorship, these works allow Knowles to both liberate and obligate the audience in a radical reorientation between subject and object. On one level, the viewer’s position shifts from passive to active through an unusual access to the art object. After all, the proper handling of the Bean Rolls enables a temporal-durational experience that requires the same concentration demanded of reading; in fact, more so because the scrolls act as tiny archives of bean facts, stories, and recipes. The amount of time and energy expended on these objects is a crucial component to their meaning and reception. To be sure, they are decidedly economical products (surplus tins that were purchased by the dozen), but the artist’s efforts in the library and skillful printing and labor of the text—hand-rolling each scroll with her mother until their hands became clawed and cramped—took care to give the viewer something in return.35 Moreover, as in the participatory scores Make a Salad and Make a Soup, Knowles’s reframing of banal experience as art anticipated an audience and viewership that could go beyond art’s conventional spaces of exhibition and reception and into a more general economy of shared knowledge and experiences. In her hands, beans become provisional (art) objects intimately related to processes of biological life (nourishment), social praxis (ritual), and communication (reading)—all of which could be manifested both privately and publicly.36 If, as Benjamin H. D. Buchloh has observed, the Fluxus multiple “set out to erase the traditional boundaries between linguistic and visual production, between text and object,” then Knowles’s unique dissolving of material and performative borders intuits an ambiva274

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lence about the body in everyday life.37 Coterminous with emerging discourses of feminism and liberation politics, and by extension, the anxieties around questions of labor (artistic and domestic), I wish to conclude by arguing that Knowles was pursuing both aesthetic and social ends. What is most interesting about her use of beans is not just their ubiquity and seemingly endless supply of form and technique (as food, objects, histories, narratives), but also their unexpected relation to concerns surrounding political and social inequity. In a telling note on the intersection of beans and global poverty, war, and famine, Knowles once shared a private story of familial hardship: The bean is an everyman food. One thinks of the famine in medieval Europe when poor people survived on beans alone. When I see people eating butter, I remember how hard it felt to knead the lard during the war years. One spread the color through a plastic pack by hand, shaped it to make it look like a pack of butter . . . My concern with the physical stuffs came from growing up in a frugal family.38

And more broadly, their multifunctionality: Beans are the first food associated with the poor. Documents in tablet form with recipes have been discovered, but most recently in a rock crevice on cliffs off the Pacific coast what may be an ancient vestment has appeared. Its origins are completely unknown . . . Egyptians imagined it was sufficient to eat lentils to enlighten the mind and open the heart, and perhaps as well to make music!39

Fostering an attentiveness to the humble bean and its presence in agriculture, historical bookkeeping, regional diets, and other forms of social engagement and concern, Knowles’s choice of material also situates her within the emerging discourse of feminism, despite avoiding an explicitly political program. As critic Jill Johnston has observed, “Alison Knowles is quite aware at this point that only a woman would have made a public salad in 1962, and that only a woman would be so identified with food—beans, of all kinds, which have figured in so much of her work.”40 However true that sentiment might seem, there were other artists, male artists in fact, who were working through the language of

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food in the 1960s to enact and overthrow certain traditional notions of art. European artists Daniel Spoerri (at times associated with Fluxus), Marcel Broodthaers, and Piero Manzoni specifically held up kitchen items, food, and bodily processes for aesthetic investigation. In Spoerri’s assemblages of dishes on tabletops (1960), Broodthaers’s egg-shell construction paintings Coquilles d’oeufs (1966), or Manzoni’s doughy Achrome (1962) buns coated in kaolin and affixed to canvas support, quotidian foodstuffs are appropriated as an expansion of the readymade, and serve to unravel certain postwar techniques of representation.41 But unlike their efforts, Knowles’s bean projects gesture toward the more radical choice of removing the “pristine” modernist canvas (or vertical tabletop) altogether, letting her accumulated data of beans generate multiple readings and experiences outside the frame of art. That is, the food objects are contained but remain uncontainable. In Bean Rolls, Knowles’s random assortment of dried beans and portable cans is meant to associate the artwork within the origins of sustenance and creativity. They are also potentially unruly in that their contents could (and did) spill out—enabling an infinite number of sound events. The work is an interesting counter-point to Manzoni’s Merda d’artiste (Artist’s Shit) (1961), which recovers a more literal spilling out when the artist’s readymade of small circular tin cans purportedly contained thirty grams of his own bodily waste. Manzoni’s materiality speaks to the physical residue of eaten objects and commodities; indeed, its price calculated to sell for its weight in gold, its value fluctuating according to contingent market dictates. Knowles’s bean objects also allude to market exchange by highlighting their history and value as currency in different cultures. Cocoa beans were exchanged, for example, in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica civilizations, including the Aztec and Mayan empires. In recasting the value of beans in the currency of art, Knowles hints at both ancient and modern rituals of conviviality and social exchange. Moreover, Broodthaers’s foodstuffs, which art historian Rachel Haidu argues refers to as particular attentiveness to his Belgianness,42 Knowles’s beans do not signify (ironically or otherwise) a particular national diet or identity, yet they do serve as reminders of their role as a primary staple for Americans suffering through the Great Depression in the

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1930s, or anxiously stockpiling canned goods in homemade bunkers during the Cold War paranoia in the 1950s.43 If the generative capacity of mass-produced objects like Bean Rolls serves to augment the corporeal, provisional, and political conditions of living, then Knowles’s multiple readymade engages these concerns, through a prolonged meditation on the economic and circulatory systems of the literal body and the body politic. Indeed, it can be argued that the continuity between the propositional score and the expanded readymade is part of a larger concern of Knowles to address the phenomena of global poverty and the conditions of domestic labor by calling attention to the practice of eating itself, not only as a process of the body but a procedure of art. The transformations of the eating body are uniquely inflected in Knowles’s art practice of the late 1960s and early 1970s and aimed to reexamine art itself as a social relation. She follows what Bill Brown has described as “the chance interruption” where “the story of objects asserting themselves as things [is] the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.”44 That kind of relationality, evidenced in a delicate oscillation of the processes of sociality, gastronomy, and economic accessibility, is precisely what makes her food-based works paradigms of the productive mixing of art and life.

Conclusion For sociologist Henri Lefebvre, whose critical studies of the “ensemble of activities” in daily life also materialized in the early 1960s, in order to properly analyze the dispositions and practices acquired through the social world one must be attentive to the “general processes of development: evolution, growth, aging, of biological or social protection or change.”45 Similarly, Knowles’s multimedial Bean Rolls highlight the sensorial, biological acts of everyday life, and represent a shift by the artist to a definitively open-ended practice premised on the potentiality of the found environment; on the complexity of objects and rituals that bind the social sphere. As a founding member of Fluxus, and a pioneer in the emergence of performance art, Knowles was part of a



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larger movement in the postwar era that replaced the usual materials of painting and sculpture (pigment, wood, stone, metal) with unusual materials (food, plastic, everyday objects, the artist’s body, etc.). Like many others in her generation, it was, again, a lessening of traditional artistic control that could lead to more productive and liberating ends. In this way, Knowles answered Lefebvre’s call for a critique of everyday life—that urgency to turn our attention to the dispositions and practices acquired through the social world that structures perception and action. Knowles’s text-object-performance works organize around devalued objects and experiences that maintain a kind of rigorous attention to touch and communicability. What is evident decades later is how effectively Knowles’s chance-derived experimentations serve to mobilize another dimension of perception and knowledge through an activation of domestic and urban zones of consumption. Examining the rich subject of food and other processes, I maintain that Knowles’s unassuming objects occupy a threshold for larger social, cultural, and political concerns that transfer the value of food work with artwork. The ways in which she imagines her public is contingent, then, on the destabilization of certain public and private spheres associated with aesthetic, social, and biological economies and circuits of exchange. The openness to provisional, unknowable outcomes, at once fertile with risk and reward was thus no arbitrary formulation, but rather a politics, a system, and a critical stake in the reception and distribution of meaning. We see this in the artist’s creation of works that rely on the direct engagement of the audience, asking us to consider the ways in which the physical and social body interacts with the environment, including where our food sources come from. Broadly speaking, then, one recurring theme of Knowles’s Bean Rolls, and her other food-based works of the 1960s and 1970s, concerns the registration of tasks mostly associated with women and the maintenance of households, the familial, political, and social body. Finally, the rather simple object of a readymade canned book of beans turns into a rich examination of the varying institutional and social pressures one negotiates every day.

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Chapter 16

Cooking and Eating across Species Natalie Jeremijenko’s Cross(x)Species Adventure Club Lindsay Kelley

LURES: wishing fish well gin rosemary grapefruit juice tonic velvet falernum lime juice bitters chitinase The major source of mercury in our bodies is from fish. These lures were designed as delicious cross species nutrition that is visual and sensually appealing. The hook is there is no hook, but there is chelating agent that when ingested (by fish or human) bind to the bio-­ accumulated heavy metals and PCB, and allow the organisms to pass these out of their bodies in a complexed and less reactive form. These then bound forms settle into the silt, and are effectively removed bioavailability. Small actions to feed the fish can aggregate 279

s­ignificant effect, augment the nutritional resources and improve the health of fish, aquatic ecosystems and humans.1 Natalie Jeremijenko asks, “Can we rescript our interactions with nature?”2 Her answer focuses in part on the food we share with animals. Jeremijenko’s Cross(x)Species Adventure Club hosts supper clubs that feature menus designed to promote interaction between animals, plants, and humans. Environmental remediation begins by addressing the “bio-amplification that happens through the food web.”3 Cooking and recipe development emerge as scientific practices with implications for ecological well-being across species. Consider mercury, and Jeremijenko’s Lures, a recipe and social experiment that she considers to be “the iconic example” of the project.4 Most of the mercury in human bodies comes from eating fish contaminated by methylmercury.5 Fish quickly absorb mercury from waterways polluted by human activities like burning coal, but they excrete these metals very slowly. To clear mercury from human and fish bodies, the Cross(x) Species Adventure Club developed lures laced with chitinase, a chelating agent that transforms heavy metals into harmless salts.6 This approach enfolds an entire ecosystem: the lures are edible for both fish and humans, and if fish can eliminate heavy metals more quickly, the entire food web benefits. The chitinase lures promote companionship and entanglement. Companion, cum panis, means sharing food together. Companionship can arise from almost any act of sharing. With the lures, humans and fish share a diet engineered for environmental remediation. Sharing these particular foods promotes an active, interventionist companionship anchored in bodily processes. Human and fish flesh process methylmercury in tandem, mirroring and undoing the cycles of pollution and consumption that created our present need for these targeted foods. Lures model food webs and ecosystems to suggest how humans might change the way they act within these systems. Jeremijenko’s recipes alter the composition of human and animal bodies—eating together becomes world making. With a cookbook in progress, Cross(x)Species Adventure Club 280

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has hosted meals in venues around the world. Jeremijenko’s menus include a meal designed for geese and people, cocktails focused on the environmental impact of oil spills, and investigations of water, soil, and terroir. She collaborates with molecular gastronomist Mihir Desai and food designer Emilie Baltz to produce foods with unexpected forms and textures. Of her decision to use molecular gastronomy, Jeremijenko explains that “the complexity of the tastes that people are experiencing makes them open to hearing about these complex systems and processes that they would otherwise not be motivated to hear.”7 Creating change demands new technologies, unexpected combinations, and interspecies alliances. While eating a technologically sophisticated meal like those prepared for Cross(x)Species Adventure Club, we begin to understand ways in which our bodily processes mirror larger processes at work in the world—we see our intestines as wetlands, and our human microbiomes as atmospheres, oceans, and fertile soils. Most of our meals do not provoke these sorts of reflections. How do Cross(x)Species Adventure Club menus succeed in demonstrating the connections between the multitude of organisms and systems that make up our bodies and the ecologies that make up our surroundings? In part, these connections are facilitated by the mechanisms of molecular gastronomy. Inspired by laboratory experiments and chemistry and “the science of flavor,” molecular gastronomy combines textures and ingredients in unexpected ways. René Redzepi’s Copenhagen restaurant Noma promotes Nordic cuisine, houses a research laboratory, and takes up molecular gastronomy techniques (Redzepi worked at Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli before opening Noma). Noma and Cross(x) Species Adventure Club both aim to, in Redzepi’s words, “experience the sensation of time and place.”8 To this situated knowledge, Cross(x) Species Adventure Club adds active environmental remediation. The technologies at work in these recipes do provide unexpected flavors and textures and do encourage awareness of time and place, as with Redzepi’s Nordic cuisine, and in addition, the body’s processes reference the earth’s processes with the specific intention of effecting change, as with the Lures clearing mercury in human and fish bodies. This active remediation distinguishes Jeremijenko’s deployment of molecular gastronomy from the work that restaurants do, even very

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ecologically minded restaurants like Noma. These menus place our bodily and planetary ecosystems in conversation and move beyond the meal to argue that food preparation, recipe development, eating, digesting, and excretion are mechanisms for environmental remediation. If much of the environmental effect of a restaurant like Noma takes place before the meal (foraging and sourcing local ingredients, for example), Cross(x)Species Adventure Club emphasizes the work that its menus do after the meal, collecting and transforming heavy metals or intervening in amphibian disease epidemics. The nuances of molecular gastronomy, coupled with the resulting subtle tastes and textures, model a sensory, digestive approach to technologies of environmental remediation. Molecular gastronomy has entered the global culinary imagination from several directions at once. Although many chefs object to the term molecular gastronomy, preferring alternatives like “new cuisine” or “modernist cuisine,” “molecular gastronomy” has proven to be enduring shorthand for a range of research questions and culinary techniques. Molecular gastronomy was first pioneered in an academic context, but elite restaurants quickly became the public face of the movement. Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli (1987–2011) exemplified new culinary forms and tastes (El Bulli exists at the time of writing as El Bulli Foundation, which promotes an expansive educational agenda). In addition to the previously mentioned Noma, other well-known molecular gastronomy restaurants around the world include Grant Achatz’s Alinea in Chicago, Wylie Dufresne’s wd~50 in New York, and Seiji Yamamoto’s Nihonryori RyuGin in Tokyo. Molecular gastronomy extends beyond these exclusive venues into the home kitchen with television shows like Alton Brown’s Good Eats, publications and television produced by America’s Test Kitchen, a range of DIY projects in magazines like MAKE, and even molecular gastronomy boxed kits. Behind the scenes, some molecular gastronomy labs and restaurants receive substantial funding from large food corporations, while others do the opposite, promoting open source and nonprofit models.9 All of these cultural forms contribute to an expanded notion of how new technologies inform food preparation and what it means to cook. The line between cooking and chemistry becomes porous, and in the case of Jeremijenko’s menus, cooking and chemistry further collapse into 282

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environmental remediation. The palate embraces bubbles, foams, and aromatic accompaniments, while the kitchen bench accommodates tools like ultrasound, liquid nitrogen, and syringes. Physicist Nicholas Kurti and chemist Hervé This coined the term molecular gastronomy in 1988 while programming a series of workshops on physics, chemistry, and cooking.10 This went on to write the first and also the best-known and most accessible treatise on molecular gastronomy, Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor. This’s book revisits common processes, from how to hard boil eggs to how to best cool a cup of coffee, then follows these experiments with sections on the “Physiology of Flavor” (why we feel full, food allergies, specific flavors and tastes) and “Investigations and Models” (using yeast, environmental factors in taste perception). This asserts that “cooking is not the same thing as molecular gastronomy, for craft aims at the production of goods, not of knowledge.”11 Defending itself as a knowledge production enterprise, molecular gastronomy regards “time-honored maxims, proverbs, old wives’ tales, folk beliefs, and culinary rules” as “millstones round our necks that weigh us down when they are false and wings that carry us aloft when they are true.”12 Recipes have a low status here, dismissed as “protocols that relegate cooks to the status of mere executors.”13 For This, “traditional ways are not always best.”14 A critical eye must be cast on what has come before. We must avoid rote learning in the kitchen and instead evaluate our choices against scientific understandings of the properties of the ingredients at hand. This and Kurti speak of molecular gastronomy as if it has been called into being from the ether, invented from scratch, created with no historical baggage to encumber a new discipline. Although home economics and European culinary tradition could not be more different in their histories and tenants, molecular gastronomy owes a great deal to the global home economics movement, an interdisciplinary field of study that popularized the idea that chemistry and science belonged in the kitchen.15 Among the home economics master’s and PhD theses filed in 1954–1955, the following titles suggest that chemistry and biology thrived within home economics contexts, even if practitioners tended to wear aprons rather than lab coats: “Determination of Meringue Slippage and Liquid Drained from Pies

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Prepared in Quantity” (Shirley A. Felt, Cornell University, 1955), “Lipid Metabolism and Cell Division” (Elinor Levin, Wayne University, 1955), “Effect of Xanthophyll on the Palatability, Fat Stability, and Histological Characteristics of Fresh and Frozen Broad-breasted Bronze Turkeys” (Burnadine L. Lewis, Kansas State University, 1955), and “The Effect of Methods of Preparation on the Retention of Ascorbic Acid and Dehydroascorbic Acid of Raw and Cooked Vegetables” (Lois Ann Lund, University of Minnesota, 1954).16 These projects could be interpreted as molecular gastronomy if pursued today. Home economics laboratories produced serious chemistry while also building the corporate alliances that molecular gastronomy labs currently negotiate— the thesis titles above make an effort to appeal to industry agendas, with interests like frozen food and mass production. Before home economics, corporate sponsorship for food science and culinary processes was not the norm. Sophia Roosth’s ethnography of French molecular gastronomy laboratories and kitchens traces the funding sources for molecular gastronomy laboratories (focusing on This). Roosth writes, “The question ‘what will we eat tomorrow?’ begs the question of who decides what we eat tomorrow, a question all the more vexing when keeping in mind that molecular gastronomy research is funded by the food industry.”17 The 1950s, when home economics gathered momentum as a field of study, was a decade marked by a surge in industrialism and new food technologies partially motivated by industrial warfare. In this earlier era, the food industry benefited from its alliances with home economics, familiarizing home cooks with new technologies in much the same way molecular gastronomy aims to do today. Home economics did not produce an equivalent to the haute cuisine experience we associate with molecular gastronomy, which is influenced by historical understandings of gastronomy, terroir, and culinary traditions that predate industrialization. Nonetheless, as a container for scholarly research in the kitchen and as a model for culinary partnerships with food science technologists, home economics must be acknowledged as a castoff relative of molecular gastronomy. Molecular gastronomy forgets or deliberately denigrates the women who pioneered chemistry in the kitchen. Its top t­ echnologist-chefs are nearly all men (a recent “Best Molecular Gastronomy Chef ” Internet 284

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competition presents a ballot of twelve men18), and molecular gastronomy does little to intervene in the status quo in restaurant kitchens, where only 20 percent of all “Chef or Head Cook” positions are held by women.19 Masculine discourse dominates the rhetoric of molecular gastronomy. By rejecting “old wives’ tales,” cookbooks, and recipes, molecular gastronomists devalue associations with women in the kitchen. Roosth describes how “old wives’ tales,” if scientifically proven, are “rechristened ‘culinary formalisms.’”20 The laboratory erases the “old wife” and her outmoded speech by deeming her knowledge tenuous and anecdotal before scientifically validating the culinary problem at hand. Once validated, the old wife disappears; culinary formalisms no longer belong to her but to the laboratory. Collaborations like Jeremijenko’s and Desai’s contribute muchneeded complexity and political consciousness to molecular gastronomy discourse. One of the few molecular gastronomy enterprises led by a woman, the Cross(x)Species Adventure Club counters scientific “god tricks” with multispecies creative work that builds on feminist technoscience instead of seeking out and decrying technophobia.21 Most critically, Cross(x)Species Adventure Club acts with environmental remediation in mind. In its corporate-sponsored manifestation, molecular gastronomy springs from Haraway’s “everywhere and nowhere” fully formed, and floating above the concerns about toxicity, pollution, and species extinction that animate Cross(x)Species Adventure Club.22 It may be possible that Cross(x)Species Adventure Club is not molecular gastronomy at all; the project may move beyond molecular gastronomy, creating a new enterprise that melds science, ecology, and cooking to create politically powerful culinary designs. Yet, molecular gastronomy remains critical to the vocabulary of the project, and the recipes quote extensively from classic molecular gastronomy techniques. Cross(x)Species Adventure Club may refashion molecular gastronomy as an incidental effect of its projects, but the menus do not exist simply to intervene in or politicize molecular gastronomy. Jeremijenko no doubt chose molecular gastronomy in part because its elaborate protocols allow for dishes that register a range of sensory and biopolitical concerns. Complex problems merit complex food, and critical engagements with techoscience animate both the food and politics

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consumed in the Cross(x)Species Adventure Club. The formal elements of molecular gastronomy are often elegant and sculptural, engaging natural systems in playful ways. These engagements invite questions of scale and reflection, which Jeremijenko and Desai extend into ecological critique. For example, molecular gastronomy takes endless delight in the egg. With its varied textures and delicate anatomy, the egg becomes the subject of countless experiments and the inspiration for new creations. This examines every preparation of the egg from hard-boiled to soufflé as well as the properties of its yolk, whites, and membranes. In their Oil Spill meal, Jeremijenko and Desai employ “inverse spherification” to craft an egg yolk from beetroot. The egg’s vitelline envelope separates the yolk from the white, and this membrane must be pierced before the yolk’s liquid center spills out. Perhaps because it is relatively easy to do at home, inverse spherification is one of the most well-known molecular gastronomy techniques.23 The chemical reaction between calcic gluconolactato and sodium alginate causes a thin membrane (structurally similar to the egg’s vitelline envelope) to form around small quantities of liquid. Diners then spoon the spheres into their mouths, where pressure from the tongue and teeth pierces the membrane, allowing for a gush of flavor. Jeremijenko and Desai call these spheres “terrestrial bubbles,” the inverse of air bubbles underwater, prompting a consideration of “terrestrial versus aquatic environments and where we fit in.”24 Cross(x)Species Adventure Club begins with agricultural landscapes and creates new imaginary landscapes, with membranes and ecologies separating, joining, and facilitating encounter with the country we inhabit and digest. The chemically created membrane presents old foods in new ways, fulfilling the progressive aspirations of both molecular gastronomy and home economics. Terrestrial bubbles join courses anchored by flavored oils and dishes designed with wetlands in mind. Marshmallow, a wetland plant, mixes with crème de violette in edible cocktails called Wetkisses: Marsh*mallows for Kissing Frogs formerly known as Prince. The purple color references violacein, a purple pigment produced by bacteria common to wetland ecosystems. After drinking the cocktail, any frogs diners happen to kiss will be inoculated against the deadly chytrid fungus. By way of this imagining and dispersal of wetlands, 286

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diner-­participants become agents capable of positively impacting the public health of amphibians. Like the chitinase lures, Wetkisses activate companion relationships between human and nonhuman animals in a speculative framework of reciprocity. Kissing gives the frog a human-facilitated life, if not a human form. Transferring vital immunities from human lips to amphibian skin creates princes of a different order: amphibian royals are those who, although endangered, survive. As with the lures, the speculative activity of post-cocktail frog kisses enacts what Donna Haraway calls “multispecies cosmopolitics.” Haraway finds a path into Isabelle Stengers’s cosmopolitics by way of the stomach: “relations in multispecies cosmopolitics work by indigestion and infection, rather than reproduction.”25 Working across species boundaries makes reproduction both less probable and less interesting than viral modes of transmission and cooperation: the chelating lures intercept digestion to infect human and fish with metal-absorbing capacities, while frog kisses simultaneously infect and inoculate. Stengers frames cosmopolitics as a set of obligations: The term “cosmopolitics” introduces what is neither an activity, nor a negotiation, nor a practice, but the mode in which the problematic copresence of practices may be actualized . . . It is a form of asymmetrical reciprocal capture that guarantees nothing, authorizes nothing, and cannot be stabilized by any constraint, but through which the two poles of the exchange undergo a transformation.26

The moment that a Cross(x)Species Adventure Club participant shares a lure with a fish or kisses a frog, human, frog, and fish experience copresence and obligation across species boundaries. Cross(x) Species Adventure Club contains many activities, negotiations, and practices, but “multispecies cosmopolitics” attends to the moment of capture, infection, and resulting indigestion. Kissing the frog and feeding the fish rescript multispecies interaction without turning away from technology—instead of chasing Eden, these activities build on existing complexities. Against philosophies of conservation that would isolate and protect, Cross(x)Species Adventure Club recalibrates negotiations among plants, animals, and technoscience.

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Digestion becomes a way of figuring the landscape and encountering animals, plants, and environmental systems, with molecular gastronomy techniques providing metaphoric and literal mechanisms for imagining how bodies and landscapes interrelate. In the aftermath of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Jeremijenko elaborates on the technologies of digestion and the difficulties of her position against conservation: In terms of oil, one of the big issues in the gulf is that there are many people calling to protect the wetlands from the spill. That’s a very understandable position to take, but I take a completely opposite one, because the only technology we know of that can effectively digest large amounts of petrochemical waste is wetlands. So we don’t need to protect the wetlands—instead, we need to expose the wetlands and also build many more wetlands, and reconstruct the ones we’ve destroyed, in order to deal with this spill.27

If wetlands are organs of vast ecosystems, why should they be held apart? A desire to conserve and protect the wetlands might be seen as analogous to a desire to pinch off the small intestine and keep it exactly as it is, clean and untainted by food or waste matter. Of course, such an action would have terrible consequences across the body. By turning to food and eating, Jeremijenko agitates against impulses to protect and keep pure. Although environmental policymakers and philosophers take more nuanced positions than the simple protective approaches that dominate the public discourse Jeremijenko responds to above,28 the idea that a critically functional system like the wetlands should be held apart and kept from performing important functions suggests that we should join Donna Haraway and “advocate pollution.”29 Mel Chin’s Revival Field (1991–ongoing), shares this project by seeking out sites of pollution and then transforming rather than conserving those sites. The reclamation potential of landscapes has been revealed over the last twenty-five years in a field of “hyperacculumator” plants designed to absorb heavy metals from a superfund site in Minnesota.30 Although Chin does not address food and eating with this project, Revival Field functions similarly to Cross(x)Species

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Adventure Club, transforming metals in the earth in much the same way that the Lures work with human and fish bodies. Cross(x)Species Adventure Club explicitly addresses wetland environments as digestive organs and interspecies cooperation with the cocktail Wetkisses. As with the Lures, eating Wetkisses creates chemical and cultural transformations. Wetkisses do not use actual marshmallow roots, or even the marshmallows we buy in the grocery store (which are not marshmallows at all, but are instead made of sugar and gelatin, processed to be puffy and chewy to emulate the texture of whipped marshmallow sap). Instead, Wetkisses are made of methylcellulose, which has been manipulated to resemble marshmallow fluff. Wetkisses simulate a simulation, referencing and recreating wetland plants with synthetic processes. By modeling and abstracting marshmallows, molecular gastronomy techniques model the recreation of wetlands that Jeremijenko advocates. If we can create a marshmallow in a lab, can we also create a landscape? A planet? Wetkisses propose both an activity and a construction project—the marshmallow transfers amphibian immunity to human companions, and the marshmallow also represents wetland landscapes that must be amplified and extended. Imagining wetland environments as digestive organs invites us to invert the metaphor and imagine our digestive systems as landscapes and ecologies. This shift in thinking has already begun, with research into the human microbiome revealing communities of microorganisms working together to perform nearly every physiological process. Often referred to as an “ecology” or an “ecosystem,” the human microbiome has been productively analyzed with ecological theory.31 Plants and animals converge in our understanding of how our bodies are colonized by a changing population of bacteria, viruses, and fungi. For example, microorganisms are often referred to as “microflora” or “normal flora,” even though “flora” refers to plant life. While “microbiota” might be more correct, “microflora” evokes the terrestrial landscape metaphor that has proven to be productive in thinking through the massive, if tiny, cooperative efforts that allow us to touch, taste, and digest. Attention to the visual cultures of the very small, sometimes called “molecular aesthetics,” often employs language that evokes the very large, with individual human microbiomes described as islands,



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figured as territory to be explored.32 The body maps to the earth, with digestive systems capturing plants, animals, and humans in a diffuse network. The atmospheric space of our intestinal flora may be diagnosed, pushed, and materially manipulated. The technoscience mediations made visible by molecular gastronomy model environmental interventions capable of diagnosing, pushing, and materially manipulating the atmospheric space of our intestinal flora and larger digestive systems around the planet, like wetland ecosystems. When transplanted into a critical art context, molecular gastronomy facilitates vital, even revolutionary culinary practices. Given the complexities of food science today, we are always eating technologies, but food technologies often hide in plain sight, seeking invisibility and familiarity. In its shocking strangeness, molecular gastronomy brings the technologies we are eating into visible and differently palatable forms. This act of making food technologies visible is already provocative, but when coupled with a political sensibility, molecular gastronomy projects like the Cross(x)Species Adventure Club lures facilitate new understandings of ecological intervention and material transformations across species boundaries. As a discipline, molecular gastronomy straddles biology, even biotechnology, and art, but before Cross(x)Species Adventure Club, molecular gastronomy has not been regarded as bioart. A relatively new set of practices and propositions, bioart broadens the scope of performance and installation art to include “wet” media like living plant and animal tissues, human and animal bodies, and ecological systems. Bioart prehistory begins with Edward Steichen’s exhibition of delphiniums at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1936.33 Steichen chemically triggered mutations in the delphiniums and then edited the final exhibition selection to exclude the flowers that were malformed or otherwise unrecognizable as flowers. Contemporary practitioners like Maria de Menezes, George Gessert, and Brandon Ballengée, working with butterflies, irises, and frogs, respectively, have engaged with Steichen’s experiments with projects that emphasize the aesthetic and political ramifications of mutation. In recent years, bioart has extended to embrace nearly every new bioscience technique, from genetic modifications to tissue culture protocols. Given the upsurge of bioart projects created in the 1990s and early 2000s, bioart 290

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has often been perceived as an outgrowth of digital media, privileging projects focused on genetics.34 Complicating this narrative, food and eating have been central concerns for many artists engaged with living systems, going back to the Harrisons’s Survival Piece No. 2: Notations on the Ecosystems of the Western Salt Works (with the Inclusion of Brine Shrimp) (1971), which created “three-dimensional color-field paintings” as brine shrimp consumed algae in saltwater ponds of various salinities.35 Both shrimp and salt were harvested from the ponds, aligning the work with feminist interventions like Alison Knowles’s Beans All Day and Leslie Labowitz-Starus’s Sproutime. This interest in sustainability and new ways of cultivating and consuming food has persisted and occupied contemporary bioart practitioners, including the Critical Art Ensemble, the Tissue Culture and Art Project, the Center for Genomic Gastronomy, and of course Natalie Jeremijenko. These practitioners emphasize the “wet” aspects of bioart, and many theorists and artists insist that authentic bioart projects manipulate living systems and uphold the “vitality of media.”36 Bioart has nurtured both art projects and an expanding network of contemporary curators, theorists, artists, and art historians who ask urgent questions about the commingling of biology, art, and performance, contributing to philosophies of interspecies collaboration, technoscience and biopolitics, and the evolving posthumanities.37 Overlaps with home economics and laboratory-based projects would suggest that molecular gastronomy has more in common with bioart than with mainstream food science (where aesthetic concerns are minimal and conformist) or with traditional cooking (where laboratory protocols are rarely embraced). As with bioart and its home economics prehistory, molecular gastronomy creates a space for critical reflection and communicates new scientific processes to new publics. Jeremijenko is already rooted in the bioart landscape with earlier projects like OneTrees and Biotech Hobbyist. OneTrees comprises one thousand clones of the same tree, micro-propagated in culture and then planted in different locations to form “a networked instrument that maps the micro climates of the Bay Area, connected not through the Internet, but through their biological material.”38 Biotech Hobbyist distributes kits and protocols to its readership, acknowledging that “some of the greatest cultural and technological advances have

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emerged from peoples bedrooms.”39 Building on participatory projects like these that emphasize experimentation, Jeremijenko’s molecular gastronomy collaboration with Desai extends her laboratory space from the street and the bedroom to the kitchen, offering multifaceted forms that ask many of the same questions as her bioart projects: How might we change our interactions with nature? How might humans and animals work together to solve environmental problems? What does generative ecology look like? What does it mean to stand against conservation and “advocate pollution?” The familiar scale of the human body connects the very small with the very large. Microbial communities of “invisible earthlings” are in dialogue with ecosystems, continents, and worlds.40 New textures and flavors work to evolve the palate: human and animal tastes converge, with shared meals destabilizing anthropocentric approaches to food and eating. With Cross(x)Species Adventure Club, molecular gastronomy helps establish culinary practices as science practices, using experimental processes to reveal the aesthetic, sensory, and metaphoric capacities of interspecies dining. Our food, our companions at table, and our metaphors opens up complex questions, complex politics, and complex actions, from making more wetlands to inoculating amphibians against deadly fungi to simply contemplating the weeping, porous membrane dividing water from air.

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Contributor s

Silvia Bottinelli is a full-time lecturer at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts / Tufts University. She received her PhD from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 2008. Bottinelli has previously published two books that explore the relationship between art, institutions, and the public in post-Fascist Italy: seleARTE: Una Finestra Sul Mondo (An Open Window to the World), 2010; and Un Premio Dimenticato. La Collezione del Fiorino alla Galleria d’arte moderna di Palazzo Pitti (A Forgotten Award: The Fiorino Collection at the Gallery of Modern Art, Palazzo Pitti), 2007. She has contributed chapters and essays to a number of volumes and exhibition catalogues. Her writing has appeared in many journals, among them Food Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal; Art Journal; Modernism/Modernity; Art Papers; Sculpture Magazine; Artribune; Predella; Ricerche di Storia dell’Arte; and Annali di Critica d’Arte. Bottinelli received an award for excellence in scholarship from the Food Studies Research Network in 2016. Jody B. Cutler (PhD, 2001, State University of New York at Stony Brook) writes about diverse contemporary art, artists, and art issues. Her scholarly articles have focused on American painter Robert Colescott (1925–2009) and Japanese multimedia artist Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), and she has contributed exhibition reviews regularly to the International Review of African American Art and Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism. She has been affiliated with a number of universities and colleges around the country over the past decade, and currently teaches art history courses at St. John’s University. Margherita d’Ayala Valva is assistant professor at Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (Italy), where she earned her PhD. Her monograph La collezione Sforni (2005) delves with the reception of French art in Italy. Other books, such as Bernasconi, Pensieri ai Pittori (2008), analyze artists’ writings and aphorisms. She currently contributes to the interdisciplinary research project Futurahma, examining problems of painting conservation in the 1910s and 1920s from the

point of view of art technological sources. Her recent research and publications focus on artists (in particular Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini) as readers of ancient treatises and writers of their own copybooks and handbooks of technical recipes on painting in the early twentieth century. These studies of technical art treatises and artists’ notebooks are intertwined with her research on gastronomic treatises and artists’ gastronomic diaries. Her study of food examines aestheticism, ethnography, and national celebration in the context of the 1911 Italian World’s Fair; her study of Carl Friedrich von Rumohr discusses his 1822 Geist der Kockunst. Rachel Federman is assistant curator of modern and contemporary drawings at the Morgan Library & Museum. She received her PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she wrote her dissertation on West Coast installation art. As assistant curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, she helped curate a major retrospective of the work of Bruce Conner (2016). She has published essays on Conner, Paul McCarthy, and Andy Warhol, among others. Anja Foerschner is a research specialist at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Originally trained as a visual artist, she holds a master’s degree in art pedagogy, art history, and philosophy (2008) and a PhD in art history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich (2011). Her research encompasses modern and contemporary art with special emphasis on performance art from Los Angeles and the Balkans, feminist art, the human body in contemporary art and culture, and the emotion of disgust in art. Her research has been published, among others, by the Getty Research Journal, Afterimage—The Journal for Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, GENRE—International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Literature and the Arts, kunsttexte, and Performance Art Journal. She co-curated the exhibition WWI: War of Images, Images of War at the Getty Research Institute in 2014 and served as a curator to Marta Jovanovic’s performances Motherhood and Ljubav (both Belgrade, 2016). She is currently conducting an international research project on the documentation and archiving strategies of feminist performance artists from the 1960s to the present.

294 Contributors

Sharon Hecker specializes in modern and contemporary Italian art. Her essays on Medardo Rosso, Lucio Fontana, and Luciano Fabro appeared in Oxford Art Journal and the Burlington Magazine, as well as edited volumes, such as Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure (2008), Patrioti si diventa: Linguaggi di pedagogia patriottica nell’Italia postunitaria (2010), and Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present (2010). Her essays on Fabro include “Art Is Glimpsed” in Contemporary Art and Classical Myth (2011), “If the Boot Fits . . . Luciano Fabro’s Italie” in Italy from Without (2013), and “‘Markets, Bacchanals and Gallows’: Luciano Fabro’s Italia all’asta in Piazza Plebiscito in Naples (2004)” in Platzanlagen und ihre Monumente: Wechselwirkungen zwischen Skulptur und Stadtraum (2013). Hecker received fellowships from the Fulbright and Mellon Foundations, and a Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities. With Harry Cooper, she curated Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions at the Harvard University Art Museums (2004). Her most recent book, A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture, will appear in June 2017. Carol Helstosky teaches history and historical method at the University of Denver in Colorado. Her research explores the ways in which food consumption became a politically charged issue in modern European history. Her first book, Garlic and Oil: Food and Politics in Modern Italy, examined this issue in the context of liberal, fascist, and democratic regimes. She has also published Pizza: A Global History and Food Cultures of the Mediterranean and edited The Routledge History of Food. She is currently finishing a research project on foreign media coverage of art forgery scandals in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italy. She continues to be interested in the history of food, particularly the history of “not eating meat” or the history of food cultures that were mostly vegetarian, either out of necessity or choice. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the German Marshall Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Contributors 295

Lindsay Kelley’s art practice and scholarship explore how the experience of eating changes when technologies are being eaten. She cares about the edges and fringes of food, and the circumstances that transform a substance from food to not-food and back again. Her first book, Bioart Kitchen: Art, Feminism and Technoscience, attends to topics like the bodily engagements of home economists, the borderlands of bioart, and starvation food and eating. The book emerges from her work at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she holds a PhD in the history of consciousness and an MFA in digital art and new media. Kelley is a lecturer at UNSW Australia Art & Design, Research Fellow at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, UNSW, and International Research Fellow at the Center for Fine Art Research, Birmingham City University. She is also a co-investigator with the KIAS funded Research-Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory: Arts and the Anthropocene (University of Alberta, Canada). Barbara Kutis is assistant professor of fine arts–art history at Indiana University Southeast. Specializing in global contemporary art, Kutis teaches courses on modern and contemporary art, cross-­cultural art, race and identity, and women in art. She received her PhD in art history from the University of Delaware and has taught at a variety of institutions, including Rutgers University-Camden, Swarthmore College, Temple University, and the University of Delaware. Her current research centers on contemporary artist-parents and their engagement with issues of gender, domesticity, and parenting in respect to their particular cultural contexts, identity politics, and foodbased performance art. Her previous research includes a study of the San Francisco-based artist Joan Brown and her portraits of her son, Noel. She has presented papers on Olaf Breuning, Guy Ben-Ner, the Czech collective Matky a Otcové, and Elżbieta Jabłońska. Her writing has appeared in n.paradoxa: International Feminist Journal and the Palmer Museum of Art’s Couples Discourse exhibition catalogue. Harald Lemke lives in Hamburg, Germany; works as philosopher, curator, and urban activist; teaches at the Institute for Cultural Theory, Culture Research and Arts at Leuphana University in Lueneburg, Germany, and at the Centre for Gastrosophy, University Salzburg,

296 Contributors

Austria; was 2013 Visiting Professor at the University Kyoto; 2007 Visiting Professor at the East China Normal University in Shanghai, China; 2006 Habilitation; 1999 PhD in philosophy. He studied philosophy and history at the University of Hamburg, Konstanz, and Berkeley. He has authored numerous publications on ethical, political, aesthetical, intercultural topics. His books that are related to food include Ethics of Eating: Introduction to Gastrosophy (2007); Eat Art: Toward an Aesthetics of Culinary Taste (2007); The Dining Society: Philosophical and Cultural Theoretical Approaches (2008); The Wisdom of Food: Gastrosophical Foundations of Japanese and Chinese Food Culture (2008); Culture|Nature: Art and Philosophy in the Context of Urban Development (2009); Politics of Food: How Will the World of Tomorrow Feed Itself? (2012); About Food: Philosophical Expeditions (2014). Recently, he is the director of the International Forum Gastrosophy, Austria: www.gastrosophy.net. For more information: www.haraldlemke.de. Cecilia Novero completed her doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. After positions held in various colleges and universities in the United States, she is now senior lecturer in the Department of Languages and Cultures at the University of Otago in New Zealand Aotearoa. Her book entitled Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art (2010) examines the temporal relations between the historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde through an analysis of food. Cecilia’s research and teaching interests encompass aesthetics and critical theory, European cinema, travel literature, the former GDR, especially women writers, and, currently, “animal studies.” In the area of food studies, she has published scholarly articles on Futurism, Dada, Viennese Actionism, the Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri and other Eat artists, the cultural history of food, and German and European film. Spatula&Barcode (www.spatulaandbarcode.net) is the collaborative identity for projects developed by Laurie Beth Clark (professor, Art Department, University of Wisconsin) and Michael Peterson (associate professor, Art Department, University of Wisconsin). Their relational artworks explore conviviality, criticality, cartography and,

Contributors 297

always, food ways. Their work has been hosted in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Germany, Morocco, the Netherlands, Uruguay, and the United States. Fabio Parasecoli is associate professor and director of Food Studies Initiatives at the New School in New York City. His work explores the intersections among food, media, and politics, particularly in popular culture. He studied East Asian cultures and political science in Rome, Naples, and Beijing. After covering Middle and Far Eastern political issues, he worked for many years as the US correspondent for Gambero Rosso, Italy’s authoritative food and wine magazine, covering North America and the Caribbean. Recent books include Food Culture in Italy (2004), Bite Me! Food in Popular Culture (2008), and Al Dente: A History of Food in Italy. He is general editor with Peter Scholliers of the six-volume Cultural History of Food (2012). Nicola Perullo is professor of aesthetics at the University of Gastronomic Sciences, Pollenzo, since 2013. He worked with A. G. Gargani in Pisa, where he earned his doctorate, and with J. Derrida in Paris, where he pursued further studies. The first period of his research was primarily concerned with Wittgenstein and the philosophy of language, Derrida and deconstruction, and Vico and the aesthetics of the eighteenth century. Some of his first works are dedicated to these philosophers. In the last ten years, the course of his study has led him to analyze, describe, and theorize about the relationship between philosophical thought and food, in order to introduce the prospect of the aesthetics of taste and of gastronomy. Some of his work has contributed to the codification of this discipline in Italy. Following on from the theme of taste, his work focuses on the relations between food, cooking, and art. Most recently, his research focuses in particular on the idea of experience as a participatory form of knowledge, starting from the case of wine: the term “epistenology” has been used to capture this notion of a conceptual/experiential field. Key publications include Bestie e bestioni: Il problema dell’animale in Vico (2002), Per un’estetica del cibo (2006), L’altro gusto: Saggi di estetica gastronomica (2008), Filosofia della gastronomia laica: Il gusto come esperienza (2010), La scena del senso: A partire da Wittgenstein e Derrida (2011), Il gusto come esperienza (2012), Taste as Experience (2016), La cucina 298 Contributors

è arte? Filosofia della passione culinaria (2013), Wineworld: New essays on Wine, Taste, Philosophy, and Aesthetics (2013), and Epistenologia: Il vino e la creatività del tatto (2016). Edward A. Vazquez is associate professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Middlebury College. He is a scholar of modern and contemporary art, with a historical focus on the art of the 1960s and 1970s, and minimal and conceptual art in particular. His book on the American sculptor Fred Sandback entitled Aspects: Fred Sandback’s Sculpture is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press. His writing has appeared in Art Journal and Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, and caa.reviews, among other venues. Nicole L. Woods is assistant professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of Notre Dame, where she teaches modern and contemporary art history, criticism, and theory with a focus on the neo-avant-garde, performance, and gender studies. Her current book project is the first in-depth study of the diverse art objects, performances, environmental works, visual poems, and publishing activities of American artist Alison Knowles. She is also working on a project that examines the convergence of feminism, political radicalism, and expanded media practices in the 1960s and 1970s; and a project on the use of food as a source of contemplation, consumption, and display in twentieth-century art. Her essays and criticism have appeared in publications such as X-TRA: A Contemporary Art Quarterly, Performance Research, Radical Philosophy, caa.reviews, and the Walker Art Center’s Living Collections Catalogue.

Contributors 299

N ot es

Introduction 1. Cecilia Novero, Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 2. It must be acknowledged that edible architecture and sculpture have their roots in Renaissance centerpieces and in neoclassicist confectionery, as recent studies highlight. See John Varriano, Tastes and Temptations: Food and Art in Renaissance Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals, Getty Research Institute’s online exhibition, 2000, http://goo.gl/n2oO11 (accessed March 13, 2015). 3. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (New York: Harper & Row, 1969). 4. Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O’Connor, Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011). 5. Aesthetes and Eaters, ed. Alexandra Alisauskas, Invisible Culture 14 (2010): http://goo.gl/iY0uCY (accessed March 3, 2015). 6. See also the more significant retrospective on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the first important Eat-Art exhibition in Amsterdam, 1971: Daniel Spoerri presents Eat-Art, ed. Elisabeth Hartung (Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2001), exhibition catalogue. Eating the Universe: Vom Essen in der Kunst, ed. Magdalena Holzhey (Düsseldorf: DuMont, 2009), exhibition catalogue. 7. Magdalena Holzhey, “Eating the Universe,” in Eating the Universe, 230. 8. Stephanie Smith, ed., Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art (Chicago: Smart Museum, 2013). 9. For a historical overview on the role of food in world’s fairs, see A Taste of Progress: Food at International and World Exhibitions in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Nelleke Teughels and Peter Scholliers (London: Ashgate), 2015. 10. Arts and Foods, ed. Germano Celant (Milan: Electa, 2015); Kitchens and Invaders, ed. Germano Celant (Milan: Electa, 2015). 11. For the postwar period, see Marco Panella, Il cibo immaginario: 1950–1970: pubblicità e immagini dell’Italia a tavola (Rome, Italy: Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 2014). For food design, see Beppe Finessi, Progetto cibo: la forma del gusto (Milan: Electa, 2013). 12. Cibo, estetica e arte, ed. Nicola Perullo (Pisa: ETS, 2014). Also see Nicola Perullo, Taste as Experience: The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Food (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 13. For alternative approaches, see for example the recent Le Arti e il Cibo, proceedings of the conference, ed. Sylvie Davidson and Fabrizio Lollini (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2014). This volume includes interdisciplinary

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c­ ontributions on food within a wide chronological range, from its role and representation in Renaissance centerpiece art, painting, literature, and gastronomy to twentieth-century visual art, film, and performance. In contrast to this survey, our ambition is to cover a much shorter period and to provide an organic reading— thesis-based—to contemporary food art practices. 14. Évelyne Cohen and Julia Csergo, “L’Artification du culinaire,” Sociétés & Représentations 34 (2012): 7–11. 15. The Getty Institute’s focus theme for 2015 and 2016 was, not by chance, that of “Art and Materiality.” http://www.getty.edu/research/scholars/years/pdf/poster_ gri15_16.pdf (accessed March 12, 2015). 16. Monika Wagner, Das Material der Kunst: Eine andere Geschichte der Moderne (München: C. H. Beck, 2001). This book’s cover includes an image of Jana Sterbak’s Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic. See also the great role confered to food as art material in Monika Wagner, Lexikon des künstlerischen Materials (München: C. H. Beck, 2002). 17. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 79. 18. Janine Antoni, From the Vow Made, http://goo.gl/wzi51l (accessed March 13, 2015).

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

Can Cuisine Be Art?: A Philosophical (and Heterodox) Proposal

1. Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 2. Glenn Kuehn, “Tasting the World: Environmental Aesthetics and Food as Art,” Contemporary Pragmatism 9, no. 1 (2012): 85–98. 3. Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 4. For more on this, see my book La cucina è arte? Filosofia della passione culinaria (Roma: Carocci, 2013). 5. Bénédict Beaugé, “On the Idea of Novelty in Cuisine: A Brief Historical Insight,” International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science 1, no. 1 (2012): 5–14. 6. Amy B. Trubek, Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 7. Richard Hamilton and Vincent Todoli, eds., Food for Thought/Thought for Food (New York: Actar, 2009). 8. On Ferran Adrià, see also Carol Helstosky’s essay in this collection. 9. Hervé This and Pierre Gagnaire, Il bello e il buono: La cucina tra arte, amore e tecnica (Roma: Gambero Rosso, 2006), 13; the translation is mine. 10. For a positive aesthetic account of popular art, see Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). 11. Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy, L’esthétisation du monde: Vivre à l’âge du capitalisme artiste (Paris: Gallimard, 2013). 12. Julie A. Mennella, Coren P. Jagnow, and Gary K. Beauchamp, “Prenatal and Postanatal Flavor Learning by Human Infants,” Pediatrics 6, no. 107 (2001), http:// goo.gl/KKJfEp (accessed March 3, 2015).

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Notes to Pages 8–30

13. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (Oxford: Clarendon University Press, 1975), 35. 14. For counterpoints on this issue, see Fabio Parasecoli’s essay in this collection. 15. René Redzepi, Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine (London: Phaidon, 2010). 16. Ann Cooper, A Woman’s Place Is in the Kitchen (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1998). 17. Carolyn Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2004). 18. Nicola Perullo, L’altro gusto: Saggi di estetica gastronomica (Pisa: ETS, 2008), 148–49. 19. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 20. Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archeology, Art, and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013), 104.

2



Time Changes Everything: Futurist/Modernist Cooking

1. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Cookbook, trans. Suzanne Brill (San Francisco: Bedford Arts, 1989), 98. 2. The historian Warren Belasco’s Meals to Come: The Future of Food (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) grapples with futuristic thinking about food in terms of popular and elite anxieties about food supply and the nature of food. 3. Many articles and book chapters written about Futurist cooking tend to understand the term avant-garde in a theatrical sense, indeed Futurist banquets were great performances, yet it was also true that the Futurists used food as means of commenting on a variety of political and social issues. See, for example, Kevin Landis, “Culinary Pataphysics: Dining, Theatre, and the Historical Avant-Garde,” Gastronomica 14, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 46–55. Enrico Cesaretti has linked Futurist cooking to previous ideas about food and aesthetics from the nineteenth century, specifically, Charles Fourier’s utopian ideas about gastronomy. See Enrico Cesaretti, “Recipes for the Future: Traces of Past Utopias in The Futurist Cookbook,” The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms 14, no. 7 (2009): 841–56. 4. The Italian version of the Futurist cookbook is reprinted as F. T. Marinetti, La Cucina Futurista (Milan: Longanesi, 1986), and there is an English translation: Marinetti, The Futurist Cookbook, trans. Suzanne Brill (Boston: Bedford Arts, 1989). All quotations and references used in this article will be taken from the English translation. On Futurist cooking, see Claudia Salaris, Cibo futurista: Dalla cucina nell’arte all’arte in cucina (Rome: Graffiti, 2000). Previously, I have written about the political context and history of Futurist cooking; Carol Helstosky, “Recipe for the Nation: Reading Italian History through La Scienza in Cucina and La Cucina Futurista,” Food and Foodways 11, no. 2–3 (2003): 113–40. 5. Pastasciutta meant pasta. The Italian tradition of the minestra, or first course/meal, was divided into categories of wet (soup, for example) and dry (pasta dishes).



Notes to Pages 32–48

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6. The Futurist Cookbook, 33–38. 7. On Futurist banquets as performance, see Günter Berghaus, “The Futurist Banquet: Nouvelle Cuisine or Performance Art?” New Theatre Quarterly 17, no. 1 (February 2001): 3–17. 8. The Futurist Cookbook, 69–70. 9. Italian officials were optimistic prior to peace negotiations after World War I. The Italian prime minister signed the Treaty of London in 1915, agreeing to go to war on the side of the Allies in exchange for irredentist territories along the Adriatic. At Versailles, Italy was denied much of the anticipated territory (for a variety of reasons), and diplomats returned to Italy to face the wrath of nationalists and others who now claimed that Italy had won the war but bungled the peace. 10. The Futurist Cookbook, 110–11. 11. For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Italian diet was not dominated by pasta consumption. Dried or fresh pasta was more expensive than other staples, such as bread or polenta, and therefore, was treated as more of a luxury or special food item. As more Italian emigrants (especially southern Italians) left Italy for the Americas, they created a foreign market for dried pasta and processed tomatoes, two industries that grew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See Carol Helstosky, Garlic and Oil: Food and Politics in Modern Italy (Oxford: Berg, 2001). Not surprisingly, the Futurists were rumored and accused of eating pasta “on the sly,” and many humorous articles and letters to the editor were published regarding the proposed ban on pasta. On Marinetti’s troubled relationship with pasta, see Romy Golan, “Ingestion/Anti-Pasta,” Cabinet 10 (Spring 2003) online edition, http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/10/anti-pasta.php. 12. The Futurists endorsed rice consumption as an alternative to pasta consumption. Rice would make the Italian body lighter, more agile and ready for the future. During the interwar period, European and American physiologists found that rice was one of the most easily and quickly digested foods. It was not unusual, for example, for rice dishes to be featured in cookbook chapters on “invalid” or “nursery” foods. See Carol Helstosky, “Recipe for the Nation.” 13. In the section of the cookbook titled “Against Xenomania,” the Futurists declared “. . . we consider vulgar and foolish the Italian woman who proudly participates in cocktail parties,—perhaps suitable for the North American race but certainly poisonous to our race. Vulgar and foolish the Italian woman who thinks it more elegant to say ‘I’ve drunk four cocktails’ than ‘I’ve eaten a bowl of minestrone.’” The Futurist Cookbook, 60. 14. The Futurist Cookbook, 77. On the synesthetic aspects of Futurist cooking, see Paolo Fabbri, “Ipotizzare il periodo: sintassi di un pranzo paralibero,” from “Imprevisti Futuristi,” Il Verri 1 (2010), available online at http://www.paolofabbri.it/ saggi/ipotizzare_periodo.html. 15. The Futurist Cookbook, 40. 16. The most consistent coverage of the Futurist cooking movement can be found in La Cucina Italiana, a middle-class culinary magazine founded by fascist sympathizers Delia and Umberto Notari. Yet the editors were mostly interested in exploring the pros and cons of pasta consumption; their attention to Futurist cooking faded by 1933, though in later years, one can find an occasional letter to the editor about Futurism on the pages of the magazine. See “Una battaglia intorno alla

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Notes to Pages 48–52

pasta asciutta,” La Cucina Italiana 2, no. 12 (December 15, 1930), 2; “Cucina Futurista e Pasta Asciutta,” La Cucina Italiana 3, no. 1 (January 15, 1931), 2; “Continua l’alta polemica sulla pasta asciutta,” La Cucina Italiana 3, no. 2 (February 15, 1931), 2; “Fine della polemica sulla pasta asciutta,” La Cucina Italiana 3, no. 5 (May 15, 1931), 3; “Ill grande banchetto futurista di Parigi,” La Cucina Italiana 3, no. 9 (September 15, 1931), 1; “Aerovivande e polli d’acciaio,” La Cucina Italiana 4, no. 1 (January 15, 1932), 4; “Cucina futurista” (letter), La Cucina Italiana 5, no. 7 (July 15, 1933), 7. 17. On the history of avant-garde culinary movements, see Cecilia Novero, Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 18. Also in the 1980s, Claudia Salaris published a series of studies of Futurist cooking (which became the basis for her book Cibo Futurista (2000) in the magazine La Gola. 19. This style of cooking or food preparation is also referred to as molecular gastronomy, although some of its practitioners dislike the term because it is too vague. 20. The six-volume “bible” of Modernist cooking is Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young, and Maxime Bilet, Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking (Bellevue, WA: The Cooking Lab, 2011), see also www.modernistcuisine.com. 21. See, for example, Andreas Viestad, “The Gastronomer: What if One Futurist Had Made His Ideas More Delicious?,” Washington Post online edition, March 29, 2011. The opinion of modernist chefs regarding the value of Futurist cooking varies. On Adrià’s interest in Futurism, see Harald Lemke, Die Kunst der Essens (Bielefeld: Verlag, 2007). Nathan Myhrvold, however, did not consider Futurist cooking as a serious effort, instead viewing it as more of a prank or a joke. 22. The major publications of Adrià, translated into English, include Ferran Adrià, Juli Soler, and Albert Adrià, A Day at El Bulli: An Insight into the Ideas, Methods andCreativity of Ferran Adrià (London: Phaidon Press, 2000); Ferran Adrià, Juli Soler, and Albert Adrià, El Bulli, 2005–11, 7 vols. (London: Phaidon, 2014); Ferran Adrià and Eugeni De Diego, The Family Meal: Home Cooking and Ferran Adrià (London: Phaidon, 2011). There is also a full-length documentary feature film, El Bulli: Cooking in Progress (2010) and Adrià’s El Bulli Foundation will create a culinary wiki entitled Bullipedia. Recently, chef Grant Achatz has published an autobiography, Life on the Line: A Chef ’s Story of Chasing Greatness, Facing Death, and Redefining the Way We Eat (New York: Gotham, 2012), and Alinea (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2008). 23. Ferran Adrià, “The Big Red Book, or El Pràtico,” in How I Learned to Cook, ed. Kimberly Witherspoon and Peter Mehan (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 11. 24. One account of the encounter can be found in Colman Andrews, Reinventing Food: Ferran Adrià: The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat (London: Phaidon, 2010), 144–45. On the concept of creativity as originality, see Nicola Perrullo’s essay in this collection. 25. Andrews, Reinventing Food, 161. 26. Andrews, Reinventing Food, 149. 27. Adrià’s critics have charged that he has endangered the health of his customers through the use of chemicals and additives in food preparation; in particular, chef Santi Santamaria has been a very public critic of Adrià’s techniques.



Notes to Pages 53–56

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28. Ferran Adrià, Juli Soler, and Albert Adrià, A Day at El Bulli: An Insight into the Ideas, Methods and Creativity of Ferran Adrià, insert “Creative Methods II” between pages 240 and 241. 29. A Day at El Bulli, insert “Creative Methods III” in between pages 464 and 465. 30. Andrews, Reinventing Food, ch. 14, 265–94. 31. Most news articles about the aesthetic value of Adrià’s work stop short of declaring him an artist. That is, because a chef does not create something lasting, his work cannot be displayed in a museum. See, for example, Adrian Searle, “Should I Eat It or Frame It?,” Guardian, online edition, Sunday, September 14, 2008. 32. A Day at El Bulli, insert between pp. 400 and 401, “Cooking and Art.” 33. “The revulsion and attraction to defining art is another element that the masters of haute-cuisine share with their historical avant-garde forefathers. At the same time that they resist definition, the need to identify what they are doing is something that does not escape the great chefs.” Kevin Landis, “Culinary Pataphysics: Dining, Theatre, and the Historical Avant-Garde,” Gastronomica 14, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 46–55. 34. A recent summary of global trends in food processing is Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 35. Despite the prevalence of home kits for molecular gastronomy (for adults and children) and numerous websites devoted to Modernist cooking, the more outrageous dishes and preparations have not become popular among the general public. This is not due to a lack of effort; Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft executive, has consistently used the Internet and social media channels to promote Modernist cuisine while Ferran Adrià is currently working on various projects as part of El Bulli Foundation, including an Internet search engine of gastronomy, an extensive cooking laboratory, and a visitor’s center for interested visitors.

3

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From Stove to Screen: Food Porn, Professional Chefs, and the Construction of Masculinity in Films

1. Dinner Rush, directed by Bob Giraldi (2002; Los Angeles: New Line Home Video, 2010), DVD. 2. Tom Jones, directed and produced by Tony Richardson (1963; Los Angeles: Lopert Pictures Corporation, 2001), DVD. 3. La Grande Bouffe, directed by Marco Ferreri (1973; New York: Koch Lorber Films, 2009), DVD. 4. Sweet Movie, directed by Dusan Makavejev (1974; New York: Criterion Collection, 2007). DVD. 5. Tampopo, directed by Jûzô Itami (1985; Victoria, Australia: Umbrella World Cinema, 2010). DVD. 6. Babette’s Feast, directed by Gabriel Axel (1987; New York: Criterion Collection, 2013), DVD. 7. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, directed by Peter Greenaway, produced by Kees Kasander (1984; Beverly Hills, CA: Starz/Anchor Bay, 2001), DVD. 8. Like Water for Chocolate, directed and produced by Alfonso Arau (1992;

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Notes to Pages 56–65

Burbank, CA: Miramax Lionsgate, 2011), DVD; Eat Drink Man Woman, directed by Ang Lee (1994; Beverly Hills, CA: MGM World Films, 2002), DVD. 9. Big Night, directed by Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci (1996; Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2002), DVD. 10. Andrew Chan, “La Grande Bouffe: Cooking Shows as Pornography,” Gastronomica 4 (Fall 2003): 47–53. 11. Frederick Kaufman, “Debbie Does Salad: The Food Network at the Frontiers of Pornography,” Harper’s Magazine 311, no. 1865 (2005): 55. 12. Alexander Cockburn, “Gastro-Porn,” New York Review of Books 24, no. 20 (1977), 5–18, 10. 13. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 79. 14. Anne E. McBride, “Food Porn,” Gastronomica 10, no. 1 (2010): 38–46, 38. 15. Molly O’Neill, “Food Porn,” Columbia Journalism Review 42, no. 3 (2003): 38–45. 16. McBride, “Food Porn,” 40. 17. James R. Keller, Food, Film and Culture: A Genre Study (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006), 1. 18. Linda Williams, “Film Body: An Implantation of Perversions,” Ciné-Tracts 3, no. 4 (1981): 19–35, 21. 19. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Elena del Río, “The Body of Voyeurism: Mapping a Discourse of the Senses in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom,” Camera Obscura 15, no. 3 (2000): 15–49. 20. Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 60. 21. The God of Cookery, directed by Stephen Chow (1996; Hong Kong: Tai Seng, 1998) DVD; Ramji Londonwaley, directed by Sanjay Dayma (2005; Mumbai: Shemaroo, 2005), DVD; Cheeni Kum, directed by R. Balki (2007; Mumbai: Eros International, 2007), DVD; Udon, directed by Katsuyuki Motohiro (Japan: Fuji Television Network, 2006); The Chef of South Polar, directed by Shuichi Okita (Japan: Anaheim Entertainment, 2009); Tutte le Donne Della Mia Vita, directed by Simona Izzo (2007; Milano: Eagle Pictures, 2007), DVD; Le Grand Chef, directed by Jeon Yun Su (2007; Hong Kong: Kam & Ronson Enterprise, 2008), DVD; Estomago, directed by Marcos Jorge (2007; Madrid: Alta Classics, 2008), DVD; The Chef, directed by Daniel Cohen, produced by Sidonie Dumas (2012; Roma: Videa-Cde, 2013), DVD; Chef, directed by Jon Favreau (2014; Universal City, CA: Universal Studios, 2014), DVD. 22. Mostly Martha, directed by Sandra Nettelbeck (2002; Hollywood, CA: Paramount, 2003), DVD. 23. No Reservations, directed by Scott Hicks (2007; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2012), DVD; Dieta Mediterránea, directed by Joaquìn Oristrell (2009; Madrid: Cameo Media, S.L., 2009), DVD.



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24. On Adrià, see Carol Helstosky’s essay in this collection. 25. Chef ’s Special, directed by Nacho Garcìa Velilla (2008; Philadelphia: TLA Releasing), DVD.

4



Spoerri Reads Rumohr: The Spirit of Culinary Art Revisited

I warmly thank Silvia Bottinelli and Shilpa Prasad for their comments and suggestions during the editing of this text, as well as Peter Lieberman and Matthew Collins for their language revisions. 1. See Cecilia Novero, “Daniel Spoerri und die ‘Erfindung der Tradition’ in seinem Gastronomisches Tagebuch,” in Daniel Spoerri Presents Eat Art, ed. Elisabeth Hartung (Nürnberg: Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2001), exhibition catalogue, 64–75. 2. Here I refer to Spoerri’s friend Andre Thomkins’s own palindromes written for Restaurant Spoerri in 1968, now conserved in Spoerri’s garden in Seggiano. This critical approach led me to the paradoxical realization that my own text is essentially written around another’s footnotes and is itself almost merely composed of footnotes: this first aspect, though ideally consistent with the upside-down perspective chosen, was not necessarily compatible with American academic writing standards, and thus my text was rearranged, elucidating and in some ways “unearthing” (as Spoerri would call it) the ponderous apparatus of references. On the use of the scholarly footnote as an apparently neutral (but in fact subtle) resource for aiming at legitimation, for expressing personal ambitions, and for the often-ironical outing of polemic, see Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 3. These theories of reading (Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978]; Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979]) didn’t specifically consider the ­artist-reader, but rather the ideal reader. On artists’ reading practices, see for the modern era: The Artist as Reader: On Education and Non-Education of Early Modern Artists, ed. Heiko Damm, Michael Thimann, and Claus Zittel (LeidenBoston: Brill, 2013). For the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Gilles Soubigou, “Les pratiques de lecture dans les milieus artistiques en France au début du XIX siècle,” and Sandra Delacourt, “La bibliotheque d’artiste aux États-Units dans les années 1950 et 1960: une nouvelle forme d’atelier?,” in Visible et lisible: Confrontations et articulations du texte et de l’image, conference proceedings (Paris, 2006), ed. Joana Barreto and Jérémie Cerman (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2007), 61–92, 93–118. 4. This has been particularly stressed in John Varriano’s analysis of Renaissance sources on cuisine, looking at unexpected parallels between ingredients used in ateliers and kitchens. See John Varriano, Tastes and Temptations: Food and Art in Renaissance Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 142–59. In the contemporary context, the parallel between artists’ studios and kitchens has been proposed—though with no in-depth analysis of textual sources—in Atelier + Kitchen = Laboratories of the Senses, exhibition catalogue, ed. Hubertus Gaßner, Roland Nachtigäller, Friederike Fast, Oliver Seifert (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012). 5. In his introduction to Spoerri’s book, Emmett Williams first establishes

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a parallel between the writing and the cumulative praxis of snare pictures: Daniel Spoerri, The Mythological Travels of a Modern Sir John Mandeville Being an Account of the Magic, Meatballs and Other Monkey Business Peculiar to the Sojourn of Daniel Spoerri upon the Isle of Symi, Together with Divers Speculations Thereon (New York: Something Else Press, 1970), xxvii. On Dick Higgins’s and particularly Alison Knowles’s contribution to Something Else Press, see Nicole Woods’s essay in this collection. 6. Daniel Spoerri, An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (Re-Anecdoted Version). Done with the Help of His Very Dear Friend Robert Filliou and Translated from the French, and Further Anecdoted at Random by Their Very Dear Friend Emmett Williams with One Hundred Reflective Illustrations by Topor (New York: Something Else Press, 1966). 7. Brèves réflexions pour la première édition française du Journal gastronomique, in Daniel Spoerri, Journal gastronomique (Genève: Metropolis, 1998), 7–10; my translation. 8. There is some confusion surrounding the publishing history of this text, due to incomplete editions as well as different titles, annotations, and anecdotes referred to by Spoerri himself. The original manuscript is in French (1967), and some passages were published immediately in the magazine Le Petit Colosse de Symi, subsequently translated into English (1970, reprint 1982) by Emmett Williams, in close interaction with and approved by the author, and then into German. Two editions (French and Italian) of the less-diaristic part related to the meatballs date from the 1970s. Twenty years later, in the 1990s, the French manuscript of the journal was recovered in the archives and published in German (1995) and in French (1998), then translated into Italian (2000, without the so-called dissertation on meatballs). 9. Spoerri, The Mythological Travels, 238. 10. By the way, this was exactly when Spoerri was entering the art scene, founding the Editions MAT and living in Paris, in what would later become the infamous Chambre no. 13 of the Hotel Carcassonne, which is now immortalized in the bronze cast in Seggiano. 11. Daniel Spoerri: From Trap-pictures to Prillwitz idols, ed. Thomas Levy, Barbara Räderscheidt, and Sandra Solimano (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2010), exhibition catalogue, 108. 12. When Spoerri wrote his Gastronomic Itinerary in 1966–1967, Rumohr’s treatise had just been reprinted (Spoerri read the book in the 1966 Insel Verlag edition by Wolfgang Koeppen), inaugurating a new, fortuitous season of German-limited gastronomy. From that point on, the Gastronomische Akademie Deutschlands would award the “Rumohr ring” as a prize recognizing merit in the culinary arts. http://goo.gl/xBm6Oh (accessed January 20, 2015). 13. Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, The Essence of Cookery, trans. Barbara Yeomans (London: Prospect Books, 1993). Original editions: Geist der Kochkunst (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1822; Stuttgart: Cotta, 1832). On this text, see the PhD thesis by Thomas M. Hauer, Carl Friedrich von Rumohr und der Geist der bürgerlichen Küche (Karlsruhe: Universität Karlsruhe, 2000), which minutely detects the sources and interprets the book as a recalling of German bourgeois cuisine to traditional values. Further studies: Karl Heinz Götze, “Juste milieu: Carl Friedrich von Rumohr,



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­portrait d’un gastrosophe,” in Pour une “Économie de l’Art”: L’itineraire de Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, ed. Michel Espagne (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 2004), 146–60, and my essay “Lo spirito dell’arte culinaria di Carl Friedrich von Rumohr,” in Cibo estetica e arte, ed. Nicola Perullo (Pisa: ETS, 2014), 113–27, which reads Geist der Kochkunst for its aesthetic proposal of a culinary art. 14. Recent studies have highlighted Ruhmor’s coexistence with various interests and disciplines within his organic idea of style: Enrica Yvonne Dilk, Ein “practischer Aesthetiker”: Studien zum Leben und Werk Carl Friedrich von Ruhmors (Hildesheim: Olms, 2000); Alexander Auf der Heyde, “Stil/Stylus: Rumohrs Versuch einer Neuprägung des Stilbegriffs und die Flucht in die Kunstgeschichte,” in L’idée du style dans l’historiographie artistique: Variantes nationales et tansmissions, ed. Sabine Frommel and Antonio Brucculeri (Roma: Campisano, 2012), 21–33; Kunst, Küche und Kalkül: Carl Friedrich von Rumohr (1785–1843) und die Entdeckung der Kunstgeschichte, ed. Alexander Bastek and Achaz von Müller (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2010), exhibition catalogue. 15. Daniel Spoerri, Anekdotomania (Basel: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2001), 15. 16. Arturo Schwarz, “The Eternal Youth of Daniel Spoerri,” in Levy et al., eds., Daniel Spoerri, 29, 31: “his interests are as multiple and varied as those of the enciclopedists of the 18th century. [. . .] With Daniel, the authority principle gives way to the pleasure principle.” 17. Eckhard Fuhr, “Der Martin Luther im Reich der Töpfe,” Die Welt, November 15, 2010: http://goo.gl/3so0dh (accessed February 5, 2015). 18. The English version of the book (1993) cited here, the only one ever attempted (the intricate structure and language are very hard to paraphrase), contains various inadequate translations of important terms and concepts, beginning with the title, rendered simplistically as The Essence of Cookery. 19. Occasions, characters, time, and space, indicated in the very first lines of the book, are constantly denied by the chance (the anecdotes, registered with an innate sense for Jewish humor), the rituals and ciclicality of dietary norms, as Novero rightly remarks: Novero, “Daniel Spoerri und die ‘Erfindung der Tradition’ in seinem Gastronomisches Tagebuch,” 64–75. 20. See Elisabeth Pilliod, “Ingestion: Pontormo’s Diary,” in Cabinet 18 (Summer 2005), http://goo.gl/hggtNl (accessed January 20, 2015), in which she suggests a comparison of Pontormo’s Diary to sixteenth-century cookbooks, health guides, and dietary treatises. 21. On Spoerri’s friends’ activity for Eat Art Gallery, see Cecilia Novero’s essay in this collection. The Eat Art Gallery is also created with its strong self-conscious sense of belonging to a group, as can be read in Spoerri’s own words, in which he compares the enthusiasm grown around his gallery to the compagnia del paiuolo of Renaissance artists referred to by Vasari’s Lives of the Artists: Inauguration speech of the Eat Art Gallery, September 17, 1970, in Spoerri, Anekdotomania, 194. 22. Spoerri, The Mythological Travels, 91 n. 23. Examples of Urspeise described by Rumohr and mentioned and appreciated by Spoerri for their local characteristics are bread, bread soup, and potatoes (related to German food culture), artichokes (related to Italian food culture), water, and salt (in their local varieties). 24. Speech for the Henkel Banquet, October 29, 1970, in Spoerri, Anekdotomania, 184–85; my translation): “First I had to know how the table came

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to be so disordered—I had to go back to the kitchen. I wanted to know how one cooked, what was needed. I wanted to slaughter the hens I would later eat—and thus I became aware that the moment I had frozen on the table was a mere millisecond of an entire cycle of life and death, of decay and rebirth. This vast topic, which I’m calling, with some cockiness, ‘Eat art,’ includes decay as well as the creative act of what is newly emerging. To display life thus, as an artwork, seems to me an entirely worthy life activity.” 25. Daniel Spoerri, Gastronomisches Tagebuch (Hamburg: Nautilus Verlag, 1995), 258. 26. Spoerri, The Mythological Travels, 110 n. 27. On this topic, see Harald Lemke, “Extrabeilage: Gebt uns unser täglich’ Symbolbrot!,” in Die Kunst des Essens: Eine Ästhetik des kulinarischen Geschmacks (Bielefeld: Verlag, 2007), 193–206. 28. “Die Liebeskugeln des Scheich Muhammad Ibn-Muhammad an-Nafzawi,” in Twen, 8 (August 1970), now in Spoerri, Anekdotomania, 214–15. 29. “Les Tables du Restaurant Spoerri au Jeu de Paume” (2004), in Daniel Spoerri, Lo Spoerri di Spoerri (Vercelli: Edizioni Mercurio, 2008), 318. 30. Spoerri, The Mythological Travels, 116 n. (about the French invention of pot-au-feu), 123 n. (about the stuffing characterizing French cuisine). 31. He quotes Rumohr: “Still, it should be highlighted that food has an invaluable influence on mankind’s moral education, despite all that is said due to today’s sentimentalism.” Spoerri, Gastronomisches Tagebuch, 85; my translation. 32. Die Küche der Armen der Welt, June 4, 1972, in Spoerri, Anekdotomania, 219. The apolitical character of Spoerri’s art is highlighted by Lemke, opposing it to Beuys’s Eat Art as soziale Plastik and political involvement: see Lemke, Die Kunst des Essens, 43–62. 33. Renate Buschmann, “Evocations of Pleasure and Disgust: Daniel Spoerri and the Establishment of Eat Art,” in Eating the Universe: Vom Essen in der Kunst, ed. Magdalena Holzhey (Kölln: DuMont, 2009), exhibition catalogue, 235. 34. Daniel Spoerri, “A Dissertation on Keftedes or Reflections on the Premasticated or How to Talk about Meatballs and Not Art with an Unforeseen Excursion into Blood,” in The Mythological Travels, 219–78: written in Symi between December 20, 1966, and January 20, 1967. 35. Spoerri, The Mythological Travels, 201 n. 36. Spoerri, Gastronomisches Tagebuch, 116–17. 37. Spoerri, The Mythological Travels, 108 n. In the 1982 English edition (Mythology and Meatballs [Berkeley: Aris Books]), the intertextual game of references is enriched by Charles Perry’s notes, offering a parallel dialogue between author and annotator and explaining to the reader whatever was inaccessible in the multilingual original text. 38. Spoerri, The Mythological Travels, xii. 39. Spoerri, The Mythological Travels, 221. 40. Spoerri, The Mythological Travels, 101 n. 41. Gerhard Neumann, “‘Kinder lieben blaue Nudeln’: Daniel Spoerri als Ethnologe der Eßkultur,” in Daniel Spoerri Presents Eat Art, 23. 42. Cecilia Novero, Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 145–208. 43. His remarks on Ali-Bab’s cookbook (Henri Babinski, Gastronomie

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pratique, études culinaires, suivies du traitement de l’obésité des gourmands [Paris: Flammarion, 1907] can be related to his interest in Rumohr: “Ali-Bab is, moreover, the only writer on gastronomy, to my knowledge, who has attempted to divide cookery into archetypes, if I may use the term, of preparation. In the introduction he speaks of the dry method, the humid method and, of course, the raw and the uncooked.” (Spoerri, The Mythological Travels, 248). 44. Spoerri, The Mythological Travels, 242–43. 45. On the thematic banquets organized at Restaurant Spoerri in the 1960s and 1970s, see Novero, Antidiets of the Avant-Garde, 191–208. 46. Spoerri, The Mythological Travels, 117. 47. Spoerri, The Mythological Travels, 152. 48. Spoerri, The Mythological Travels, 181. 49. Spoerri, The Mythological Travels, 113 n: “[. . .] which makes me think of another possible origin for my interest in cooking—to recapture the taste of a dish from my childhood, like this soup, for example, or stuffed peppers or Transylvanian Sauerkraut or the home-made noodles I remember watching our cook prepare.” 50. Anna Mazzanti, “Daniel Spoerri e la seconda Symi: dalla città alla campagna e ritorno motivi di riflessione intorno all’oggetto nell’arte contemporanea,” in L’oggetto nell’arte contemporanea: Uso e riuso, ed. Enrico Crispolti and Anna Mazzanti (Napoli: Liguori, 2011), 11–21. 51. Spoerri’s contributions to La Gola, mensile del cibo e delle tecniche di vita materiale (1982–1988/1991–1993) consist in some recipes illustrated by his friends Roland Topor, Fritz Schwegler, Alfred Hofkunst, and Bernard Luginbühl in the monthly issues from July–August 1987 until August 1988. 52. Spoerri, The Mythological Travels, 114 n. 53. Spoerri, The Mythological Travels, 111 n. 54. Daniel Spoerri, “Stadt oder Land?,” in Anekdotomania, 29. 55. Neumann, “Kinder lieben blaue Nudeln,” 20–27. On the idea of vanitas and disgust related to food performance, see Anja Foerschner’s essay for this collection. 56. Spoerri, The Mythological Travels, 214 n.

5



Food, Decay, and Disgust: Paul McCarthy’s Bossy Burger as Contemporary Still Life

1. The religious revolution of the Protestant reformation in the Dutch Republic questioned the traditions and doctrines of the powerful Roman Catholic Church. With far-reaching political, social, and economic effects, it led to a diversification of religious denominations. 2. For a concise study of the changes in the art market and the development of still life painting, see Donna R. Barnes, “Dutch Paintings in the Seventeenth Century,” in Matters of Taste: Food and Drink in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art and Life, ed. Donna R. Barnes and Peter G. Rose (Albany, NY: Albany Institute of History & Art; Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 9–16. 3. Stephanie Rosenthal, “Paul McCarthy LaLaLand Parodie Paradies: How to Use a Failure,” in Paul McCarthy: LaLaLand Parodie Paradies, ed. Stephanie Rosenthal (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz 2005), exh. cat., 130–47, 141.

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4. Interview with the artist, Los Angeles, July 11, 2007. Most of McCarthy’s works are in a process of development and change for years or even decades. New projects develop from old works, old works are being recreated, or pieces are being destroyed and reformed. See also Foerschner, Paul McCarthy und die Entertainment-Metropole Los Angeles: Aspekte zur Produktion und Rezeption eines multimedialen Kunstkonzepts (Munich: Digitale Hochschulschriften, 2011), 30–35; http://goo.gl/vJHWnC. 5. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mythologiques: The Raw and the Cooked, vol. 1, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 142. 6. The performance to Bossy Burger clearly ventures into the concept of domesticity and touches upon questions of traditional gender roles. By replacing the female figure in the kitchen with a male/infantine one and by ignoring all the values of homely tidiness and correctness that are to prevail in (female) housekeeping, McCarthy furthers the attack on the traditional definition of the kitchen as a “female space,” which had first been targeted by the feminist movements of the 1960s. Even though the issue of McCarthy’s negotiation of gender roles, which not only concerns his use of food, but the topics of sexuality, violence, and the human body in his works, would be a fascinating and rewarding topic, it unfortunately cannot be explored in the context of this essay. 7. Kathleen Collins, Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows (New York: Continuum, 2009), 5. For a closer analysis of the evolution of TV cooking shows, see Collins, Watching What We Eat; Monika Mak, “The Pixel Chef: PBS Television Cooking Shows and Sensorial Utopias,” in Eating in Eden: Food and American Utopias, ed. Etta M. Madden and Martha L. Finch (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 258–74. 8. According to Simon Schama’s Embarrassment of the Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Knopf, 1987), this focus on cleanliness and order is a characteristic that contemporary consumer society shares with the Dutch society of the seventeenth century. Schama states that “No visitor to Holland [. . .] failed to notice the pains that the Dutch took to keep their streets, their houses and themselves brilliantly clean” (375). 9. See Lothar Penning, Kulturgeschichtliche und sozialwissenschaftliche Aspekte des Ekels (Bitburg-Mötsch, 1984), 234. 10. See Winfried Menninghaus, Ekel: Theorie und Geschichte einer starken Empfindung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), 7–8, 66–67. In my dissertation, “Paul McCarthy und die Entertainment-Metropole Los Angeles: Aspekte zur Produktion und Rezeption eines multimedialen Kunstkonzepts,” I offer an in-depth analysis of disgust and give an overview of relevant texts on the topic. See 177–202. 11. Arguably the most important book about disgust in recent times is Winfried Menninghaus’s Ekel: Theorie und Geschichte einer starken Empfindung (English version published in 2003 by State University of New York Press). One of the first to dedicate a scholarly article to the topic was Aurel Kolnai, whose “Der Ekel” was published 1929 in Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, ed. Edmund Husserl, 10, (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1987). In recent years, disgust found a larger audience, especially in science. In the humanities, Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics (2008) by Carolyn Korsmeyer addresses the topic. Dietmar Rübel was among the first to approach the relation



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of food and disgust in McCarthy’s work in “‘American Food’—Nahrungsmittel, Schmutz und Ekel bei Paul McCarthy,” in kunsttexte.de 3 (2002): 1–6. 12. See Christine Pernlochner-Kügler, Körperscham und Ekel—wesentliche menschliche Gefühle (Münster: LIT, 2004), 186, and Menninghaus citing Nietzsche in Ekel, 238. 13. See Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in praktischer Hinsicht, ed. Reinhardt Brandt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2000), 166ff, and Kolnai, “Der Ekel,” 545. 14. Food actually is the area in which the sharpest distinctions in triggers of disgust can be detected: What is considered disgusting by one person can be another person’s highest pleasure. A food-related no-go in one culture can be an absolute essential part of another’s identity. Therefore, specifications of disgust are not innate, but rather acquired in the course of adolescence and thus considerably dependent on a respective social and cultural environment. See also Penning, Kulturgeschichtliche und sozialwissenschaftliche Aspekte des Ekels, 261–63. 15. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 115. 16. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press 1982), 4. 17. See Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3–4. 18. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3. 19. Remo Bodei, La vita delle cose (Bari: Laterza, 2011), 99. The English translation of this book is The Life of Things, the Love of Things, trans. Murtha Baca (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). 20. The genre of still life painting is a broad field with numerous differentiations and overlaps. The same applies to the social and cultural developments that furthered the development of this genre in the Dutch Republic. Also, still life painting did exist before the seventeenth century and certainly is not a phenomenon exclusive to this region, but was popular in other European countries as well. Unfortunately, its negotiation in the context of this argument thus can only be of a rather general nature. For further reading and a more in-depth analysis of still lifes, I recommend Norman Bryson’s Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Alan Chong and Wouter Kloek et al., eds., Still-Life Paintings from the Netherlands 1550–1720, (Zwolle: Waanders, 1999), exhibition catalogue; and Stefan Grohé, Stilleben: Meisterwerke der holländischen Malerei (Munich-Berlin: Prestel, 2004), to name just a few. Anne Lowenthal, ed., The Object as Subject: Studies in the Interpretation of Still Lifes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), expands the focus and includes works up until the mid-twentieth century. For the historic background, see Michael North, Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age, trans. Catherine Hill (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), or Simon Schama’s slightly eccentric Embarrassment of the Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. 21. In his filmic works, especially those exploring the relation between cinema and painting, Peter Greenaway equally negotiates the characteristics of Dutch still lifes and applies them to contemporary society and a current mode of expression. For an in-depth examination of this relation, see Sylvia Karasthahi, “Filming the Dutch Still Life: Peter Greenaway’s Objects,” Gramma: Journal of Theory and

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Criticism (2006): 119–218, and Ruth D. Johnston, “The Staging of the Bourgeois Imaginary in ‘The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover,’” Cinema Journal 41, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 19–40. 22. J. L. Price, Culture and Society in the Dutch Republic during the 17th Century (London: B. T. Batsford, 1974), 41–57, offers a more in-depth reading of this topic. 23. Julie Berger-Hochstrasser’s excellent Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007) deals with this particular aspect. By means of still life painting, she demonstrates the problems and moral tensions that global commerce of the seventeenth century entailed. 24. During the era of the Dutch Republic (1581–1795), the Orangists supported the House of Orange-Nassau as monarchy of the Netherlands, and formed the opposition to the pro-Republic party, which supported the states of Holland. 25. See also Price, Culture and Society in the Dutch Republic, 16–40.

6

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In & On: Herbs, Fish, and Janine Antoni’s Touch

1. I am thankful to Margherita d’Ayala Valva, Emily Green, and Valerie Moon for their important feedback on this essay. My gratitude also goes to Janine Antoni, Rachel Budde, Meredith Johnson, and the staff of Creative Time and Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York, who facilitated my research on In & On. 2. Meredith Johnson, e-mail message to the author, January 31, 2014. 3. Johnson, e-mail message, 2014. 4. Patricia C. Phillips, “Temporality and Public Art,” in Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context, and Controversy, ed. Harriet Senie and Sally Webster (New York: IconEditions, 1992), 295–304. 5. Miwon Kwon, One Site after Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 26. According to Miwon Kwon, “a discursively determined site [. . .] is delineated as a field of knowledge, intellectual exchange, or cultural debate.” Kwon recognizes that “site oriented art is also informed by a broader range of disciplines (anthropology, sociology, literary criticism, psychology, natural and cultural histories, architecture and urbanism, computer science, political theory, philosophy) and is more sharply attuned to popular discourses (fashion music, advertising, film, television).” 6. Janine Antoni and Kevin Lasko, In & On, artist book, limited edition (New York: 2011). 7. Antoni and Lasko, In & On, 9. 8. Among the numerous sources on urban agriculture, the following titles offer an overview of the goals and effects of this alternative farming practice: Introduction to Urban Agriculture: Opposing Viewpoints, ed. Nancy Dziedzic and Lynn Zott (Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2012); Jennifer Cockrall-King, Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2012); Kimberley Hodgson, Marcia Caton Campbell, and Martin Bailkey, Urban Agriculture: Growing Healthy, Sustainable Places (Chicago: American Planning Association, 2011). 9. Fresh Direct is an online retailer delivering local and fresh foods in New



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York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. The company was founded by Jason Ackerman and David McInerney in 1999. 10. Janine Antoni, interview with author, June 11, 2013. 11. Rachel Budde, e-mail message to author, June 12, 2013. 12. Budde, e-mail message to author, 2013. On the principles and design of permaculture gardens, also see David Watkins, Urban Permaculture (Clanfield, England: Permanent Press, 1993). 13. Budde, e-mail message to author, 2013. 14. On the role of collaboration in defining cuisine as a form of art, see also Nicola Perullo’s essay in this collection: Can Cuisine Be Art? The author reverses my perspective, looking at the chef ’s role instead of the visual artist’s contribution. In his interpretation, in order to consider cuisine a form of art, cuisine needs to be able to crystallize the net of relationships that develop in all the phases of food production. However, cuisine is not necessarily art when it is the result of the collaboration between a chef and a visual artist. 15. Lorie Mertes, Janine Antoni and Paul Ramirez Jonas (Miami: Miami Art Museum, 2004). 16. Like Lazarus Did premiered in April 2013 at the Joyce Theatre in New York City. During the performance of the dancers on stage, Antoni was hanging over the audience, meditating inside a sculpture of her creation for about one hour. Trevor, an excerpt from Like Lazarus Did, was performed at the opening of Antoni’s solo show Within at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh (September 12, 2013–March 30, 2014). The exhibition also featured the video Honey Baby, a collaboration between Antoni and Petronio. A body floats and moves in a honey-filled environment, recalling the motions of a fetus in the uterus. 17. Marisa Mazria Katz, “Art Cocktails, Beautiful Food . . . ,” Vogue, June 8, 2011, 1. 18. Janine Antoni, The Girl Made of Butter (Ridgefield, CT: Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000). 19. Stuart Horodner, “Interview with Janine Antoni,” BOMB 66 (Winter 1999): 50. 20. Among other titles that discuss Gnaw and Lick and Lather, see Janine Antoni et al., Slip of the Tongue (Glasgow: Centre for Contemporary Arts, 1995); Self/Made, Self/Conscious: Janine Antoni, Bruce Nauman, ed. Lelia Amalfitano (Boston: The Grossman Gallery / School of the Museum of Fine Arts, 1994). Laura Cottingham, “Janine Antoni: Biting Sums up My Relationship with Art History,” Flash Art 171 (Summer 1993): 105; Sarah Bayliss, “24-Hour-a-Day Artist,” Art News 98, no. 10 (November 1999): 164–67. 21. Laura Trippi, “Untitled Artists’ Projects by Janine Antoni, Ben Kinmont and Rirkrit Tiravanija,” in Eating Culture, ed. Ron Scrapp and Brian Seitz (New York: SUNY Press, 1999), 132–60. Robin Cembalest, “Fast Forward: Janine Antoni,” Art News 92, no. 9 (November 1993): 122–23. See also Cottingham, Janine Antoni, 105. 22. Laura Heon, “Janine Antoni’s Gnawing Idea,” in Gastronimica, The Journal of Food and Culture 1, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 5. 23. Helen Molesworth, “House Work, Art Work,” October 92 (2000): 71–97. 24. Tanja Maka, Eat Art: Joseph Beuys, Dieter Roth, Sonja Alhäuser

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(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 2001). On Roth and Beuys, also see Cecilia Novaro and Harald Lemke’s chapters in this collection. 25. Antoni’s relationship with the sixties has been deemed pictorial by some scholars: Rosalind Krauss, Denis Hollier, Annette Michelson, Hal Foster, Silvia Kolbowski, Martha Buskirk, and Benjamin Buchloh, “The Reception of the Sixties,” October 69 (Summer 1994): 3–24. Others have contextualized Antoni’s art historical references to understand her work beyond the distinction of essentialist and cultural constructions of feminine identity: Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, “Antoni’s Difference,”in Janine Antoni, ed. Dan Cameron et al. (Kusnacht: Ink Tree, 2000), 42–75. A comprehensive analysis of Antoni’s interpretation of 1960s artists can be found in Stacie Lindner, “Janine Antoni: Finding a Room of Her Own” (Thesis, Art and Design, Georgia State University, 2006), Paper 9. 26. I am indebted with Lelia Amalfitano, who made me reflect on the power of Antoni’s pieces’ smell during a conversation in Boston on September 23, 2013. 27. Janine Antoni, Interview with author, May 9, 2013. 28. “Culinary/Art Experience at Park Avenue Summer,” Piece of (Chocolate) Cake, June 9, 2011, http://goo.gl/YymHgT (accessed March 18, 2014). 29. Johnny Misheff, “Spa Food, Sort of, at Park Avenue Summer,” Elle, June 10, 2011, http://goo.gl/2Aw216 (accessed January 15, 2015). 30. Lindsay Brown, “In & On: A Culinary Art Experience at Park Avenue Summer,” EcoChic, June 10, 2011, http://goo.gl/Pkc6xc (accessed January 15, 2015). 31. Anna Hyclak, “Park Avenue Summer Turns Dinner into a Beauty Treatment,” Zagat, June 9, 2011. 32. A notable exception is Swoon (1998). Antoni addresses her shift in engaging the public in this piece: “You know, we talked about empathy. The thing I am interested in right now is the experiential. I am exploring how to communicate through experience. With Swoon I really tried to push that; the viewer’s experience creates meaning. That is the big difference, not that I am in it or not, but that there are different ways of communicating.” Horodner, “Interview with Janine Antoni,” 53.

7



Luciano Fabro: Bitter Sweets for Nadezhda Mandelstam

1. Computers di Luciano Fabro, caramelle di Nadezda Mandel’stam, Galleria Christian Stein, Milan, October 30, 1990–January 5, 1991. The variations in spelling of Nadezhda’s name throughout the quotations used in this essay are taken verbatim from publications and transcribed interviews. 2. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope: A Memoir (New York: Atheneum, 1970). 3. Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, 8. 4. Luciano Fabro stated this in an interview with Jan Braet, editor-in-chief of the Belgian weekly news magazine Knack, titled “Un geste fort sous une forme banale,” on the occasion of the exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. The interview was subsequently published in Na De Regen Gaat Een Bloem Open, Jan Braet Spreekt Met Luciano Fabro, exh. cat., Openluchtmuseum Voor Beeldhouwkunst (Middelheim and Antwerp, 1994), 59–72.



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5. Na De Regen Gaat Een Bloem Open. 6. Na De Regen Gaat Een Bloem Open. 7. Affinités Sélectives VII Luciano Fabro e Michel Verjux, curated by Bernard Marcadé, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, December 6, 1990–January 6, 1991. 8. One critic commented specifically on how hard it was to understand the show. See Meyer Raphael Rubinstein, “Luciano Fabro. Christian Stein,” Artnews (January 1991): 173. 9. See, for example, the entry under “arm” in Charles Talbut Onions, ed., Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 50. 10. Jacopo Galimberti, “A Third-worldist Art? Germano Celant’s Invention of Arte Povera,” Art History 36, no. 2 (April 2013): 2–24. On Fabro and autonomy, see Bernard Rüdiger, ed., Luciano Fabro: Habiter l’autonomie (Lyon: Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, 2011). On Fabro and politics, see Sharon Hecker, “‘Markets, Bacchanals and Gallows’: Luciano Fabro’s Italia all’asta in Piazza Plebiscito in Naples (2004),” in Platzanlagen und ihre Monumente: Wechselwirkungen zwischen Skulptur und Stadtraum, ed. Alessandro Nova and Stephanie Hanke (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2014), 481–520. 11. Jole de Sanna, “Oltre la forma: Luciano Fabro alla Galleria Stein” (unpublished lesson, Accademia di belle arti di Brera, 1991), n.p. Fabro himself described this in his interview with Braet, “Un geste fort.” See note 4. 12. See Luciano Fabro, Letture parallele IV, exh. cat., Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan (Cinisello Balsamo [Milan]: Silvana Editoriale, 1980). In 1975 Fabro had also titled several drawings Rorschach’s Inkblots. See Sharon Hecker, “Luciano Fabro: Drawing as Dialogue,” in Luciano Fabro: Disegno In-Opera, exh. cat., Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo (Cinisello Balsamo [Milan]: Silvana Editoriale, 2013), 69. 13. The uncertainty of weight distribution in Nadezda recalls Michelangelo’s Pietà Rondanini in Milan, in which it is unclear if Mary is supporting the dead Christ or vice versa. John Paoletti, “The Rondanini ‘Pietà’: Ambiguity Maintained through the Palimpsest,” Artibus et Historiae 21, no. 42 (2000): 53–80. 14. Francesca Pasini, “Computers e caramelle per fasciare la libertà,” Il Secolo 19 (October 31, 1990): 11. 15. See Beth Holmgren, Women’s Works in Stalin’s Time: On Lidiia Chukovskaia and Nadezhda Mandelstam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 97–179. 16. Pasini, “Computers,” 11. 17. Elena Pontiggia, “Da Luciano per Nadezda,” Il Giornale (December 23, 1990): iv. 18. Pasini, “Computers,” 11. 19. One critic reported that the words in Nadezhda’s book were, in fact, Osip’s. See Rüdiger, Luciano Fabro, 175 (note 16). If some of the quotes were Osip’s words, however, they were filtered through Nadezhda’s memoirs. 20. Germano Celant, “Appunti per un’arte di guerriglia,” Flash Art 5 (November–December 1967): 3. Translation in Carolyn Christov Bakargiev, Arte Povera (London: Phaidon, 2005), 194–96. See the description of Celant’s intention for the subsequent 1968 Arte Povera show in Amalfi, in Galimberti, “A ThirdWorldist Art?,” 18.

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21. Veronique Goudinoux, “Luciano Fabro: Suddenly, the Highway Disappeared from Under our Feet,” in Rüdiger, Luciano Fabro, 80. 22. It is not clear if Fabro’s exhibition and Gonzalez-Torres’s candy installations are directly connected or merely coincidental given their close dates. Since one of Gonzalez-Torres’s earliest installations was called Untitled (A Corner of Baci, 1990) and uses the Italian chocolates called “Baci Perugina,” it is tempting to see a connection with Italy and perhaps Fabro’s show. 23. The Archivio Manzoni gives the English translation of the title as “The Consumption of Dynamic Art by the Art-Devouring Public.” Manzoni had first exhibited fingerprinted eggs a month earlier at the Arthur Kopke Gallery in Copenhagen, selling cooked eggs for fifteen krone each and giving away raw ones. Giorgio Zanchetti, ed., Piero Manzoni: Consumazione dell’arte dinamica del pubblico divorare l’arte, exh. cat. (Milan: Skira, 2000). 24. Zanchetti, ed., Piero Manzoni, 11. 25. Zanchetti, ed., Piero Manzoni, 11, 22. Zanchetti also connects the egg to traditional Eucharistic and Easter experiences of regeneration and resurrection (Zanchetti, ed., Piero Manzoni, 17 n. 35). See also Elio Grazioli, Piero Manzoni (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2007). For psychoanalytic and Jungian readings, see Anna Costantini, “Piero Manzoni in Context,” in Piero Manzoni, ed. Germano Celant, exh. cat. (London: Serpentine Gallery 1998), 255–56. 26. Jacopo Galimberti, “The Intellectual and the Fool: Piero Manzoni between the Milanese Art Scene and the Land of Cockaigne,” Oxford Art Journal 35, no. 1 (March 2012): 87. 27. Galimberti (“The Intellectual and the Fool”) does not describe the earlier exhibition or later films, identifying the Bellone film as the one that was lost. 28. See Sharon Hecker, “Sealed between Us: The Role of Wax in Luciano Fabro’s Tu,” Oxford Art Journal 36, no. 1 (March 2013): 13–38. 29. Randy Kennedy, “Tough Art with a Candy Center,” New York Times, June 7, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/07/arts/design/07bien.html?page wanted=all&_r=0. 30. Doryun Chong, “Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” in Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole: Walker Art Center Collections, ed. Joan Rothfuss and Elizabeth Carpenter, exh. cat. (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 2005), 241. 31. Rüdiger, Luciano Fabro, 175 n. 16. Silvia Fabro, daughter of the artist (in conversation with the author, December 22, 2014), however, believes that Rüdiger did not intend the word to have religious overtones but rather meant a form of communal sharing. 32. Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 4. On this, see also Nicola Perullo’s and Harald Lemke’s essay in this collection. 33. Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste. 34. Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste, 6, 5. 35. Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste, 101. 36. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 17. 37. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 4–18. 38. Braet, “Un geste fort,” interview with Luciano Fabro. See note 4.



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39. Mintz notes that sugar was unavailable to the lower classes for centuries (Sweetness and Power, 8). 40. Braet, “Un geste fort,” interview with Luciano Fabro. See note 4. 41. Braet, “Un geste fort.” 42. Braet, “Un geste fort,” interview with Luciano Fabro. See note 4. 43. Braet, “Un geste fort.” 44. Se also Cecilia Novero’s essay in this collection, mentioning Arman’s Candy, 1970 (Barbie dolls’ legs made of marzipan) among those of artists who exhibited at Eat Art Gallery. 45. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 155. 46. See discussion in Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 151–53. 47. Sweet Movie, Yugoslavia, 1974, directed by Dušan Makavejev. 48. Julien Suaudeau, “Dusan Makavejev, l’enfance de l’art,” Positif 490 (December 2001): 60, author’s translation. For insightful analyses of sugar and the role of taste in Makavejev’s film, see Stanley Cavell, “On Makavejev on Bergman,” Critical Inquiry 6, no. 2 (Winter 1979): 312; and Lorraine Mortimer, Terror and Joy: The Films of Dusan Makavejev (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 49. Braet, “Un geste fort,” interview with Luciano Fabro. See note 4. 50. This appendix includes a physical-technical description of Nadezda and a selection of texts by the artist intended to clarify the work, compiled by Fabro in collaboration with his daughter, Silvia. Appendix translated by the author. 51. Luciano Fabro, “Vademecum San Francisco,” leaflet distributed along with Luciano Fabro, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 52. Luciano Fabro, “Nadezda” (Discussion with the students of the “Civil Service,” Milan, Casa degli artisti, October 4, 1990), Arti (Athens), no. 3 (January– February 1991): 50–51.

8



Feminist Art: Kitchen Testimony

1. In necessarily generalizing below, “first-generation feminist art” is used to correspond (more or less) with “second-generation” political and literary feminism in the United States. The racial divide among women was starkly editorialized for the mainstream early on in Toni Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib,” New York Times (1923–Current File), August 22, 1971; http://goo.gl/ sroggk (accessed February 22, 2015). 2. The kitchen installation at Womanhouse and its creators have been referred to variously in the published record due to the intrinsic collaborative genesis and ephemerality of the piece. In the exhibition catalogue, Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, Womanhouse (California Institute of the Arts, 1972), much of it posted at www.womanhouse.refugia.net, created by Leslie Brack and Suzy Spence (n.d.). The Kitchen (the main paint job, apparently, to be discussed) is attributed to Weltsch and the applied forms, Eggs to Breasts, to Hodgetts. In most subsequent published mentions and reproductions, it is usually referred to as Nurturant Kitchen, established in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Abrams, 1994), 55. Good footage of the installation is seen at the start of the

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documentary film, Womanhouse (1974), by Johanna Demetrakas; an excerpt is archived at the Getty Center’s web resource, “Pacific Standard Time,” http://goo.gl/ PPKjB0. See also Temma Balducci, “Revisiting Womanhouse: Welcome to the (Deconstructed) Dollhouse,” Woman’s Art Journal, 27, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2006), Jstor http://goo.gl/3KzUNd; and Sandra Sider, “WOMANHOUSE: Cradle of Feminist Art January–February 28, 1972,” Art Spaces Archive Project, August 5, 2010, http://goo.gl/Gn0fPr. (All websites and databases given here and below were last accessed December 1, 2014.) 3. Among museum collections in which Martha Rosler’s video can be found are the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. The video is accessible through Artforum online videos at http://goo.gl/tYxTGA (and periodically, elsewhere). 4. Lucy Lippard, “Household Images in Art” (1973) in The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Feminist Essays on Art (New York: New Press, 1995), 62–65; and Helen Molesworth, “House Work and Art Work,” October 92 (2000): 71–97; http://goo.gl/ 1PO5fE. 5. Weems’s entire Kitchen Table Series can be accessed online at the Cleveland Museum of Art collection database, http://goo.gl/Ou4dIY. The photographs have also been widely exhibited and collected by individuals, museums, and other institutions as individual self-contained works; however, my work here is predicated on the totality of the series. 6. Focus on the connections is central to Lippard, “Introduction: Moving Targets/Concentric Circles” (1984–1995), in The Pink Glass Swan, 3–28; Laura Cottingham, “The Feminist Continuum,” in The Power of Feminist Art, 276–87; also, Balducci, “Revisiting Womanhouse.” Molesworth, “Housework and Art Work,” comprehensively addresses a perceived theory/essentialist dichotomy (discussed below). See also Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin, “Stepping out of the Beaten Path: Reassessing the Feminist Art Movement,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society 33, no. 2 (2008): 329–42, Academic Search Premier. 7. Barbara Ryan, “Kitchen Testimony: Ex-Slaves’ Narratives in New Company,” Callaloo 22, no. 1 (1999): 141–56; http://www.jstor.org/stable/3299959 ; also, Barbara Ryan, Love, Wages, Slavery: The Literature of Servitude in the United States (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), ch. 4. 8. Including reviews in Time magazine and the Los Angeles Times; press details and attendance summarized in Sider, “WOMANHOUSE”; see also, Balducci, “Revisiting Womanhouse,” 17. 9. Quoting Carolyn J. Seifert, “Images of Domestic Madness in the Art and Poetry of American Women,” Woman’s Art Journal 1, no. 2 (1980–1981): 1–6. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1358076; 4, whose paragraph on the installation here is among the earliest descriptive summaries; Lippard, “Household Images in Art,” 64, mentions “funky fantasy” as one mode of early feminist art, including the art at Womanhouse. On activities and goals in the program, see Miriam Schapiro, “The Education of Women as Artists: Project Womanhouse,” Art Journal 31, no. 3 (1972): 268–70, http://www.jstor.org/stable/775513; and Paula Harper, “The First Feminist Art Program: A View from the 1980s,” in Signs 10, no. 4 (1985): 762–81. 10. Attempts to “bolster the definition of masculinity within the domestic



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sphere are paradoxically the most central yet least expressed elements of postwar kitchen culture,” according to Christopher Homes Smith, “Freeze Frames: Frozen Foods and Memories of the Postwar American Family,” in Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender and Race, ed. Sherrie A. Inness (Philadelphia: University of Pennyslvania Press, 2001), 176–209, 177, passim. See also Steven Gdula, How the Kitchen Became the Warmest Room in the House (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 82–109. 11. Sider, “WOMANHOUSE,” n. 12, sites an advertisement as late as 1972 from the issue of Time magazine that included the Womanhouse review, with the caption, “Tonight you’re having chicken again. And the family always likes it a lot. But, last week you used up your last idea on how to make it different. It’s a good day for Stouffer’s.” The racial division remained prominent from early in the century; see Alice A. Deck, “‘Now Then—Who Said Biscuits?’ The Black Woman Cook as Fetish in American Advertising, 1905–1953,” in Kitchen Culture in America, 69–93. Very few images of black women other than updated stereotypes of domestics can be found in kitchen and food ads into the 1980s. 12. See Lorna Piatti-Farnell, “‘At My Cooking I Feel It Looking’: Food, Domestic Fantasies and Consumer Anxiety in Sylvia Plath’s Writing,” in It Came from the 1950s!, ed. Darryl Jones, Elizabeth McCarthy, and Bernice M. Murphy (New York: Palgrave/McMillian, 2011), 198–215; Caroline J. Smith, “‘The Feeding of Young Women’: Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar,’ ‘Mademoiselle’ Magazine, and the Domestic Ideal,” College Literature 37, no. 4 (2010): 1–22, http://goo.gl/Zl3hls; Marsha Bryant, “Plath, Domesticity, and the Art of Advertising,” College Literature 29, no. 3 (2002): 17, http://goo.gl/JqJlmk; also Seifert, “Images of Domestic Madness.” 13. An important exhibition, in which Rosler was included, is documented in Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958–1968 (exh. cat.), ed. Sid Sachs and Kalliope Minioudaki (Philadelphia: University of the Arts, and New York: Abbeville, 2010). 14. Still Life #20 (1962, Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo), and Still Life #30 (1963, Museum of Modern Art), which includes the window image described. The idea of male aesthetic dominance juxtaposed with consumer tastes of the female homemaker in Wesselmann’s art is developed in Cecile Whiting, “Pop at Home,” in Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, ed. Christopher Reed (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 222–36; also Cecile Whiting, A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ch. 2. 15. Rosler felt affinities with the anti-hierarchic, anti-metaphysical aspects of pop, but found her work was not considered in that context, according to Minioudaki, “Pop Proto-Feminisms: Beyond the Paradox of the Woman Pop Arts,” in Seductive Subversion, 90–143, 181–82. 16. See Jessica Dallow, “Reclaiming Histories: Betye and Alison Saar, Feminism, and the Representation of Black Womanhood,” Feminist Studies 30, no. 1 (2004), http://goo.gl/NCbQeH. 17. Lippard, “Household Images,” 62. Seifert, “Images of Domestic Madness,” 2, points out that domestic subjects in postwar feminist poetry generally preceded their appearance in art. Minioudaki, “Pop Proto-Feminisms,” 98, suggests that Lippard, in “Household Images,” accepted male paradigms for Pop art, juxtaposing it with feminist art a priori.

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18. See Schapiro, “The Education of Woman as Artists,” 269: “it became obvious that the kitchen was a battleground where women fought with their mothers . . . ,” also cited by Sider, “WOMANHOUSE,” n.p.; also Arlene Raven, “Womanhouse,” in The Power of Feminist Art, 48–65, 52: “Struggles between mothers and daughters for psychological power were embedded in the gestures of giving and receiving food.” 19. Schapiro, “The Education of Women as Artists,” 269, states that five clay molds were used to cast the forms in a spongy material, painted realistically. Raven, “Womanhouse,” 52, describes the forms as plastic. 20. In Chicago and Schapiro, Womanhouse, see entries, under “Works,” for Eggs to Breast and The Kitchen. On the quoted and related personifications in Plath’s poetry, Piatti-Farnell, “At My Cooking I Feel It Looking,” 201–6. 21. See note 2, above. 22. Discussed specifically in Harper, “The First Feminist Art Program,” 773. 23. Frazier states that the collage idea and application was hers in Susan Frazier and Sandra Rodo, “Interviewing Susan Frazier by Rudax,” trans. Miguel Marco, Rudax: Feminismos, Literatura, Arte, Cine y Política, March 2010, http:// goo.gl/pQHbUV. In Schapiro, “The Education of Women as Artists,” a caption under a reproduction reads: “Kitchen by Susan Frazier, Vicky Hodgett [sic] and Robin Weltsch,” 268; the collage images, not clearly visible in widely distributed reproductions of the installation, are also mentioned. 24. See the “Dining Room” entry at http://womanhouse.refugia.net/. 25. This facile dichotomy is deconstructed comprehensively in Molesworth, “House Work”; broached in Lippard, “Both Sides Now: A Reprise” (1989), in The Pink Glass Swan, 266–77. 26. Of the dozens of similar, summary descriptions of this work (as opposed to detailed analyses cited elsewhere herein), an insightful, succinct one is provided in Cottingham, “Crossing Borders: Art: Martha Rosler,” Frieze 13 (November– December 1993), http://goo.gl/IEr5Ma, within a discussion of the “interrogation of categories” in Rosler’s oeuvre. 27. See Kathleen Collins, Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows (New York: Continuum International, 2009), 30–40. 28. Following Collins, Watching What We Eat, 71–100; see also Joanne Hollows, “The Feminist and the Cook: Julia Child, Betty Friedan and Domestic Femininity,” in Gender and Consumption: Domestic Cultures and the Commercialism of Everyday Life, ed. Emma Casey and Lydia Martens (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007), 33–48. 29. An insightful analysis of the Budding Gourmet video is Alexander Alberro, “The Dialectics of the Everyday: Martha Rosler and the Strategy of the Decoy,” in Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World (exh. cat.), ed. Catherine de Zegher (Birmingham, England: Ikon Gallery, Vienna: Generali Foundation, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 73–112, 73–74. An early, brief summary of the piece is Lippard, “Issue and Taboo” (1980), in The Glass Swan, 150–70, 166–68. 30. See Lisa Bloom, Jewish Identities in American Feminist Art: Ghosts of Ethnicity (New York: Routledge, 2006), 83–104. 31. Molesworth, “House Work,” 79, 90–91. 32. In Jane Weinstock, “Interview with Martha Rosler,” October 17 (1981): 77–98, http://www.jstor.org/stable/778252; 85. For focused analysis on Rosler’s use of language, see Alberro, “The Dialectics of the Everyday.”

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33. Carrie Mae Weems, “Carrie Mae Weems: The Kitchen Table Series,” Artbabble Art21, Episode 138 (video, 3:09 min.); http://goo.gl/BYUYZg. 34. Emphasized in Elaine King, “Black and White: Two Portrait Stories,” Journal of American Culture 31, no. 1 (2008): 66–82, http://goo.gl/rtrfde. 35. See Dust and Domesticity: Constructions of the Feminine (exh. cat.), essays by Jesús Fuenmeyer, Kate Haug, and Frazer Ward (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992), http://goo.gl/wlgYKG. 36. See Mira Schor, “Backlash and Appropriation,” in The Power of Feminist Art, 248–65. 37. See Kellie Jones, “In Their Own Image,” Artforum International 29, no. 3 (1990): 132–38. An important study is Debra Willis and Carla Williams, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). 38. One landmark was “The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s,” a collaboration between three New York museums that included over 100 artists; see the catalogue of the same title edited by Marcia Tucker, Nilda Pereza, and Kinshasha Conwill (New York: Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1990). 39. See Mark P. Leone and Gladys-Marie Fry, “Conjuring in the Big House Kitchen: An Interpretation of African American Belief Systems Based on the Uses of Archaeology and Folklore,” Journal of American Folklore 112, no. 445 (1999): 372– 403, http://www.jstor.org/stable/541368; also Barbara Ryan (as in note 2 above). In relation to collective issues of women (in the West) historically, see Barbara Arneil, “Women as Wives, Servants and Slaves: Rethinking the Public/Private Divide,” Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique 34, no. 1 (2001): 29–54, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3232542. 40. Barbara Burlison Mooney, “The Comfortable Tasty Framed Cottage: An African American Architectural Iconography,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61, no. 1 (March 2002): 48–76, http://www.jstor.org/stable/991811; 48. 41. The Banjo Player (1893, Hampton University Museum, Hampton, VA), and The Thankful Poor (1894, William H. and Camille Cosby Collection). See Albert Boime, “Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Subversion of Genre,” Art Bulletin 75 (September 1993): 413–42, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3045967. 42. In this regard, Aaron Siskind’s domestic images in his series, Harlem Document (1932–1940), are both prototypes and build on an image history older than photography. See also The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992). Some domestic images of African Americans in the documentary work of Gordon Parks into the 1960s are quite similar, if tempered somewhat by perceived greater intimacy with and more views of individual, named subjects. Along the lines of Van Der Zee’s intentions, however in a journalistic milieu, are the photographs of Roy DeCarava, an acknowledged influence for Weems. 43. M. G. Lord, “Art View; Women’s Work Is (Sometimes) Done,” New York Times, February 19, 1995; online at http://goo.gl/HsuL0I. See Division of Labor: Women’s Work in Contemporary Art (exh. cat.), essays by Lydia Yee, Arlene Raven, and Michele Wallace (Bronx: Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1995); includes a reproduction of Nurturant Kitchen, 15.

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44. Raven, “Blood Sisters: Feminist Art and Criticism,” in Division of Labor, 47–55. 45. Jan Garden Castro, “American History Is Not What It Appears to Be: A Conversation with Liza Lou,” Sculpture 22, no. 4 (2003), http://goo.gl/uxvwjU; and Christopher Bagley, “W Profile: Liza Lou,” W Magazine (September 2008): 522–29, http://goo.gl/5GFH5l. 46. See Deborah Belgum, “Artist Beads the World! Mixes Quadrillions of Glass Beads with Artist Imagination and—Voila!—You Have Liza Lou’s Kitchenette,” Orange County Register, September 26, 1994; http://search.proquest.com/ docview/272863160?accountid=14068; and Zan Dubin, “Cooking Up Criticism in the ‘Kitchenette,’” Los Angeles Times (Pre–1997 Fulltext), September 8, 1994, http://goo.gl/69wCZR. 47. See Labor of Love (exh. cat.), ed. Marcia Tucker (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996). 48. Drawing on Deborah L. Siegel, “The Legacy of the Personal: Generating Theory in Feminism’s Third Wave,” Hypatia 12, no. 3, “Third Wave Feminism” (1997): 46–75, http://goo.gl/PL4EiF. 49. By c. 2006, the claim in Balducci, “Revisiting Womanhouse,” that “within the history of feminist art . . . Womanhouse has generated scant scholarly notice,” 17, seems a bit exaggerated, especially given its ephemerality and the fact that many artists involved, including Weltsch and Hodgetts, did not pursue public art careers, in contrast to Judy Chicago and the extant The Dinner Party (1974–1979) with which it is juxtaposed by her in this regard. Installations and performances from Womanhouse received substantial mentions and some more serious attention through the 1980s, including Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Matthews, “The Feminist Critique of Art History,” Art Bulletin 60, no. 3 (1987): 326–57, http:// goo.gl/1bKmzv, where it is mentioned casually as “celebrated.” Seifert, “Images of Domestic Madness,” and Harper, “The First Feminist Art Program”; followed by The Power of Feminist Art and Division of Labor. It has since been included in ­textbook-type surveys including Irving Sandler, Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s (New York: Westview, 1996), 118–19 (a reproduction of “the kitchen” is included); Hjorvardur Harvard Harnason, History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Photography, 5th ed. (New York: PrenticeHall, 2004), 600; and Hal Foster et al., Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, vol. 2 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 570–75, in a discussion (encompassing other works) of several pages. 50. See Nicole J. Caruth, “Gastro-Vision: Martha Rosler’s Kitchen Mise-enScène,” January 21, 2011, at: http://goo.gl/zR3hci. 51. Weems, “Carrie Mae Weems” (as in note 33 above). 52. The artist, in introductory remarks, “Carrie Mae Weems Live” (symposium), the Guggenheim Museum, New York, April 25, 2014; in conjunction with “Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video” (organized by the First Center for the Arts, Nashville, 2012, traveling for two years), which included the entire Kitchen Table Series. 53. See Public Art Fund, Projects, “Anissa Mack: Pies for a Passerby”; http://goo.gl/e4PZx6; informed by correspondence with the artist, March 2014.



Notes to Pages 153–56

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9



Es Geht Um Die Wurst: On Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s Sausage Photographs

1. Lynne Cooke, “Home Alone . . . : The Sausage Photographs,” in Peter Fischli and David Weiss / Flowers & Questions: A Retrospective, ed. Bice Curiger, Peter Fischli, and David Weiss (London: Tate Publishing, 2006), 156. 2. An observation I owe to Florence Feiereisen. See http://wapo.st/Q64oN9 for past winners of the contest. Website accessed June 16, 2014. 3. Peter Fischli quoted in “Interview: Beate Söntgen in conversation with Peter Fischli and David Weiss,” in Peter Fischli / David Weiss, ed. Robert Fleck (London: Phaidon, 2005), 23. 4. See Nancy Spector, “Clay Figures: Suddenly This Overview,” in Curiger, Flowers & Questions, 127. For a playful example in the world of criticism, see the food-inflected, tongue-in-cheek approach to the Abstract Expressionists in E. A. Carmen’s “The Sandwiches of the Artist,” October 3, no. 16 (1981): 87–101, which offers that Harold Rosenberg actually argued that “bread began to appear to one American artist after another as an arena in which to act” (p. 87). My thanks to David Gray for this reference. 5. For Gadamer’s initial explicit discussion of play, the art object, and the “in-between” nature of play as occurring between players, and/or between actor and audience, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 106–14. 6. For a thoughtful discussion that takes Fischli and Weiss’s play on its own terms just as it also engages Freud in moving from the Sausage Photographs to A Quiet Afternoon and The Way Things Go, see Arthur C. Danto, “Fischli and Weiss: Play/Things,” in Peter Fischli and David Weiss: In a Restless World (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1996), 95–113. 7. Rainald Schumacher, “Salt and Pepper for Reality—Peter Fischli and David Weiss,” in Peter Fischli, David Weiss, ed. Ingvild Goetz and Karsten Löckemann (Osterfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2010), 87. 8. David Weiss, quoted in Mark Godfrey, “A Fine Balance,” in Peter Fischli / David Weiss, ed. Emily Wei Rales and Ali Nemerov (Potomac, MD: Glenstone Foundation, 2013), 18. 9. See Erich Lissner, Wurstologia, oder Es geht um die Wurst (WiesbadenBiebrich: Kalle & Co., 1939), 4. Lissner’s text is learned in a way that uncannily matches Fischli and Weiss’s work, and his use of puns and playful invocation of philosophical categorization is matched by close etymological discussion and cultural research. It is beyond the scope of this essay to engage the fact of the publication of Lissner’s book in such an important year as 1939. 10. These and many other expressions are discussed in Lissner. For Es ist mir Wurst, which comes from the sense that anything can get put into a sausage, see p. 14, and for a discussion of Wurst wider Wurst, see p. 8. 11. The relationship between past/future and hot/cold is noted by Renate Goldmann, Peter Fischli / David Weiss: Ausflüge, Arbeiten, Austellungen: Ein offener Index (Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2006), 62. 12. On Spoerri in particular, see Margherita d’Ayala Valva’s and Cecilia Novero’s essays in this volume.

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Notes to Pages 160–63

13. For a discussion of the Zürich art scene and possible influences on Fischli and Weiss, and in particular a discussion of Roth’s presence, see Godfrey, “A Fine Balance,” in Rales and Nemerov, Peter Fischli / David Weiss, 13–15. 14. For a brief survey of these works, see Theodora Vischer and Bernadette Walter, eds., Roth Zeit (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2003), 74–75. 15. The heading is from Edward Ruscha quoted in A. D. Coleman, “I’m Not Really a Photographer” (1972), reprinted in The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960–1982, ed. Douglas Fogle (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003), 22. See, for example, the essays and reproductions in Matthew S. Witkovsky, ed., Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964–1977 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), and Fogle, ed., The Last Picture Show. 16. Ed Ruscha quoted in John Coplans, “Concerning Various Small Fires: Edward Ruscha discusses his Perplexing Publications” (1965), reprinted in Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages, ed. Alexandra Schwartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 24–25. 17. Jeff Wall, “‘Marks of Indifference’: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art” (1995), reprinted in Fogle, The Last Picture Show, 36. 18. Though one can also read a clear interest in narrative fragmentation— if not quite re-presentation—in Fischli and Weiss’s works, strategies that are commonly associated with the work of the so-called Pictures Generation artists like Cindy Sherman or Richard Prince active in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s. For canonical discussions of postmodernism and photography, see, for example, Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 1, no. 8 (1979): 75–88, as well as Craig Owens’s “The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism,” published in two parts, in October 2, no. 12 (1980): 67–86, and October 2, no. 13 (1980): 58–80. See also Douglas Eklund, ed., The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). On the issue of staging in the history of photography as well as in conceptual art, see A. D. Coleman, “The Directorial Mode: Notes toward a Definition,” Artforum 14, no. 15 (1976): 55–61. 19. See Ruscha’s discussion of the book and film in Paul Karlstrom, “Interview with Edward Ruscha in His Western Avenue, Hollywood Studio” (1981), in Schwartz, Leave Any Information . . . , 168–69. 20. Mark Godfrey, “A Fine Balance,” in Rales and Nemerov, Peter Fischli / David Weiss, 13–15, notes the importance of Polke’s presence in Zürich and influence on Fischli and Weiss. 21. A complete reproduction of this portfolio is published in Jochen Poetter, ed., Sigmar Polke: Fotografien (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Edition Cantz, 1990), 259–74, and a brief discussion of Polke’s references to houseplants is found in the extended caption information in Witkovsky, Light Years, 111. 22. See “Sigmar Polke,” Interfunktionen 8 (January 1972): 2–12. 23. The image printed in Interfunktionen is a cropped version of one of the four Porcelain Pot (1968) works; this cropping, which has removed the edges of the plastic tub that the teapot and toys float inside, heightens the abstraction of the image. For reproductions of all four Porcelain Pots and other related photographs, see Poetter, Sigmar Polke: Fotografien, 39–41. Most of the other images reproduced



Notes to Pages 164–66

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in Interfunktionen seem more closely related to Polke’s Parisian photographs of 1971. 24. Poetter, Sigmar Polke, 43. 25. This extends well beyond the Sausage Photographs as well. Polke’s early experiments from 1964 to 1968 also show an interest in balance and the fleeting arrangements of kitchen items that Fischli and Weiss would explore in their 1984–1985 series Quiet Afternoon. 26. For a brief discussion of Nauman’s early photographs and their relation to his larger body of work, see Constance M. Lewallen, A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Nauman’s photos are surveyed on pp. 63–72. 27. John Langshaw Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambrige, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). 28. On Nauman’s linguistic interests, see Janet Kraynak, “Bruce Nauman’s Words,” in Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words, Writings and Interviews, ed. Janet Kraynak (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 1–45; also see pp. 10–14 for a discussion of Eleven Color Photographs and performative utterances. 29. My reading of this work (and that of all the others) and the identification of the specific sorts of cold cuts used, draws on the careful description and analysis in Goldmann, Peter Fischli / David Weiss, 59–64. 30. Goldmann, Peter Fischli / David Weiss, 61. 31. See Goldmann, Peter Fischli / David Weiss, 60–61, for a discussion of this trip as well as Fischli/Weiss’s later return to the same store with a group of students. Goldmann argues, also, that the original visit makes reference to Gerhard Richter and Konrad Leug’s (better known as the dealer Konrad Fischer) 1963 performance Living with Pop—A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism at the Möbelhaus Berges in Düsseldorf, and that the shift from social critique to a more ambiguous leisure activity is a stark difference between the artistic movements of the early 1960s and those of the late 1970s and early 1980s. For the claim that Möbel Pfister was, in fact, the largest furniture store in Switzerland, see Robert Fleck, “Adventures Close to Home: Peter Fischli and David Weiss,” in Fleck et al., Peter Fischli / David Weiss, 81. 32. As Robin Kelsey has written: “In the Choosing series, Baldessari, by suggesting that artistic selection is banal, illogical, inconsistent and self-centered, confronted the ineliminable remnant of taste with trenchant skepticism.” See Kelsey, “Hazarded into the Blue: John Baldessari and Photography in the Early 1970s,” in Light Years, ed. Witkovsky, 136. 33. Peter Fischli quoted in “Interview: Beate Söntgen in Conversation with Peter Fischli and David Weiss,” in Fleck et al., Peter Fischli / David Weiss, 9. 34. See Spector, “Clay Figures: Suddenly This Overview,” in Flowers & Questions, ed. Curiger et al., 123–29. The film’s script is reproduced in Fischli and Weiss, “Artist’s Writings: The Least Resistance,” in Fleck et al., Peter Fischli / David Weiss, 114–19. 35. In The Least Resistance (1980–1981) Rat and Bear end up producing a pamphlet, also produced as a small book by Fischli and Weiss in real life, entitled Order and Cleanliness. “This little book is a deliberate farce that riffs as much on Joseph Beuys’s revered, pseudo-scientific, Steiner-like chalkboard drawings as on the artists’ own Swiss heritage, with its clichéd attention to precision and order.” Spector, “Clay

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Notes to Pages 167–70

Figures: Suddenly This Overview,” in Flowers & Questions, ed. Curiger et al., 124. That Rat and Bear take to a helicopter with a case full of copies of their pamphlet might well reference fellow Swiss artist Jean Tinguely’s performative distribution of 15,000 copies of his “Manifesto for Statics” by airplane over Düsseldorf in 1959. For a discussion of Tinguely and postwar technological shifts, see Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 84–153. 36. Lissner, Wurstologia, oder Es geht um die Wurst, 4.

10



Elz˙bieta Jabłon´ ska’s Kitchen Interventions: Food, Art, and the Maternal Identity

1. Magdalena Ujma, “Breaking the Kitchen into Pieces,” in Elżbieta Jabłońska: (Un)usually Successful, ed. Magdalena Ujma (Olsztyn, Poland: Galeria Sztuki, 2011), 85. 2. For more on the notion of the “everyday,” see Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life, trans. John Moore; preface by Michael Trebitsch (London: Verso, 1991); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). In terms of art and the everyday, Stephen Johnstone’s edited volume, The Everyday: Documents of Contemporary Art (London: Whitechapel Gallery; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), introduces key issues related to the subject. 3. See Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Living & Cooking, trans. Timothy J. Tomasik (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), and Michel de Certeau and Luce Giard, “The Nourishing Arts,” in Food and Culture: A Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterick (New York: Routledge, 2008), 67–77. 4. Art historian Maria Poprzęcka wrote of Jabłońska’s Kitchen performances: “Everything is predictable. The only thing that remains uncertain is the food. . . . You can make predictions on the basis of the list of sponsors: Blikle?—doughnuts. Palikot?—liqueurs. Polmos?—vodka. But you can also ask yourself the question with somewhat old-fashioned seriousness—will there be any chance for art to exist in this social and snobbish tumult, in this general lack of concentration and ­attention? . . . Or is art only a pretext to organize a fashionable get-together combined with consumption?” Translation by the author. See Maria Poprzęcka, “Czy będzie jedzenie?” (Will There Be Food?), in Arteon—magazyn o sztuce 72, no. 4 (April 2006): 3, http://goo.gl/P9UEw0 (accessed September 2, 2012). 5. Joe Smith and Petr Jehlička, “Stories around Food, Politics and Change in Poland and the Czech Republic,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 32, no. 3 (September 2007): 404. 6. Smith and Jehlička, “Stories around Food,” 402. 7. Rirkrit Tiravanija has published a collection of his recipes. See Rirkrit Tiravanija, Rirkrit Tiravanija: Cook Book (Bangkok: River Books, 2010). 8. Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989), 24. 9. Jabłońska quoted in Elżbieta Jabłońska, 66. The artist claimed inspiration



Notes to Pages 171–76

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from Buñuel’s late-career film, Phantom of Liberty (1974), which as one of Buñuel’s most “free-form” films, alludes to the filmmaker’s own personal life. It, one can argue, acts as a source of inspiration for Jabłońska’s transposition of cooking in the home to the public spaces of the gallery. It is necessary to note that Jabłońska’s comments regarding the work have also been ever evolving, due to what she views as the pigeonholing of her work. 10. Jabłońska, interview with Katarzyna Bielas, “Duży Format,” Gazety Wyborczej, January 2, 2006, 8, cited in Jabłońska, Elżbieta Jabłońska, 74. 11. Ulrike Sieglohr discusses the potentiality of maternal subjectivity in her study, Focus on the Maternal: Female Subjectivity and Images of Motherhood (London: Scarlet Press, 1998). At the time of her writing, Sieglohr found maternal subjectivity “marginal and repressed.” This study is proof of a visible change within the institution of art. 12. Deborah R. Geis has argued that the space of the kitchen continues to exist as the realm of the “private, a realm most often associated with the female,” which women artists are able to make public through performance. See Deborah R. Geis, “Feeding the Audience: Food, Feminism, and Performance Art,” in Eating Culture, ed. Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 222. 13. Jabłońska, Elżbieta Jabłońska, 75. 14. Justyna Włodarczyk, ed., Gender Issues 2009: Gender Equality Discourse in Times of Transformation 1989–2009 The Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Ukraine (Warszawa: Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 2009), 105. 15. Ben Kinmont, for example, invited gallery attendees to call and schedule a mutually convenient time to come over for breakfast as part of his work Waffles for an Opening, 1991. While he did not clearly explain what would happen when the guest would arrive, Kinmont would cook his guest(s) and himself waffles, which they would consume while discussing the relationship of art and food. See Laura Trippi, “Untitled Artists’ Projects by Janine Antoni, Ben Kinmont, Rirkrit Tiravanija,” in Eating Culture, 134–35. 16. Preparing the food in what has been termed by critics as “a sophisticated way, just like the dishes shown in cook books.” See “The Whole Trick Is to Meet Well,” in Elżbieta Jabłońska, 73. 17. A part of Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Maintenance Art Performances, Hartford Wash highlighted, transferred, and transformed the power structures related to the maintenance of art museums (washing, dusting, mopping, etc.) from the custodial staff to that of the conservator/curator all the while highlighting female subjectivity. For further reading, consult Andrea Liss, Feminist Art and the Maternal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Sherry Buckberrough and Andrea Miller-Keller, “Mierle Laderman Ukeles,” Matrix 137 (1998): 1–8, http://goo.gl/AWjI6L (accessed December 27, 2014); and Elżbieta Jabłońska, untitled text, Elżbieta Jabłońska’s archive, Bydgoszcz, Poland. 18. Translation by author. Elżbieta Jabłońska quoted in Izabela Kowalczyk, “Iza Kowalczyck rozmawia z Elą Jabłońską: Supermenka w krainie codzienności” (Iza Kowalczyck talks with Ela Jabłońska: Superwoman in the realm of everyday life) Artmix, sztuka feminism kultura wizualna, http://goo.gl/sK2Fq3 (accessed January 12, 2012).

330

Notes to Pages 176–78

19. Sebastian Cichocki, Sztuka domowa: cała prawda o planecie X (Home Games: The Whole Truth about Planet X) (Katowice: Górnośląskie Centrum Kultury, 2002), np. 20. Elizabeth Hainstock, “Montessori in the Home,” in Montessori: Her Method and the Movement: What You Need to Know, ed. Reginald Calvert Orem (New York: Putnam, 1974), 130. 21. Maria Montessori, The Discovery of the Child, trans. M. Joseph Costelloe, SJ (Notre Dame, IN: Fides Publishers, 1967), 124. 22. Montessori, The Discovery of the Child, 129. 23. Aneta Szylak, Architectures of Gender: Contemporary Women’s Art in Poland (Long Island City: Sculpture Center, 2003), 6. 24. The choice to include activities like “love-making” marks a clear relationship between food and pleasure, suggesting that the “way to [one’s] heart” may actually be “through the stomach.” For a larger discussion of this aspect of the series, see Barbara Kutis, “Artist-Parents: Nature, Nurture, and Identity in Contemporary Art” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2013). 25. Additional performances and pieces by Alison Knowles are analyzed by Nicole Woods in her essay for this collection. 26. Julia Robinson, “The Sculpture of Indeterminacy: Alison Knowles’s Beans and Variations,” Art Journal 63, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 97. 27. Knowles’s project was re-performed at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2003, the Wexner Museum in 2004, and the Tate Modern in 2008 as a part of The Long Weekend: States of Flux. 28. Renate Buschmann, “Evocation of Pleasure and Disgust. Daniel Spoerri and the Establishment of Eat Art,” in Eating the Universe, ed. Sylvette Babin, (Köln: Dumont, 2009), 237. On Spoerri, also see Margherita d’Ayala Valva’s essay in this volume. 29. This first word from the series title, Przypadkowa Przyjemność, translates as accidental or casual and it has been translated as both “Casual Pleasure” on the artist’s website and “Accidental Pleasure” in the exhibition catalogue, Elżbieta Jabłońska: (Un)usually Successful. For consistency, I employ “accidental” as the translated title. 30. Buschmann, “Evocation of Pleasure and Disgust,” 237. 31. Paraphrasing Spoerri’s press release for the gallery in Buschmann, “Evocation of Pleasure and Disgust,” 238. On the Restaurant Spoerri, see Cecilia Novero, Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), ch. 5 (reprinted in this volume). 32. “The Whole Trick Is to Meet Well,” Elżbieta Jabłońska: (Un)usually Successful, 73. 33. See Julitą Wójick rozmawia Małgorzata Lisiewicz, “Obieranie ziemniaków” (Peeling Potatoes), Magazyn Sztuki 26 (2001), http://goo.gl/1eVkqo (accessed September 3, 2012). 34. Anda Rottenberg, “Biały Mazur,” in Biały Mazur, ed. Alexander Tolnay (Berlin and Warsaw: Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, 2004), np. 35. Karol Sienkiewicz, “Julita Wójcik: Peeling Potatoes,” Culture.pl, March 2011, edited and translated by Sylwia Wojda, July 2011, http://goo.gl/TRoJcv (accessed October 26, 2012).



Notes to Pages 179–82

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36. Iza Kowalczyk, “From Feminist Interventions to Post-Feminism,” in Biały Mazur, np. 37. Bourriaud’s definition upends the aesthetic, cultural, and political goals of modern art. He uses the phrase “relational art” exclusively for a group of artists included in his exhibition Traffic, 1996, at the CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux. The term has since been applied to Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Phillippe Parreno, Pierre Huyghe, Carsten Höller, Christine Hill, Vanessa Beecroft, Maurizio Cattelan, and Jorge Pardo. Bourriaud’s term and definition of the movement has been the subject of much criticism, notably by Claire Bishop and Grant Kester. See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du Reel, 2002), 14. Italics in original text. For criticisms of this argument, see Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso, 2012), and Grant Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 38. Janet Kraynak, “Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Liability,” in The ‘Do-It-Yourself ’ Artwork, ed. Anna Dezeuze (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010), 166. See also Michael Peterson and Laurie Beth Clark’s essay in this volume. 39. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 15. 40. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. and intro. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), 7–45. 41. Rancière in conversation with Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey, “Art of the Possible: An Interview with Jacques Rancière,” Artforum International 45, no. 7 (March 2007): 258. 42. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2010), 36. 43. The blur between art and life is also a subject of interest in Claire Bishop’s work. In her study, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, she discusses Rancière’s notion of the aesthetic regime in relation to how it may apply to participatory art that does not clearly fit into conventional or traditional notions of attractiveness or beauty. See Bishop, Artificial Hells, 26–30. 44. Bishop, Artifical Hells, 45. 45. Democratic, or emancipatory, art is the crux of Jacques Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics, and his text, “The Emancipated Spectator,” Artforum International 45, no. 7 (March 2007): 271–80. 46. Claire Bishop, “Anatagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” in The “Do-ItYourself ” Artwork, 259. 47. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 45–46. 48. Kraynak, “Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Liability,” 175. 49. Marek Krajewski, “Distanced towards One’s Role: On Ela Jabłońska’s Art,” nd, courtesy Elżbieta Jabłońska Archive, Bydgoszcz, Poland, 2011. 50. Elżbieta Jabłońska quoted in Emilia Iwanciw, “Gentle Perversity—That Is My Ideal,” Elżbieta Jabłońska: (Un)usually Successful, 68. 51. The public consumption of food is an interesting avenue for further development. On the one hand, food is celebrated and consumed publicly at restaurants and eating contests, on the other, it is considered inappropriate in certain volumes and places. Consult essays from Scapp and Seitz, eds., Eating Culture.

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Notes to Pages 182–84

52. Spoerri similarly reversed the consumption of food in the film Resurrection (1968). Co-created with Tony Morgan, Resurrection recounts the digestive process from the end result (excrement), to consumption (food), to source (animal, in this case, cow). 53. Elżbieta Jabłońska quoted in Elżbieta Jabłońska: (Un)usually Successful, 66. In recent years, museums themselves have begun to rent out their galleries in the evenings for private events, both personal and corporate, often in the form of celebratory dinners and fundraisers. It is not clear that this has been occurring in Polish institutions. Regardless, it is rare for museums to sanction food in their galleries during their open public hours. 54. Critiques of the institution of art are not unfamiliar in the history of art; one may recall Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’Artista, 1961, in which the artist canned his own excrement (labeled as “Freshly preserved, produced and tinned in May 1961,” and sold by weight based on the current price of gold) as a criticism of the value placed on the creator’s body in the art world. See Gerard Silk, “Myths and Meanings in Manzoni’s Merda d’Artista,” Art Journal 52, no. 3, Scatological Art (Autumn 1993): 65–75; and Jacopo Galimberti, “The Intellectual and the Fool: Piero Manzoni between the Milanese Art Scene and the Land of Cockaigne,” Oxford Art Journal 35, no. 1 (2012): 76–93. Sharon Hecker also discusses this piece in her essay for this volume. 55. Geis, “Feeding the Audience,” 222. 56. Of course, some museums now willingly rent space in rooms hung with art to corporations and individuals who can afford serving a large party, and Jabłońska herself has been “sanctioned” by the museum. 57. Jabłońska, “Gentle Perversity—That Is My Ideal,” in Elżbieta Jabłońska: (Un)usually Successful, 67.

11



Artists and Friends: Daniel Spoerri’s Eat Art Gallery

1. Spoerri had been in New York to stage a famous show at Allan Stone Gallery in 1964: “29 Variations on a Meal: Eaten by.” See Cecilia Novero, Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 163. 2. Among others, see the “Restaurant Spoerri” at the Jeu De Paume (2001), and the opening of the “Esslokal” next to his Staulager (Ab Art) in Hadersdorf am Kamp, in Austria, in 2009. 3. For a discussion of Miralda’s food art, see Cecilia Novero, “Miralda: Turning the Tables,” in De Gustibus Non Disputandum: Miralda (Madrid: La Fabrica, 2010), exhibition catalogue, 59–70. 4. Beuys’s performance at the Eat Art Gallery will not be discussed in this context. For an analysis of it, see Novero, Antidiets of the Avant-Garde, 211–21. 5. Alain Jouffroy and Patrick Beurard, “Souvenirs sans douleurs,” Opus International 110 (September–October 1988): 13. 6. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). On bricolage, see in particular, 16–17 and 19–20. On the linguistic and temporal deferral as well as difference that both inform bricolage, see The Savage



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Mind, 21. On the temporality of bricolage, see Lévi-Strauss: “Now, the characteristic feature of mythical thought, as of ‘bricolage’ on the practical plane, is that it builds up structured sets, not directly with other structured sets [i.e. language] but by using the remains and debris of events” (21–22). Jacques Derrida analyzes the notion of bricolage stressing its mythic-poetical functions. See Derrida’s “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference (London: Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005; c. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 351–70, especially 360–62. Although Lévi-Strauss’s bricolage presupposes the notion of a generalized structure of thinking, the particularity of it, extrapolated from such context, may interestingly be paired with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor literature, a literature that—through the intensities and fragments, the silences and leftover ignored within a major language—in fact deterritorializes the major language. In this sense, minor literature is a collective machine of expression. See Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), in particular 18–19. 7. Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (New York: New Press, 1985), 202. 8. Jouffroy and Jean-Jacques Lebel organized a happening (1960) in which stinging nettles were the “found food”: Hundertwasser prepared the wild plant for an eager audience. 9. On the periodization of the neo-avant-garde in an early phase from the postwar years to the mid- and late 1950s, and a self-reflexive second phase in the sixties and seventies, see Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 24–25. 10. Quoted in Emmett Williams, My Life in Flux—and Vice Versa (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 35. 11. In this, Filliou may be compared to Dieter Roth and his vast work, especially that with food. The bricoleur in the two artists impedes both to become designers. Note also that one kind of Italian pasta is named malfatti, or “badly done.” 12. The notion of the great refusal appears in Herbert Marcuse, OneDimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, c.1964, 1991). See in particular chapter 3, “The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness: Repressive Desublimation,” 59–86. 13. Williams, My Life in Flux, 128. 14. At Koepke’s gallery in Copenhagen in 1961, Spoerri had opened his Grocery Shop. The catalogue he prepared for the show was a work titled Catalog Taboo, mixing the “daily” bread with daily urban waste. It is made up of eighty bread rolls mixed in with garbage. On the notion of catalogue, sameness, and the similar, see Umberto Eco, cited in Novero, Antidiets of the Avant-Garde, 190. 15. Williams, My Life in Flux, 128. 16. Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yves Alain-Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, eds., Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 461. 17. At most it is reminiscent of some of James Rosenquist’s paintings, in which America ambivalently presents itself as a sugarcoated consumer world, offering its myths up for consumption. See, for example, President Elect, 1960 ¼ where a woman’s hands are caught in the act of breaking a slice of cake and, perhaps, offering it

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Notes to Pages 194–97

to the eager consumer of icons as of commodities, but especially the bleaker—and importantly later—F 111 (1965) in which some of the spaghetti cans one found in other paintings by Rosenquist are here splattered into a messy mush next to a jet fighter and an atomic explosion. 18. Foster et al., Art since 1900, 461. 19. Arman: Collected Works, 1958–1964 (La Jolla, CA: La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, 1974), 194. 20. This was precisely the main character’s route in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Edible Woman (1968). 21. Arman at the end of the 1950s had recourse to artful destruction of objects, especially violins, which he smashed, sliced, or burned. Arman once reflected: “A violin has a perfect form that nobody has been able to improve since the 18th century . . . almost feminine, it reminds me of those beautiful Cycladic idols.” Arman calls the works that ensue from these aggressive gestures of destruction colères or, roughly, tantrums. See Jan van der Marck, “Logician of Form / Magician of Gesture” in Arman, n.p., n. 8. 22. On the uncanny and the material in Surrealism, see Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 202. 23. Benjamin Buchloh, Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 274. 24. Quoted in Daniel Spoerri Presents Eat Art, ed. Elisabeth Hartung (Nuremberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2001), 86. 25. Quoted in Spoerri, Wenn alle Künste untergehen die edle Kochkunst bleibt bestehen (Amsterdam, 1971), 36. 26. See Dirk Dobke, ed., Dieter Roth: Books and Multiples (London: Edition Hansjörg Mayer, 2004), 17. 27. See Roth Time: A Dieter Roth Retrospective, ed. Theodora Vischer and Bernadette Walter, text by Dirk Dobke and B. Walter (New York: Museum of Modern Art/Lars Mueller Publishers, 2004), 116. Most interesting, in addition to Roth’s work with chocolate and spices that he presented at the Eat Art Gallery, is also his work with cheese. 28. Dobke, ed., Dieter Roth, 16. 29. Anekdotomania: Daniel Spoerri über Daniel Spoerri (Basel: Museum Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2001), 198; my translation. 30. Roth Time: A Dieter Roth Retrospective, ed. Theodora Vischer and Bernadette Walter, text by Dirk Dobke and B. Walter (New York: MoMa and Lars Mueller Publishers, 2004), 75. 31. Roth Time, 74. 32. Roth Time, 97. 33. On Narcissus, see Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York: Beacon Press, 1966); Eros e Civiltà (Torino: Einaudi, 1968), 190–91; my translation. 34. See Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 169–70. 35. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 191, 192. 36. Pierre Restany, “César and the Poetry of Industrial Chemistry,” Domus 462 (August 1968). Now on the web at http:///goo.gl/f00cNF (accessed October 8, 2014).



Notes to Pages 198–207

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37. The Dîner Cannibale was about eating the artist—Francois Lalanne’s— own body (or rather eating the artist as art, art as an image, a cast, of the artist). For this meal, Lalanne made a cast of himself that he then cut into pieces and used as mould for various dishes. The head, for example, was made of lamb-tongue and rows of sausage (for the brain); champignons served as eyeballs while their irises were made of truffles. The performance was reminiscent of the Surrealist Dîner sur la femme nue held at the opening of the Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme in 1959, itself a “sensationalized” version of Meret Oppenheim’s slightly earlier Spring Banquet. On those two occasions, a naked supine woman’s body functioned as a tray filled with the most refined food—including Dalí’s omnipresent lobsters. In his art-cannibalistic dinner Lalanne, by indirectly referencing these meals and by substituting his own “contemporary” body for Surrealism’s body of the eternal feminine, literally gave up for consumption the historical avant-garde. Spoerri himself underscored that the cannibal dinner stood for the motto of contemporary art, especially Eat Art: “Lalanne, your dinner was the final point of Eat Art, even though the latter will carry on. Even if we eat each other, the force of multiplication is such, that there will always be a pair of thighs left with which to continue Arman’s accumulations.” Spoerri alludes to Candy, here. This kind of art-cannibalism took place both within and beyond the context of the Spoerri Restaurant. 38. Quoted in César, 199. 39. César, 243.

12



Express Yourself: Al’s Café in Context

1. See Julie Ault, “Chronology,” in Alternative Art New York, 1965–1985 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 17–76. 2. Francis Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999), 29. 3. See Ken D. Allan, “The Artists’ Protest Committee,” in Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art, 1945–1980, ed. Rebecca Peabody et al. (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011), 167. 4. Contrary to the “strategic illusions” of Marshall McLuhan and Hans Enzensberger, who viewed media technology with some optimism, Baudrillard advocated “the liquidation of their present functional and technical structure as a whole.” Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,” in Utopia Deferred: Writings for Utopie (1967–1978), trans. Stuart Kendall (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006), 84. 5. Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,” 93. 6. Allan McCollum, “Allen Ruppersberg: What One Loves about Life Are the Things That Fade,” in Allen Ruppersberg: Books, Inc. (Limoges, France: FRAC Limousin, 1999), 9. Emphasis in text. 7. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 37. 8. A sign hanging above the reception desk at Al’s Grand Hotel read: “‘I am not creating environments. Only breaking them down.’ A. Ruppersberg—Al’s Grand Hotel—1971.” 9. Allen Ruppersberg, “Interview: Allen Ruppersberg, Frédéric Paul,” inter-

336

Notes to Pages 207–13

view by Frédéric Paul, in Allen Ruppersberg: Books, Inc. (Limoges, France: FRAC Limousin, 1999), 31. 10. Allen Ruppersberg, “Experimental Impulse,” interview by Thomas Lawson and Aram Moshayedi, September 9, 2011, http://goo.gl/1eEzqt (accessed February 19, 2013). 11. Ruppersberg recalls that each time an office became available, he would rent it; each one cost about $50 a month. Allen Ruppersberg, interview by author, Brooklyn, NY, July 2, 2012. 12. Ruppersberg, interview by author, Brooklyn, NY, July 2, 2012. 13. Ruppersberg, “Interview: Allen Ruppersberg, Frédéric Paul,” 33. Both Constance Lewallen and McCollum have noted that the dishes served at Al’s Café seem to refer to land art. See Lewallen, “Give and Take,” in Allen Ruppersberg, You and Me or the Art of Give and Take (Los Angeles: Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2009): np; McCollum, “Allen Ruppersberg,” 9. 14. Ruppersberg, “Interview: Allen Ruppersberg, Frédéric Paul,” 33. 15. Ruppersberg, “Interview: Allen Ruppersberg, Frédéric Paul,” 33. 16. Ruppersberg, interview by author. 17. Ruppersberg views his accumulations of objects and images not as a collection per se, but rather as an archive of source material for his work. As of 1999, he reported owning “around 20,000 postcards, 2,000 educational films, every issue of Life magazine from 1938 into the 1950s, thousands of slide collections, and hundreds upon hundreds of books, film strips, posters, calendars, comics, and so on.” McCollum, “Allen Ruppersberg,” 15. 18. Ruppersberg made additional works in the space beneath the mezzanine. Ruppersberg, interview by author. 19. Ruppersberg recounts that he lived in the old Sea Horse Inn restaurant. Ruppersberg, interview by author. The amusement park, which opened in 1958 as the successor to Ocean Park Pier, closed in 1967 following several years of financial and structural hardship. Some blamed the colder winter weather while others saw it as a symptom of changes in public tastes prompted by television and Disneyland. The Santa Monica Redevelopment Agency played a major role as well, as street closings limited access to the park. See Seymour Beubis, “P.O.P. Goes Pop! Amusement Park to Go on the Block,” Los Angeles Times, April 25, 1968, WS1; Ted Thackrey, “The Ride Is Over at Old-Time Carnivals,” Los Angeles Times, June 30, 1968, B1. 20. McCollum, “Allen Ruppersberg,” 8. 21. Beverly Heisner, Hollywood Art: Art Direction in the Days of the Great Studios (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1990), 5. 22. The productive exchange between Los Angeles and Amsterdam was the subject of a 2009 MoMA exhibition and catalogue. See Christophe Cherix, ed., In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960–1976 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2009). 23. Rauschenberg and Oldenburg showed at the Dwan Gallery in 1962 and 1963, respectively. Oldenburg also rented a studio in Venice and staged the happening Autobodys (1963) in the parking lot of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. For script and complete description of Autobodys, see Michael Kirby, Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1965), 262–88. 24. Chouinard was absorbed by CalArts in 1969. The process had been set



Notes to Pages 213–15

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in motion in 1961, when Walt Disney formed the California Institute of the Arts with the intention of merging Chouinard with the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music. See John Dreyfuss, “Ouster Fought by Art School Faculty,” Los Angeles Times, November 15, 1969, B10. 25. Oral history interview with Terry Allen, April 22, 1998, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 26. Ruppersberg, interview by author. 27. Ruppersberg, “Interview: Allen Ruppersberg, Frédéric Paul,” 36. 28. Steven Stern, “Taking Stock: Claes Oldenburg’s The Store,” Frieze 76 (June– August 2003), http://goo.gl/JDwEaQ (accessed February 19, 2013). 29. Ruppersberg, “Interview: Allen Ruppersberg, Frédéric Paul,” 36. 30. The complete line is “From the desert to the sea to all of Southern California.” Dunphy, who died in 2002, began his career as a newscaster in LA in the 1960s, and even has his own star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. Dan Trigoboff, “KCAL News Anchor Jerry Dunphy Dies,” Broadcasting & Cable, May 27, 2002, 20. 31. Ruppersberg’s acute exploration of the region extends to other areas of his practice, notably the photographic books 23 Pieces (1969) and 24 Pieces (1970). 32. Stanley Williford and Howard Hertel, “Singer Johnny Cash Pays $82,000 to U.S. in Fire Case,” Los Angeles Times, July 3, 1969, A3. 33. Jonathan Spaulding, “Yosemite and Ansel Adams: Art, Commerce, and Western Tourism,” Pacific Historical Review 64, no. 4 (November 1996): 632. 34. See Spaulding, “Yosemite and Ansel Adams,” 615–39. 35. David Brower, “Foreword,” in Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall, This Is the American Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1992), xvii. 36. McCollum, “Allen Ruppersberg,” 9. 37. Joan Didion, “Slouching towards Bethlehem,” in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 164. 38. John A. McCone et al., Violence in the City—an End or a Beginning? (California Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, 1965), 4. 39. McCone et al., Violence in the City, 63. 40. Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 213. 41. Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, 218–19. 42. On Chavez Ravine, seeAvila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, 145–84. 43. Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (New York: Verso, 1997), 52. 44. William Alexander McClung, Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 180. 45. Donald Craig Parson, Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 149. For a detailed account of the events leading up to the razing of Bunker Hill, see 147–62. 46. Ruppersberg, interview by author. 47. Cécile Whiting, Pop LA: Art and the City in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 24. 48. Ruppersberg, interview by author.

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Notes to Pages 216–21

49. The artist currently has a home in Brecksville. Ruppersberg, interview by author. 50. Kirse Granat May, Golden State, Golden Youth: The California Image in Popular Culture, 1955–1966 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 13. 51. Wallace Stegner, “The West Coast: Region with a View,” in One Way to Spell Man (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1982), 106, 108. 52. Stegner, “The West Coast,” 106. 53. Michael Oden, “When the Movie’s Over: The Post–Cold War Restructuring of Los Angeles,” in Local Consequences of the Global Cold War, ed. Jeffrey A. Engel (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 117–18. 54. See Jules Tygiel, “Ronald Reagan and the Triumph of Conservatism,” and R. Jeffrey Lustig, “California’s Struggle to Stop the Vietnam War,” in What’s Going On? California and the Vietnam Era, ed. Marcia Eymann and Charles Wollenberg (Oakland: Oakland Museum of California; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 43–58, 59–82. 55. Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 274. 56. Tom Wicker, “In the Nation: Air Attacks on Credibility,” New York Times, September 14, 1967, 46. 57. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, 37. 58. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, 112. 59. David Larsen, “Ready for Diners, Never Opens: Restaurant Feeds Curiosity,” Los Angeles Times, June 29, 1979, D1, 5.

13



Ways of Eating: Tradition, Innovation, and the Production of Community in Food-Based Art

1. http://goo.gl/Zo3VJr (accessed February 16, 2015). 2. In fact, numerous antecedents have been nominated: Suzanne Dunaway published No Need to Knead in 1999 (Hyperion). No less a baking authority than Rose Levy Beranbaum has published her own revision of the technique: “Bread in Under Two Minutes,” 2008, http://goo.gl/Tw4NVc (accessed February 16, 2015), and Jeff Hertzber and Zoe Francois applied the same basic insight in 2007 in Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (St. Martin’s). 3. Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson, “Critical Ingredients in a Free Lunch: Food and the Complex of Generosity in Relational Performance,” Theatre Annual 66 (2013): 68–84. The terms “relational art” and “social practice” are often used interchangeably today, although they have different histories. Nicolas Bourriaud introduced the term “relational aesthetics” to refer to art-world practices that structure personal interaction as art, while “social practice” emerged later and is often used to describe both artworks that are relations among persons and also artistic actions and interventions at a civic or institutional level. (Nicolas Baurillaud, Relational Aesthetics [Dijon: Les Presses Du Réel, 1998].) While we very much like the emphasis that “relational” places on interpersonal relationships, we have chosen



Notes to Pages 221–26

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the term “social practice” for this essay for its more widespread usage, its more inclusive character, and its emphasis on the politics of sociality. 4. While the phrase do-it-yourself dates back to the early part of the twentieth century, referring to any sort of resourceful self-reliance, the abbreviation DIY renewed in popularity at the start of the twenty-first century to signal a resurgence of alternative approaches in Western culture that shun mass commodities in favor of the locally produced and homemade. 5. Progressive Dinner was created for a conference on social practice at the University of Iowa in June 2014. In addition to creating the cookbook described herein, the performance included an intervention at a local farmer’s market and a dinner. 6. See, among many potential references for this sense of “avant-garde,” Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde; trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981); or Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). 7. For example, Megan Marsh McGlone has a series of projects involving human breast milk in which audiences have been as unnerved by her using a breast pump while serving cow’s milk as by being offered actual shots of actual breast milk. 8. Fuchia Dunlop, Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China (New York: Norton, 2009), 309–12. 9. Jennie Klein, “Feeding the Body: The Work of Barbara Smith,” 25; quoted in Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, “Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium,” Performance Research 4, no. 1 (1999): 10. 10. Stephanie Smith, Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 55. 11. Notoriously elaborated in the work of Jacques Derrida; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy offers a somewhat helpful description of deconstruction as well as a timeline of Derrida’s use of the term: http://goo.gl/2F1fDG (accessed February 28, 2015). 12. “Suggesting that the discoveries of medical science would provide the basis for their new ways of interacting with patrons, early restaurateurs emphasized their bouillons’ ‘restorative’ powers.” Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 25. 13. The idea that workers must “reproduce” their productive capacity through such daily activities as eating is developed in Marx and elaborated in multiple dimensions by marxist feminists; for a recent argument about the expropriation of the productivity of “women’s work” as essential to the foundation of capitalism itself, see Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004). 14. Tom Marioni, Beer, Art and Philosophy (San Francisco: Crown Point Press, 2004). 15. Kathan Brown, Know That You Are Lucky (San Francisco: Crown Point Press, 2012), accessed on line using Amazon preview February 28, 2015.

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Notes to Pages 226–34

16. Bryce Dwyer, “Serving Art,” Mash Tun Journal, September 15, 2013, http:// goo.gl/6DUmWo (accessed February 16, 2015). 17. Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents,” Artforum 44, no. 6 (February 2006): 178–83; Grant Kester, “Another Turn,” Artforum 44, no. 9 (May 2006): 22; Claire Bishop, “Claire Bishop Responds,” Artforum 44, no. 9 (May 2006): 24. We discuss this debate more extensively, from a food art perspective, in Clark and Peterson, “Critical Ingredients in a Free Lunch.” 18. Quoted in Greverus and Ritschel, Aesthetics and Anthropology, 248. 19. Clark and Peterson, “Critical Ingredients in a Free Lunch,” 65–81. 20. “Ride-on-Dinner—DIY Recipe.” http://goo.gl/C9pSiD (accessed June 10, 2014). 21. The pitfalls of attempting “instrumental” community as art are highlighted in Janet Kraynak’s important critique of the sustainability of The Land: “Far from the communitarianism of the past, which sought to reintroduce the ethos of ‘old sustainability’ as a counterculture resistance to progress-oriented, market-based culture. The Land’s community—its habits of sociality—emerge from the latter’s transformed structures and habits of advanced capitalism.” Janet Kraynak, “The Land and the Economics of Sustainability,” Art Journal 69, no. 4 (December 1, 2010): 16–25. 22. “86” as restaurant slang for sold-out menu items is obscure in origin, but is thought by some to be derived from rhyming the word “nix,” meaning cancel. See http://goo.gl/KuULV9 (accessed February 28, 2015). 23. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1956). 24. PatrickAnderson, So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 25. Jeremy Ohmes, “Inverting Invasive: Michael Rakowitz,” http://goo.gl/ FNCwUI (accessed February 16, 2015). We saw documentation of this project in the 2014 show “A Proximity of Consciousness” at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

14

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Joseph Beuys: Gastrosophical Aesthetics

1. Paul Johnson, Socrates: A Man for Our Times (New York: Penguin Books, 2012); James Miller, Examined Lifes: From Socrates to Nietzsche (New York: Picador, 2012). 2. For more details on “political gastrosophy,” see Harald Lemke, “The Ethics of Taste,” Sats—Nordic Journal of Philosophy 10, no. 2 (2009): 107–22; Harald Lemke, Politik des Essens. Wovon die Welt von morgen lebt (Bielefeld: Verlag, 2012). 3. My discussion of food ethics is presented in more detail in Harald Lemke, Ethik des Essens: Einführung in die Gastrosophie (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007). 4. See Allan Antliff, Joseph Beuys (New York: Phaidon Press, 2014). 5. See David Adams, “Joseph Beuys, Pioneer of Radical Ecology,” Art Journal 51, no. 2 (1992): 26–34. 6. Cara Jordan, “The Evolution of Social Sculpture in the United States:



Notes to Pages 235–49

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Joseph Beuys and the Work of Suzanne Lacy and Rick Lowe,” Public Art Dialogue 3, no. 2 (2013): 144–67. 7. On food in Fluxus, and in particular Alison Knowles, see Nicole Woods’s essay in this volume. 8. It is important to note that Beuys developed his gastrosophical thinking with conceptual support from other Eat artists, receiving particular inspiration from the well-known Eat artist Daniel Spoerri (Lemke, Die Kunst des Essens). For the Eat Art Gallery of Spoerri, see Cecilia Novero, Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 9. Joseph Beuys, Beethovens Küche (Bedburg-Hau: Stiftung Museum Schloss Moyland, 2004). 10. Recently this dimension of gastrosophical thinking is most prominently shown in Michael Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (New York: Penguin Press, 2013). 11. Lucrezia De Domizio Durini, Joseph Beuys: The Art of Cooking—La Cucina di Beuys (Milano: Edizioni Charta, 1999), 19. 12. Carsten Höller and Rosemarie Trockel, A House for Pigs and People (Köln: Walter König, 1997); Critical Art Ensemble and Sonja Alhäuser are discussed in Lemke, Die Kunst des Essens, 81–113. 13. Beuys, cited in Rolf Beil, Künstlerküche: Lebensmittel als Kunstmaterial von Schiele bis Jason Rhoades (Köln: DuMont, 2002), 224. 14. See Peter Singer and Jim Mason, Eating: What We Eat and Why It Matters (London: Random House, 2006). 15. See Hildegard Kurt, “Der umgedrehte Spazierstock. Kunst & Ökologie: Strategien zur ästhetischen Einrichtung der zukünftigen Erde,” Zukünfte 30 (Winter 1999/2000): 74–77. 16. Joseph Beuys, Jannis Kounellis, Anselm Kiefer, and Enzo Cucchi, Ein Gespräch, ed. Jacqueline Burckhardt (Zürich: Parkett, 1986), 115. 17. See Harald Lemke, Living in the Veggies: Urban Agriculture as Global Renaturaliziation of City Life, in Culture|Nature. Art and Philosophy in the Context of Urban Development, ed. Anke Haarmann / Harald Lemke (Berlin: Jovis, 2009), 109–26. 18. De Domizio Durini, Joseph Beuys, 22. 19. Joseph Beuys and Lucrezia De Domizio Durini, Difesa della Natura: Diary of Seychelles (Milano: Edizioni Charta, 1996). 20. See Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000); Joseph E. Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton, Fair Trade for All: How Trade Can Promote Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 21. See Nicola Perullo’s essay in this volume. 22. Beuys, cited in Beil, Künstlerküche, 246.

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Provisional Objects: Alison Knowles’s Bean Rolls

1. Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne II, Fondements d’une sociologie de la quotidienneté (Paris: L’Arche, 1961). Critique of Everyday Life, vol.2:

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Notes to Pages 250–63

Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans. John Moore (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 18–22. Epigraph. Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne II, Fondements d’une sociologie de la quotidienneté (Paris: L’Arche, 1961). Critique of Everyday Life, vol.2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 2002), 18–22. 2. George Brecht, “Something about Fluxus, May 1964.” Originally published in Fluxus Newspaper 4 (1964) and reprinted in What’s Fluxus? Wht’s Not! Why (Detroit, MI: Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Foundation, 2002), exhibition catalogue, 111–12. 3. There is an argument to be made that some Fluxus pieces, like Patterson’s First Symphony, analogized the often violent and changing social-economic-­ political structures initiated by the civil rights movement in the United States. His choice to “divide,” or segregate, the audience members based on an informal survey of their “trust” of him (an African American male) is furthered by the noise or “pop” of a can of Maxwell House coffee which would serve to “heighten the anxiety” of performance and remind spectators of sounds common to militarization and social unrest. On the political dimension of this work, and others, see Kristine Stiles’s indispensible essay, “Between Water and Stone, Fluxus Performance: A Metaphysics of Acts,” in The Spirit of Fluxus, ed. Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 1993), 62–99. 4. Brecht, “Statement on Fluxus,” 111. Brecht is likely referring to Flynt’s demonstration on April 29, 1964, of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Originale, a performance presented at Town Hall in New York City. In his text he argues that activism like Flynt’s could result in “making Alison Knowles’ [sic] bean-sprouts seem even lovelier.” 5. The material on The Book of Bean and other artworks referenced in this essay were first examined in chapter 3, “Provisional Objects,” of my dissertation, “Performing Chance: Alison Knowles, Fluxus, and the Enigmatic Work of Postwar Art, 1962–1975” (University of California, Irvine, 2010). The term “provisional” has taken on new currency since my dissertation was completed. See, for example, Natilee Harren, “The Provisional Work of Art: George Brecht’s Footnotes at LACMA, 1969,” Getty Research Journal 8 (2016): 177–97; and Anna Dezeuze, “In Search of the Insignificant: Street Works, ‘Borderline Art’ and Dematerialisation,” in Objets en process: Après la dématérialisation de l’art; 1960–2010, ed. Ileana Parvu (Geneva: Métis- presses, 2012), 35–63. 6. For a brief history of Fluxus activities, see Peter Frank’s “Fluxus in New York,” Lightworks 11/12 (Fall 1979): 29–36. 7. Dick Higgins also kept a studio loft at Canal Street, and even helped Maciunas to secure the ground-floor space that would become Fluxhall/Fluxshop. 8. The name of the new press was given by chance when Knowles told Higgins to name it “something else” after his first proposal was deemed unsuitable. Author interview with Alison Knowles, December 17, 2007, New York City. For a detailed history of the publishing house, see Peter Frank’s Something Else Press: An Annotated Bibliography (Documentext Publication, New York: McPherson & Company, 1983). 9. For a detailed history, see Frank, Something Else Press. On Daniel Spoerri’s



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publications for Something Else Press, see Margherita d’Ayala Valva’s essay in this collection. 10. See, for example, Jon Hendricks, ed., Fluxus Codex (Detroit: Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988). 11. Andy Warhol’s Time Capsule 21 (Pittsburg: Andy Warhol FoundationDumont, 2003), 220. 12. For a history of Rutgers University and its importance as a site for Fluxus and Happenings activities, see Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia and Rutgers University, ed. Geoffrey Hendricks (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003); and Off Limits: Rutgers University and the AvantGarde 1957–63, ed. Joan Marter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999). 13. Maciunas’s role as collector and designer is crucial to any history of Fluxus, but my main concern here is not an exhaustive history of the Fluxus multiple per se, in their every iteration, but a close examination of Knowles’s particular contribution to the traveling archive. While Maciunas commissioned the multiples, curated the contents, and designed the unique labels, the conception, and in Knowles’s case, also the labor, belonged to the artists. For more on Maciunas’s design activities, see Julia Robinson’s “Maciunas as Producer: Performative Design in the Art of the 1960s,” Grey Room 33 (Fall 2008): 56–83. 14. The classic examples are, of course, Roland Barthes’s “The Death of an Author” essay (1968), reprinted in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 142–48; and Michel Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” (1969), reprinted in Language-Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. and trans. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113–38. 15. Reprinted in Jon Hendricks, Arthur C. Danto, René Block, and George Brecht, What’s Fluxus? What’s Not! Why, exhibition catalogue (Detroit, MI: Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Foundation, 2002), 55. 16. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and trans. James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), 57. 17. Alison Knowles, interview with author, December 15, 2008, New York City. Over the course of my dissertation research, I conducted a number of interviews with Alison Knowles between 2005 and 2008. I wish to thank her (again) for her invaluable generosity of time and materials then; and now, as I transform that early work into a book on the work of Knowles and Fluxus. 18. Alison Knowles, conversation with the author, March 16, 2007. For more on Knowles’s interest in cooking, see Hannah Higgins’s, “Love’s Labor’s Lost and Found: A Meditation on Fluxus, Family, and Somethings Else,” Art Journal 69, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 2010): 15–17. 19. Knowles has said, “By then it had gone out of cooking and into reviewing the culture and how beans would affect anything—whether it was an artwork, a song, or a proverb—something that would reflect onto the culture of beans.” Interview with author, March 16, 2007, New York City. See also, Knowles, “Why I Work with Beans” (April 30, 1981), unpublished statement, Alison Knowles Archive, New York City. 20. As in Make a Salad, the mixture of history and art would consistently con-

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Notes to Pages 266–70

verge in deliberate and unexpected ways. For a discussion of this work, and another food-based performance by Knowles, The Identical Lunch, see my essay: “Taste Economies: Alison Knowles, Gordon Matta-Clark and the Intersection of Food, Time and Performance,” Performance Research: A Journal of Performing Arts 19, no. 3 (August 2014): 157–61. 21. Judith Rodenbeck, “Alison Knowles,” in “The Artist as Experience Maker” section of the exhibition catalogue Work Ethic (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 185. 22. Borges, “The Library of Babel,” 54–59. 23. See, for example, Cage’s Water Music (1952). 24. Marcel Duchamp, interview with James Johnson Sweeney, National Broadcasting Company, January 1956. Reprinted in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: De Capo Press, 1973), 134–45. 25. Alison Knowles, interview with unknown author; found among papers in the Alison Knowles Archive, New York City, 2008. 26. Alison Knowles, By Alison Knowles (New York: Great Bear Pamphlet, Something Else Press, 1965), 10. It is unclear from the historical record just who this first performer was. For more on the Café au Go Go events, see the Jean Brown Papers (Emmett Williams Correspondence File), Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. 27. Hannah Higgins, “Experience in Context: Happenings, Conceptual and Pop Art,” in her Fluxus Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 118. As the daughter of Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles, Hannah Higgins has contributed invaluable scholarship to the history of Fluxus—both as a formidable scholar, and on a more personal level, from the vantage point of personally viewing Fluxus objects and performing Fluxus scores. I am grateful for Hannah’s willingness to engage in conversation about Fluxus, and to answer a seemingly infinite number of questions over the years. 28. This idea is manifested in one remembrance Knowles has of Nam June Paik, who told her that he kept the Bean Rolls “beside the toilet for his morning contemplative reading.” See “Notes Toward Indigo Island: A Conversation between Alison Knowles and Hannah Higgins, 1994,” in Alison Knowles, Indigo Island: Art Works by Alison Knowles (Saarbrucken: Stadtgalerie Saarbrucken, 1995), 105. This link to vitality and nourishment also distinguishes my reading of text-object-­ performance from the excellent, though different approaches, of art historians Julia Robinson and Liz Kotz. 29. The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles has in its collection one edition of the Bean Rolls, which, until recently, had been hermetically sealed for purposes of conservation. On a visit to the GRI in December 2014, I had the pleasure of exploring and photographing all contents of the Bean Rolls from one of their Fluxkits. Previously, I have had the distinct privilege of playing with an opened version at the artist’s studio loft in New York City. 30. While I emphasize certain experiential sensibilities here, Julia Robinson has rightly noted the sculptural quality of Bean Rolls and other signature Knowlesian pieces. See her important survey, “The Sculpture of Indeterminacy: Alison Knowles’s Beans and Variations,” Art Journal 63, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 97–115.



Notes to Pages 270–73

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31. Jackson Mac Low, “A Bean Diastic for Alison Knowles from an Earlier Bean Poem,” in Stanzas for Iris Lezak (Barton, VT: Something Else Press, 1972); reprinted in Knowles’s A Bean Concordance, 1 (New York: Printed Editions, 1983), unpaginated; John Cage, “Where Are We Eating? And What Are We Eating?” in Merce Cunningham, ed. James Klosty (New York: Limited Editions, 1975), 55–62. 32. The poem was published in Bean Rolls and later reprinted in its entirety, including updated information from a 1978 New York City telephone book, in Alison Knowles, More by Alison Knowles (New York: Printed Editions, 1979). 33. I am currently completing a manuscript on the diverse objects, performances, installations, environments, and poetic works of Alison Knowles from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, derived from my dissertation “Performing Chance: Alison Knowles, Fluxus, and the Enigmatic Work of Postwar Art, 1962–1975” (University of California, Irvine, 2010). 34. While typically hung in her studio around a thin wooden frame, the Giant Bean Turner was conceived first as a performative object. Knowles exhibited and performed the work in The 3rd Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989, at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, January 2009. Also, in 1982, Knowles was awarded the prestigious Karl Sczuka Award for best radio work from WDR for her sound work Bohnen Sequenzen (Bean Sequences). 35. Knowles recalls, “The scrolls were all the same and they were run offset and we would cut them meticulously. We didn’t get to two hundred because my mother and I were simply worn out.” Interview with the author, March 16, 2007, New York City. 36. To this extent, Knowles’s food-based pieces become historical groundings for similar projects (some thirty years later) that augment and facilitate sharing and social interaction, as in the “free food” events created by Rirkrit Tiravanija. In 2011 Knowles and Tiravanija collaborated on an editioned book scroll, Men and Women Commonly Dress Alike (Paris: Three Star Books). Edition 2/10 is available for viewing at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. 37. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “1962 (a)” in Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, vol. 2, ed. Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 458–59. 38. Alison Knowles, interview with unknown author; found among papers in the Alison Knowles Archive, New York City, 2008. I address the feminist aspects of Knowles’s work in the late 1960s and early 1970s in “Object/Poems: Alison Knowles’s Feminist Archite(x)ture,” X-TRA: A Contemporary Art Quarterly 15, no. 1 (Fall 2012): 7–25. 39. See Alison Knowles, “Why I Work with Beans” (April 30, 1981), unpublished statement, Alison Knowles Archive, New York City. 40. Jill Johnston, “Flux Acts,” Art in America 82, no. 6 (June 1994): 79. Emphases mine. 41. This relation to Broodthaers, albeit in a different way, has been argued by Julia Robinson in “The Sculpture of Indeterminacy: Alison Knowles’s Beans and Variations.” 42. Rachel Haidu, “Laughter,” in Part-Object/Part-Sculpture (Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts and University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2005), 131–35.

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Notes to Pages 273–76

43. See, for example, Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families during the Cold War (New York: Basic Books, 1988). 44. See “Thing Theory,” in Things, ed. Bill Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 4–6. 45. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 2, 44–47.

16



Cooking and Eating across Species: Natalie Jeremijenko’s Cross(x)Species Adventure Club

1. Natalie Jeremijenko, The X-Species Adventure Club brochure, http:// goo.gl/1SpJNJ. accessed January 14, 2014. An early draft of this paper was presented at the Third International Conference on Transdisciplinary Imaging at the Intersections of Art, Science and Culture, “Cloud and Molecular Aesthetics,” Istanbul, Turkey, July 26–28, 2014. 2. Dale Dougherty, “Maker: Natalie Jeremijenko,” Make Magazine 2 (2005): 25. 3. Nicola Twilley, “Cross-Species Dining: An Interview with Natalie Jeremijenko and Mihir Desai,” Edible Geography, October 27, 2010, http://goo.gl/ aAwQcY (accessed January 14, 2014). 4. Twilley, “Cross-Species Dining.” 5. United States Environmental Protection Agency, “How People Are Exposed to Mercury,” http://goo.gl/fOaCHX (accessed May 23, 2014). 6. Chitinase is an effective chelating agent because it is high in nitrogen. For more information on different kinds of chitinase, see Rifat Hamid, Minhaj A. Khan, Mahboob Ahmad, Saleem Javed, Malik Mobeen Ahmad, Malik Zainul Abdin, and Javed Musarrat, “Chitinases: An Update,” Journal of Pharmacy and Bioallied Sciences 5, no. 1 (January–March 2013): 21–29. 7. Twilley, “Cross-Species Dining.” 8. Ursula Heinzelmann, “An Interview with René Redzepi: Noma, Copenhagen,” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 10, no. 3 (2010): 98. 9. Sophia Roosth tracks the funding flows in This’s lab in her essay “Of Foams and Formalisms: Scientific Expertise and Craft Practice in Molecular Gastronomy,” American Anthropologist 115, 1, (2013): 4–16. She writes, “soon after my arrival in the laboratory, I was surprised to learn that much of its research is bankrolled by industrial food and neutriceutical companies, French businesses that produce yogurt and provide tap water, as well as Marie SAS, which markets frozen pizzas and quiches. Another funding source is Diana Naturals, a firm that develops natural cosmetics, food products, and dietary supplements” (9). Links between molecular gastronomy research and corporate funding in France have been probed by French journalists, including Isabelle Saporta, but this topic has not been widely covered in English beyond Roosth’s comprehensive study. Meanwhile, René Redzepi’s Noma in Copenhagen promotes an open-source nonprofit business model with its Nordic Food Lab organization. “Nordic Food Lab,” http://goo.gl/RWXk4u (accessed December 12, 2014). 10. Hervé This, Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 1.



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11. This, Molecular Gastronomy, 3. 12. This, Molecular Gastronomy, 12. 13. This, Molecular Gastronomy, 11. 14. This, Molecular Gastronomy, 103. 15. For more home economics history, see Virginia B. Vincenti, “Chronology of Events and Movements Which Have Defined and Shaped Home Economics,” and Sarah Stage, “Ellen Richards and the Social Significance of the Home Economics Movement,” both in Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession, ed. Sarah Stage and Virginia B. Vincenti (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 321–30. See also Megan Elias, Stir It Up: Home Economics in American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), and Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983). 16. These titles were selected from 469 thesis titles collected in Titles of Completed Theses in Home Economics and Related Fields in Colleges and Universities of the United States, 1954–1955, USDA and Office of Education (GPO, 1955). 17. Roosth, “Foams and Formalisms,” 9. 18. See “The World’s Best Molecular Gastronomy Chefs,” Enthusio.com, http:// goo.gl/EbIjh6 (accessed January 6, 2014). 19. More women in the United States are CEOs (25 percent) than chefs. United States Department of Labor, Women’s Division, Nontraditional Occupations for Women in 2009, http://goo.gl/gFwrUy (accessed January 14, 2014). 20. Roosth goes into greater depth about the masculinist assumptions of molecular gastronomy, succinctly summarizing the situation: “Female culinary know-how, learned intergenerationally and practiced in home kitchens, here represents the sort of cultural knowledge that This and his acolytes want to experimentally explain or discard” (Roosth, “Foams and Formalisms,” 9). 21. In her chapter “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives,” Donna Haraway counters totalizing views from above by choosing to see differently, from below, from one’s situation: “Relativism and totalization are both ‘god-tricks’ promising vision from everywhere and nowhere equally and fully, common myths in rhetorics surrounding Science.” Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 191. 22. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 191. 23. As an indicator of its populist potential, a 2008 Make Magazine molecular gastronomy tutorial featured inverse spherification. See Michael Zbyszynski, “Molecular Gastronomy: Spherify Your Food for a New Culinary Experience,” Make Magazine 14 (2008): 149–52. 24. Twilley, “Cross-Species Dining.” 25. Donna Haraway, “Multispecies Cosmopolitics: Staying with the Trouble,” 2013 Distinguished Lecture, Arizona State University, March 5, 2013. 26. Isabel Stengers, Cosmopolitics II (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 371–72. 27. Twilley, “Cross-Species Dining.” 28. For examples of the changing face of environmental conservation and protection, see Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-

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Notes to Pages 283–88

colonial Era, ed. William M. Adams and Martin Mulligan (London: Earthscan, 2012); Bryan Norton, Searching for Sustainability: Interdisciplinary Essays in the Philosophy of Conservation Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); The Great New Wilderness Debate, ed. J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998); and Fairness and Futurity: Essays on Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice, ed. Andrew Dobson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 29. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 176. 30. Mel Chin with Rufus Chaney, Revival Field (1991–ongoing), http:// goo.gl/wVPBju (accessed December 1, 2014). See also Zoë Ryan and Mel Chin, “A Conversation with Mel Chin,” Log 8 (Summer 2006): 59–68. 31. Elizabeth K. Costello, Les Dethlefsen, David A. Relman, Keaton Stagaman, and Brendan Bohannan, “The Application of Ecological Theory toward an Understanding of the Human Microbiome,” Science 336, no. 6086 (2012): 1255–62. 32. See Molecular Aesthetics, ed. Peter Weibel and Ljiljana Fruk (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013); Paul Thomas, Nanoart: The Immateriality of Art (Chicago: Intellect, 2013); and Tami Spector, “Nanoaesthetics: From the Molecular to the Machine,” Representations 117, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 1–29. 33. For a short history of bioart that begins with Steichen and Alexander Fleming’s “germ paintings,” see Frances Stracey, “Bio-art: The Ethics behind the Aesthetics,” Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology 10 (2009): 496–500. 34. Ionat Zurr summarizes the state of art historical engagement with bioart in her dissertation. Zurr laments the prevalent “assumption of a linear, controlled, and progressive history of BioArt that seems to be the line of choice of most art historians, curators and theorists, who find it hard to cope with the multiplicity of sources, concerns, motivations, backgrounds and references of BioArt. . . . [I]n the eyes of published art historians, BioArt seems to be linked to and originated from digital art.” Ionat Zurr, “Growing Semi-Living Art” (doctoral thesis, University of Western Australia, 2009), http://goo.gl/8JgSJr, 145 (accessed February 6, 2014). 35. Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, Shrimp Farm, http://goo.gl/ 2xzuHw (accessed December 10, 2014). See also Leslie Ryan, “Art + Ecology: Land Reclamation Works of Artists Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, and Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison,” Environmental Philosophy 4, no. 1/2 (2007): 95–116, and Craig Adcock, “Conversational Drift: Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison,” Art Journal 51, no. 2 (1992): 35–45. 36. Robert Mitchell, Bioart and the Vitality of Media (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010). 37. Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip’s edited collection Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008) includes writing from artists like the Critical Art Ensemble, Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, Claire Pentecost, and da Costa herself as well as from other makers and thinkers whose work contributes much to bioart conversations (subRosa, Jens Hauser, Kathy High, Paul Vanouse). The book brings biologists, artists, and theorists into dialogue about both tactical media’s current manifestations and legacy and the relevance of Foucault’s concept of “biopower” to recent “(un)disciplinary” engagements with



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media and technology (da Costa and Philip xviii). Artist Eduardo Kac edited Signs of Life: Bioart and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), which also brings together artists and philosophers, but proposes a different set of questions. Kac is concerned with the creatures of bioart, “Hybrids, Clones, Mutants, Synthetics, and Transgenics,” as well as situating bioart within art history, a project da Costa and Philip do not pursue, given that tactical media has always resisted and thrived outside of art history. Also of interest: Donna Haraway’s writing about Patricia Piccinini’s work in When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), Cary Wolfe’s writing about Alba and Sue Coe in What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and Joanna Zylinska’s discussion of bioart in Bioethics in the Age of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). 38. Natalie Jeremijenko, “OneTrees: project,” http://goo.gl/TyAZ3s (accessed May 23, 2014). 39. Natalie Jeremijenko and Heath Bunting, “About Biotech Hobbyist Magazine,” http://goo.gl/a5Baev (accessed May 23, 2014). 40. Beatriz da Costa’s work on microbial life included a series of exhibitions that promoted a closer reading of those “members of the lived non-human worlds that we are least likely to recognize as social actors within urban environments.” Beatriz da Costa, “Invisible Earthlings: 2008–2009,” http://goo.gl/jyyZWl (accessed May 26, 2014).

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I nd e x

Abdin, Malik Zainul, 347 Abramović, Marina, 108, 116 Achatz, Grant, 38, 53, 54, 57, 231, 282, 305 Ackerman, Jason, 316 Adams, Ansel, 218, 338 Adams, David, 341 Adams, William M., 349 Adcock, Craig, 349 Ader, Bas Jan, 215 Adrià, Albert, 305, 306 Adrià, Ferran, 6, 11, 26–27, 33, 53–54, 57, 72, 281–82, 302, 305, 306 aerofood, 51 Ahmad, Mahboob, 347 Ahmad, Malik Mobeen, 347 Alberro, Alexander, 323 alcohol, 52, 87, 222, 254 Aleu, Franc, 29 Alhäuser, Sonja, 7, 253, 316, 342 Ali-Bab, Babinski Henri Jospeh Séverin, 86, 311, 312 Alisauskas, Alexandra, 6, 301 Allan, Ken D., 336 Allen, Terry, 215, 221, 338 almond, 200 aluminum foil, 216 Amalfitano, Lelia, 317 anchovy, 55 Anderson, Patrick, 241, 341 andouille, 162 Andrews, Colman, 305 Ang, Lee, 65, 307 Annichiarico, Silvana, 8 Antliff, Allan, 341 Antoni, Janine, v, ix, 3, 12, 13, 107–19, 210, 302, 15, 316, 317, 330 Apicius, Marcus Gavius, 85 apple, 49, 56, 254 apron, 147, 148, 181, 283 arachnids, 229 Arau, Alfonso, 306 Arau, Fernando, 65

Arensberg, Walter, 272 Armstrong, Elizabeth, 343 Arneil, Barbara, 324 Arneson, Hjorvardur Harvard, 325 art gallery, 15, 123, 129, 153, 155, 167, 173–86, 213, 315, 330; Virginia Dwan gallery, 211, 337; Eat Art gallery, 4, 16, 84, 89, 191–210, 310, 320, 335; René Block gallery, 165 artichoke, 109, 117, 67, 310 Athenaeus of Naukratis, 85 Atwood, Margaret, 335 Auf der Heyde, Alexander, xii, 310 Ault, Julie, 336 Aunt Jemima, 146, 151, 154 Austin, John Langshaw, 168, 328 Avila, Eric, 219, 338 Axel, Gabriel, 306 Baca, Murtha, 314 bacon, 254 Bagley, Christopher, 325 Bailkey, Martin, 315 Baker, Bobby, 229 Baldaccini, César, aka César, 16, 191–92, 198, 206–09, 305, 338 Baldessari, John, 15, 149, 169–70, 215, 328 Balducci, Temma, 321, 325 Balki, R., 307 Ballengée, Brandon, 290 Baltz, Emilie, 281 Bamler, Erich, 79, 88 banana, 49, 63 banquet hall, 65 barnacle, 55 Barnes, Donna R., 312 Barreto, Joana, 308 Barthes, Roland, 11, 67, 149, 302, 307, 344 Bastek, Alexander, 310 bathroom, 15, 159, 160, 171 bathtub, 114, 171

351

Baticheff, Kichka, 78, 82, 84, 87, 89 Baudrillard, Jean, 211–12, 336 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 31 Bayliss, Sarah, 316 beans, 55, 62, 88, 89, 291, 331, 342–46; cranberry beans, 109, 117; dried beans, 19, 255, 263–78; green beans, 169; soya beans, 254 Beard, James, 149 Beauchamp, Gary K., 302 Beaugé, Bénédict, 302 bedroom, 155, 292 Beecroft, Vanessa, 332 beef, 229, 231 beer, 113, 193, 216, 228–29, 233–35, 254, 340 Beil, Rolf, 342 Belasco, Warren, 303 Belgum, Deborah, 325 Bellmer, Hans, 201 Bellone, Giuseppe, 129, 319 Berger-Hochstrasser, Julie, 315 Berghaus, Günter, 304 Beubis, Seymour, 337 Beurard, Patrick, 333 Beuys, Joseph, 10, 16, 18, 30, 35, 116; Convivium, 116; chalk drawings, 328; Eat Art Project, 191–95; 316; Gastrosophy, 247–61; 341, 342; Social sculpture, 43, 311 Bielas, Katarzyna, 330 Bilet, Maxim, 305 Bishop, Claire, 182, 236, 332, 341 Block, René, 165, 344 blood, 64, 84, 85, 100, 132, 168, 229, 250, 311 Bloom, Lisa, 323 Blumenthal, Heston, 53 boat, 63, 95 Bocuse, Paul, 26 Bodei, Remo, 314 Bohannan, Brendan, 349 Boime, Albert, 324 Bois, Yves-Alain, 334, 346 Borges, Jorge Luis, 269, 271, 344 Bottinelli, Silvia, iii, v, ix, 13, 20, 107, 293, 308

bottle, 72, 89, 163, 214, 230, 234 Bourdieu, Pierre, 184, 332 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 182, 332 bowl, 56, 63, 111, 148, 163, 167, 304 box, 34, 115, 129, 153, 192, 199–200, 213, 282; fluxus box, 19, 197, 266–67, 270, 272, 274 Brack, Leslie, 320 Bradbury, Ray, 131 Braet, Jan, 317, 318, 319, 320 Brandt, Reinhardt, 314 brandy, 229 bread, 81, 85, 163, 196–97, 207, 254, 304, 326, 334, 339; bread crumb, 166; bread dough, 84, 89, 148, 202–3, 208–9, 225, 228; bread soup, 84, 310; loaf of bread, 89, 170; white bread, 166-67, 230 breasts, 49, 63, 99, 132, 146–47, 320, 323, 340 Brecht, George, 191, 228, 229, 263-264, 266, 273, 343, 344 brewing, 233–35 Brill, Suzanne, 303 Brillat-Savarin, Anthelme, 80-81, 83-84 broccoli, 231 Brodsky, Judith K., 321 broiler, 216 Broodthaers, Marcel, 276, 346 broth, 84, 117 Broude, Norma, 320 Brower, David, 338 Brown, Alton, 282 Brown, Bill, 277, 347 Brown, Kathan, 234, 340 Brown, Lindsay, 117, 317 Brucculeri, Antonio, 310 Bryant, Marcia, 322 Bryson, Norman, 314 bubble, 216, 283, 286 Buchloh, Benjamin, 201, 274, 317, 334, 335, 346 Buckberrough, Sherry, 330 Budde, Rachel, XI, 107, 109, 111–12, 118, 315, 316 Buñuel, Luis, 176, 184, 330 Burckhardt, Jacqueline, 342

352 index

Burden, Chris, 116 burger, 12, 93-105, 216, 220, 312–13 Burlison Mooney, Barbara, 152, 324 Busch, Wilhelm, 88 Buschmann, Renate, 180, 311, 331 Buskirk, Martha, 317 Butler, Eugenia, 213 butter, 7, 61, 62, 67, 113, 254, 275, 316 cabinet, 147, 177, 270 café, 4, 17, 211–24, 272, 336–37, 345 Cage, John, 266, 271, 273, 345, 346 cake, 93, 101, 200, 254, 334 calcic gluconolactato, 286 Caldwell, John, 139 Callicott, J. Baird, 349 Cameron Menzies, William, 215 Cameron, Dan, 317 canapé, 51, 196 candied fruit, 49, 51 candy, 63, 115, 127–28, 139, 198–202, 205–6, 231, 319–20, 336; candy wrap, 13, 14, 121–22, 130–37 canned food, 89, 255, 264, 267, 269, 270, 272, 277, 278, 333 canvas, 126, 137, 204, 213, 276 Carême, Marie-Antoine, 26 Carmen, E. A., 326 Carnevale, Fulvia, 332 Carpenter, Elizabeth, 319 carrot, 169, 179, 251 Caruth, Nicole J., xi, 325 Casey, Emma, 323 Cash, Jonny, 17, 215–19, 338 Caton Campbell, Marcia, 315 Cattelan, Maurizio, 182, 332 Catts, Oron, 349 Cavell, Stanley, 320 caviar, 28, 34, 55, 61, 62 Celant, Germano, 8, 124, 128, 301, 318, 319 celery, 55 Cembalest, Robin, 316 cereals, 153 Cerman, Jérémie. 308 Cesaretti, Enrico, 303 challah, 227

champagne, 61, 62, 72 Chan, Andrew, 65, 307 Chaney, Rufus, 349 Chapel, Alain, 26 Charlton, Andrew, 342 cheese, 67, 113, 159, 160, 164, 179, 202, 203, 230, 335 Chekhov, Anton, 236 chemicals, 54, 97, 110, 227, 286, 289– 90, 305 Cherix, Christophe, 337 chervil, 55 chestnut, 49, 55 Chicago, Judy, 145, 147, 154, 320, 323, 325 chicken, 49, 55, 56, 61, 242, 322 Child, Julia, 86, 149, 323 Chin, Mel, 288, 349 chitinase, 19, 279–80, 287, 347 chive, 62 Choay, Françoise, 199 chocolate, 65, 68, 70, 114–17, 164, 198, 202–5, 229, 254, 306, 317, 319, 335 Chong, Alan, 314 Chong, Doryun, 131, 319 chopper, 148 Chow, Stephen, 307 Christ, Jesus, 132, 170, 208, 214, 227, 318 Christov Bakargiev, Carolyn, 318 chutney, 229 Cichocki, Sebastian, 331 Claesz, Pieter, 93 Claesz, Willem, 93 Clark, Laurie Beth and Peterson, Michael, aka Spatula & Barcode, vi, 10, 17, 225, 238, 241-234, 297, 332, 339 Clark, Laurie Beth, 297 Cleaver, June, 145 Clert, Iris, 199, 200 Cockburn, Alexander, 67, 307 Cockrall-King, Jennifer, 315 cocktail, 50, 56, 109, 112, 119, 281, 286, 287, 289, 304, 316 cocoa, 276 coconut, 56, 109 Coe, Sue, 350 coffee shop, 241

index 353

coffee, 31, 67, 107, 109, 167, 216, 254, 264, 283, 343 Cohen, Daniel, 307 Cohen, Évelyne, 302 Coleman, A.D., 327 Collins, Kathleen, 313 Collins, Matthew, 308, 323 Colombo, Luigi, aka Fillìa, 47–48 confetti, 127 Conwill, Kinshasha, 324 Cooke, Lynne, 160, 326 cookie, 254 Cooper, Anne, 303 Coplans, John, 327 Corà, Bruno, 139 Corcoran, Steven, 332 coriander, 55 cornbread, 227 Cosby, William H. and Camille, 324 Costantini, Anna, 319 Costello, Elizabeth K., 349 Costelloe, M. Joseph, 331 Cottingham, Laura, 316, 321, 323 Counihan, Carole, 329 crackers, 165 Crary, Jonathan, 307 cream, 51, 209 crème de violette, 286 Crewdson, Gregory, 156 Crimp, Douglas, 327 Crispolti, Enrico, 312 Cronos, 136 Croppa, Udo, 61 croquettes, 55 Csergo, Julia, 302 Cucchi, Enzo, 342 cucumber, 109 cup, 7, 163, 283 cupboard, 171 Curiger, Bice, 326, 328, 329 currant, 229 curry, 56, 183, 236, 238 Cutler, Jody B., vi, 14, 143, 293 cutlery, 44 d’Alambert, Jean-Baptiste Le Rond, 87 d’Ayala Valva, Margherita, ix, 12, 20, 77, 293, 315, 326, 331, 344

da Costa, Beatriz, 349, 350 Dalì, Salvador, 336 Dallow, Jessica, 322 Damm, Heiko, 308 Dancourt, Maurice, 25 Dante (Alighieri, Dante), 136, 138 Danto, Arthur C., 326, 344 date, 49 Davidson, Sylvie, 301 Dayma, Sanjay, 307 de Certeau, Michel, 175, 329 de Cointet, Guy, 215 De Diego, Eugeni, 305 De Domizio Durini, Lucrezia, 253, 342 de Heem, Jan Davidsz, 93 de Menezes, Maria, 290 De Sanna, Jole, 124–25, 127, 318 de Zegher, Catherine, 323 Debord, Guy, 161 DeCarava, Roy, 324 Deck, Alice A., 322 del Río, Elena, 307 Delacourt, Sandra, 308 Demetrakas, Johanna, 321 Denis, Renée, 197 Derrida, Jacques, 298, 303, 334, 340 Desai, Mihir,281, 285–286, 292, 347 Desrousseaux, Alexandre Marie, 85 Dethlefsen, Les, 349 Dezeuze, Anna, 332, 343 Dickinson, Emily, 154 Diderot, Denis, 87, 223 Didion, Joan, 219, 338 Dietmann, Sharon and Erik, 196 Dilk, Enrica Yvonne, 310 dining room, 62, 148, 153, 185, 323 Dobke, Dirk, 203, 335 Dobson, Andrew, 349 donut, 214, 329 dough, 84, 89, 148, 202, 203, 208, 209, 225, 227–28, 254 Dougherty, Dale, 347 Douglas, Mary, 99, 314 Douglas, Mick, 238 dove, 55 Dreyfuss, John, 338 Dubin, Zan, 325 Dubois, Urbain, 25-26.

354 index

Duchamp, Marcel, 23, 154, 220, 265, 267–68, 272–73, 345 Dufresne, Wylie, 282 Dumas, Sidonie, 307 dumplings, 241 Dunaway Suzanne, 339 Dunlop, Fuschia, 329, 340 Dunphy, Jerry, 217, 338 Dwyer, Bryce, 234–35, 341 Dziedzic, Nancy, 315 eau de Cologne, 49, 51 Eco, Umberto, 308, 334 edible multiples, 16, 191–92, 195, 203–8, 210, 335 Edmier, Keith, 156 egg, 34–35, 84, 87, 125, 229, 254, 276, 283, 319–20, 323; boiled egg, 129, 286; fried egg, 146; eggshell, 135; egg yolks, 49, 63, 286; egg whites, 49, 286; poached egg, 55 Einstein, Albert, 170 Eklund, Douglas, 327 Elias, Megan, 348 Engel, Jeffrey A., 339 Enzensberger, Hans, 336 Ericksen, Dustin, 7 Escoffier, Auguste, 25–26 Espagne, Michel, 310 excrement, 98, 202–4, 333 exotic food, 31, 93, 103, 241 extract, 52 Eymann, Marcia, 339 Fabbri, Paolo, 304 Fabro, Carla, 11, 137 Fabro, Luciano, vi, xi, 13–14, 121–39, 295, 317, 318, 319, 320 Fabro, Silvia. 137, 139, 319, 320 farm, 110–11, 113–14, 127, 239, 241, 255-59, 261, 315, 349 farmers’ market, 241, 340 Fast, Friederike, 308 fat, 89, 107, 110, 115, 119, Plates 6.1 and 6.2, 164, 169, 192, 248, 250 Favreau, Jon, 307 Federici, Silvia, 340 Federman, Rachel, vi, 17, 211, 294

Feiereisen, Florence, 326 Felt, Shirley A., 284 fennel, 51, 56, 57, 109 fermented food, 229 fern, 17, 216–18 Fernandes, João, 139 Fernandez, Armand, aka Arman, 16, 191–92, 198–201, 205–7, 320, 335, 336 Ferreri, Marco, 306 fiberglass, 208 Filliou, Robert, 16, 191, 193–96, 309, 334 Finch, Martha L., 313 Finessi, Beppe, 301 Finley, Karen, 229 Fischer, Konrad, 328 Fischli, Peter, vi, xi, 14–15, 159–71, 326, 327, 328 fish, 13, 107, 117, 193, 253, 279–81, 315 Fitzgerald, Gerald, 340 Fleck, Robert, 326, 328 Fleming, Alexander, 349 flesh, 5, 7, 280, 302 flour, 52, 81, 229 Flynt, Henry, 264, 343 Foerschner, Anja, v, 12, 93, 312, 313 Fogle, Douglas, 327 forest, 111–12, 216–19, 237, 242 fossiles, 220 Foster, Hal, 201, 317, 325, 334, 335, 346 Foucault, Michel, 86, 251, 344, 349 Foulkes, Llyn, 220 Fourier, Charles, 303 Franceschini, Amy, 5 Francois, Zoe, 339 Frank, Peter, 343 Frascina, Francis, 336 Frazier, Susan, 147, 323 Freely, Jennifer, 61 Freud, Sigmund, 161, 206, 326, 335 fridge, 15 Friedan, Betty, 145, 323 Frommel, Sabine, 310 frozen food, 171, 231, 284, 322, 347 fruit, 81, 93, 101, 175, 253, 254, 257, 279; fruit pies, 237; dried fruit, 52; pureed fruit, 230; wax fruit, 130 Fruk, Ljiljana, 349

index 355

Fry, Gladys-Marie, 324 Fuenmeyer, Jesús, 324 Fuhr, Eckhard, 310 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 326 gadget, 145, 222 Gagnaire, Pierre, 302 Galimberti, Jacopo, 129 Gallaccio, Anya, 253 Garden Castro, Jan, 325 garden, 88, 110–12, 204–5, 257–58, 308 garlic, 109, 254 Garnett, William, 218 Garrard, Mary D., 320 Gaßner, Hubertus, 308 Gates, Theaster, 239 Gdula, Stephen, 322 Geis, Deborah R., 185, 330 gelatin, 56, 289 Gesamtkunstwerk, 155 Gessert, George, 290 Gilardi, Piero, 124 Gillick, Liam, 332 ginger, 109 Giraldi, Bob, 306 Girard, Luce, 175 Glicksman, Hal, 215 goat, 55 Godfrey, Mark, 326, 327 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 81, 87 Goetz, Ingvild, 326 Goffman, Erving, 341 Golan, Romy, 304 Goldberg, Rube, 161 Goldfarb, Will, 67 Goldmann, Renate, 168, 326, 328 Goldsworthy, Andy, 30, 43 Gonzalez-Torres, Felix, 128, 130–31, 133–35, 319 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 134 Götze, Karl Heinz, 309 Goudinoux, Veronique, 128 Gough, Richard, 236 Gouma-Peterson, Thalia, 325 Grafton, Anthony, 308 Granat May, Kirse, 339 grass, 118, 204

Grass, Günter, 164, 205 Gray, David, 326 Grazioli, Elio, 319 Greenaway, Peter, 306, 314 Greenberg, Richard, 236 Grenier, Catherine, 139 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, 242 Grohé, Stefan, 314 Guattari, Felix, 334 Guérard, Michel, 26 Gulick, Charles Burton, 85 Haarmann, Anke, 342 Haeg, Fritz, 5 Hafiz, 131 Haidu, Rachel, 276, 346 Hainstock, Elizabeth, 331 Halprin, Anna, 112 Hamachi (yellowtail), 109 hamburger, 216 Hamid, Rifat, 347 Hamilton, Richard, 302 Hanke, Stephanie, 318 Haraway, Donna, 348–50 Harper, Paula, 321, 321, 325 Harren, Natilee, 343 Harrison, Helen Mayer and Newton, 349 Hartung, Elisabeth, 301, 308, 335 Hauer, Thomas M., 309 Haug, Kate, 324 Hauser, Jens, 349 Hecker, Sharon, 13, VII, 318–19, 333 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 32, 164, 205, 303 Heinzelmann, Ursula, 347 Heisner, Beverly, 337 Helstosky, Carol, 10–11, ii, 302, 303, 304, 308 Hendricks, Geoffrey, 344 Hendricks, Jon, 344 Heon, Laura, 115, 316 herbs, 13, 107, 110–13, 254, 258, 315 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 87 herring, 122 Hertel, Howard, 338 Hertzber, Jeff, 339

356 index

Hicks, Scott, 307 Higgins, Dick, 265–66, 309, 343 Higgins, Hannah, 272, 344–45 High, Kathy, 349 Hill, Catherine, 314 Hill, Christine, 332 Hodgetts, Vicki, 14, 143, 147, 320, 325 Hodgson, Kimberley, 315 Hofkunst, Alfred, 312 Höller, Carsten, 253, 332, 342 Hollier, Denis, 317 Hollows, Joanne, 323 Holzhey, Magdalena, 301, 311 Homes Smith, Christopher, 322 honey, 18, 49, 51, 192, 242, 254, 316 Horace, 80 Horodner, Stuart, 316–17 hot dog, 94, 97 Huelsenbeck, Richard, 266 Huizinga, Johan, 161 Hundertwasser, Friedensreich, 194, 334 Husserl, Edmund, 313 Huyghe, Pierre, 332 Hyclak, Anna, 117, 317 ice cream, 56, 214 Ingold, Tim, 303 insects, 98, 101, 229 Irby, James E., 344 Iser, Wolfgang, 308 Itami, Jûzô, 306 Iwanciw, Emilia, 332 Izzo, Simona, 307 Jabłońska, Elżbieta, 3, 15, 16, x, 329–33 Jacobson, Michael, 67 Jagger, Mick, 170 Jagnow, Coren P., 302 jam, 167 Javed, Saleem, 347 Jehlička, Petr, 175, 329 jelly, 55, 56 Jeremijenko, Natalie, 19, xvi, 347, 350 Johnson Sweeney, James, 345 Johnson, Meredith, 107, 112, 315 Johnson, Paul, 341 Johnston, Jill, 275, 346

Johnston, Ruth D., 315 Johnstone, Stephen, 329 Jones, Brian, 170 Jones, Darryl, 322 Jones, Kellie, 324 Jordan, Cara, 341 Jorge, Marcos, 307 Jouffroy, Alain, 193–94, 333, 334 Joyce, James, 204, 205 juice, 52, 56, 109, 279 Kac, Eduardo, 350 Kafka, Franz, 198, 334 Kalamansi, 109 Kant, Immanuel, 10, 36, 98, 254, 314 kaolin, 276 Kaprow, Allan, 30, 43, 215, 216, 233 Karasthahi, Sylvia, 314 Karlstrom, Paul, 327 Kasander, Kees, 306 Katz, Marisa Mazria, 316 Katz, Megan, 229 Kaufman, Frederick, 66, 307 keftedes, 79, 83, 85-87, 311 Keller, James, 68, 307 Kelley, Lindsay, 19, xvi Kelley, Mike, 152 Kelsey, John, 332 Kelsey, Robin, 328 Kendall, Stuart, 336 Kennedy, John F., 270 Kennedy, Randy, 131, 319 Kester, Grant, 182, 236, 332, 341 ketchup, 13, 94, 97, 99, 104 Khan, Minhaj A., 347 Kiefer, Anselm, 342 kielbasa, 175 Kinchin, Juliet, 301 King, Elaine, 324 Kinmont, Ben, 316, 330 Kirby, Michael, 337 Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 229, 340 kitchen appliances, 15, 145–48, 150, 154, 180 kitchen counter, 15, 173–74, 177, 179, 214 kitchen machine, 52, 56, 72, 136, 349

index 357

kitchen space, 8, 11, 61, 62, 70–90, 107, 239–41, 251, 292, 308, 313; domestic kitchen, 9, 15–16, 39, 40, 64–66, 71–72; 96, 143–57, 166, 168, 173–86, 282; Frankfurt kitchen, 6; gallery kitchen, 14–16; 173–87; 238–39, 329–30, 346; Kitchen Table Series (Carrie Mae Weems), 14, 101, 144, 150–56, 321, 324–25; mobile kitchen, 16, 241; Nurturant Kitchen (Womanhouse), 14, 143, 146–47, 150, 155, 320, 324 kitchen tools and items, 42, 53, 62, 87–88, 95-96, 119, 148, 159-60, 276, 328 Klein, Jenny, 229, 340 Klein, Norman M., 338 Klein, Yves, 199 Kleist, Heinrich von, 87 Kloek, Wouter, 314 Klosty, James, 346 knive, 61 Knowles, Alison, 15, 18, 19, 168, 180, 186, 210, xv, 291, 309, 331, 342–46 Koeppen, Wolfgang, 309 Kohlhöfer, Chris, 165 Kolbowski, Sylvia, 317 Kolnai, Aurel, 98, 313–14 König, Joseph, 81 Kopke, Arthur, 319 Korsmeyer, Carolyn, 132, 302, 303, 313, 319 Kosuth, Joseph, 149 Kounellis, Jannis, 124, 342 Kowalczyk, Izabela, 182, 330, 332 Krajewski, Marek, 184, 332 Krauss, Rosalind, 317, 334, 340, 346 Kraynak, Janet, 328, 332, 341 Kristeva, Julia, 99–100, 314 Kruger, Barbara, 151 Kubelka, Peter, 7 Kuehn, Glenn, 302 Kurt, Hildegard, 342 Kurti, Nicholas, 283 Kusama, Yayoi, 155 Kutis, Barbara, 14, 15, x, 331

Kwan, Gayle Chong, 105 Kwon, Miwon, 315 La Chapelle, Vincent, 25 lab, laboratory, 72, 282–85, 289, 291–92, 305-6, 308, 347–48 Labowitz-Starus, Leslie, 291 ladle, 62 Lahey, Jim, 225 Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa, 317 Lalanne, Claude, 192, 207 Lalanne, François, 192, 207, 336 Landis, Kevin, 303, 306 lard, 18, 114–16, 254, 275 Larsen, David, 223, 224, 339 Lasko, Kevin, 107, 109, 112, 119, 315 Laudan, Rachel, 306 lavender, 107, 109, 117 Laycock, Ross, 130 leaves, 55, 109, 166, 213, 216–17, 220 Lebel, Jean-Jacques, 334 Lee, Ang, 65, 307 Lee, Pamela M., 329, 343 leek, 175 Lefebvre, Henri, 263, 264, 277, 278, 329, 342, 343, 347 leftovers, 3, 52, 180–81, 194, 253–54 Lemke, Harald, 10, 16, 18, xiv, 305, 311, 317, 319, 341–42 lemon, 88, 107, 109, 112, 253 Leone, Mark P., 324 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 87 Leug, Konrad, 328 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 5, 16, 42, 86, 87, 95, 194, 227, 301, 313, 333–34 Levin, Elinor, 284 Levy Beranbaum, Rose, 339 Lewallen, Constance M., 328, 337 Lewis, Burnadine L., 284 Lichtenstein, Roy, 192 licorice, 135 Lieberman, Peter, 308 lime, 55, 279 Lindner, Richard, 191, 198, 207 Lindner, Stacey, 317 linoleum, 168

358 index

Lipovetsky, Gilles, 302 Lippard, Lucy, 143, 321–23 liquor, 63 Lisiewicz, Julitą Wójick rozmawia Małgorzata, 331 Liss, Andrea, 330 Lissner, Erich, 162, 326, 329 lobster, 55, 61, 62, 336 Löckemann, Karsten, 326 Lollini, Fabrizio, 301 Lord, M. G., 324 Lou, Liza, 14, 144, 153, 325 Lowe, Rick, 342 Lowenthal, Anne, 314 Luginbühl, Bernard, 312 Lund, Lois Ann, 284 lures, 19, xvi Lustig, R. Jeffrey, 339 Lynceus of Samos, 85 Mac Low, Jackson, 273, 346 macadamia, 55 macaroni, 88, 155 Maccentelli, Gian Paolo, 129 Maciunas, George, 265–67, 269, 273, 343–44 Mack, Anissa, 156, 325 Madden, Etta M., 313 Madison, Alan, 67 Maggi-Würze, 10 Magritte, René, 147 Maka, Tanja, 316 Makavejev, Dušan, 134, 306, 320 Mandelstam, Nadezda, 13, 14, vii, 317 Mandelstam, Osip, 13, 14, vii, 318 Manzoni, Piero, 128–31, 135210, 276, 319, 333 Marcadé, Bernard, 138, 318 Marco, Miguel, 323 Marconi, Guglielmo, 52 Marcuse, Herbert, 195, 206–7, 251, 257, 334, 335 Marin, François, 25 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 27, 45, 47–49, 55, 58, 303–4 Marioni, Tom, 233–35, 242, 340

market, 89; farmer’s market, 241; supermarket, 146, 340 Marks, Laura U., 307 Marsh McGlone, Megan, 340 marshmallow, 161, 218, 286, 289 Martens, Lydia, 323 Marter, Joan, 344 Martin Luther, 81, 310 Marx, Karl, 232, 249, 257, 340 marzipan, 199-200, 320 Mason, Jim, 342 mastic, 56 Matta-Clark, Gordon, 4–5, 156, 345 Matthews, Patricia, 325 Maximin, Jacques, 27, 54 may chang essential oil, 109 Mayer, Hans, 197. Mayol, Pierre, 329 mayonnaise, 13, 94, 97, 99, 104 Mazzanti, Anna, 312 McBride Anne E., 307 McCarthy, Paul, v, ix, 3, 7, 12, 13, 93–97, 100–105, 294, 312, 313, 314, 322 McClung, William Alexander, 338 McCollum, Allan, 212, 214–16, 218, 336, 337, 338 McCone, John A., 338 McInerney, David, 316 McLuhan, Marshall, 336 meat, 51, 64, 84, 85, 90, 93, 94, 101, 159–60, 164, 168, 169, 226, 230, 231, 295; cured meat, 161; deli meat, 175; dove meat, 55; dried meat, 254; grilled meat, 73; veal meat, 49 meatballs, 69, 83, 85, 86, 309, 311 Medina-Campeny, Xavier, 55 Mehan, Peter, 305 melon, 28, 34, 242 Mennella, Julie A., 302 Menninghaus, Winfried, 313, 314 Menon, 25 menu, 6, 19, 29, 34, 37, 46, 47, 52, 69, 96, 107–9, 112, 212, 215, 216, 218, 220, 231, 232, 239, 241, 280–82, 285, 341 menu plan, 11, 49; menu travesti, 85

index 359

mercury, 19, 279-81, 347 meringue, 209, 283 Mertes, Lorie, 316 Merz, Mario, 124 methylcellulose, 289 Michelson, Annette, 317 milk, 31, 49, 94, 166, 167, 229, 254; maternal/breast milk, 30, 40, 99, 132, 340; cow’s milk, 114; sour milk, 202 mill, 52 Miller-Keller, Andrea, 330 Miller, James, 341 Mingwei, Lee, 3 Minioudaki, Kalliope, 322 mint, 55 Mintz, Sidney, 132, 134, 319, 320 Miralda, Antoni, 192, 210, 333 Misheff, Johnny, 117, 317 Mitchell, Robert, 349 mobile kicthen, 16 Molesworth, Helen, 143, 149, 316, 321, 323 Mondrian, Piet, 146 Montagné, Prosper, 25, 87 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, 81 Moore, John, 329, 343 Moore, Roger, 163. Morgan, Tony, 90, 333 Morris, Robert, 349 Morrison, Toni, 320 Mortimer, Lorraine, 320 Moser, Walter, 203 Moshayedi, Aram, 337 Motohiro, Katsuyuki, 307 Muir, John, 217 Mulligan, Martin, 349 Murphy, Bernice M., 322 Musarrat, Javed, 347 museum, 3, 16, 25, 45, 58, 117, 130, 143, 151, 174, 177, 180, 210–11, 219, 248, 267, 306, 324, 330, 333; Aldrich Museum, 113; Baltimore Museum of Art, 331; Berkeley Art Museum, 146; Brooklyn Museum, 148; Carnegie Museum, 321; Guggenheim Museum, New

York, 346; Jewish Museum, 155; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 219; Metropolitan Museum of Art, 155, 321; Miami Art Museum, 112; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 6, 130, 146, 151, 155, 272, 290; Museum of the Triennale, Milan, 8; New Museum of Contemporary Art: 153; Smart Museum, Chicago, 7; Smithsonian American Art Museum, 321; Tate Modern, 331; Wexner Museum, 331; Whitney Museum of American Art, 144, 151 mushroom, 111, 254 mussel, 49, 51 Mussolini, Benito, 47 mustard, 109, 117, 119, 230 Myhrvold, Nathan, 305–6 Nachtigäller, Roland, 308 Nauman, Bruce, 15, 149, 161, 165, 167–68, 316, 328 Nelson, Harriet, 145 Nelson, Michael P., 349 Nemerov, Ali, 326, 327 Nettelbeck, Sandra, 307 Neuman, Alfred E., 94 Neumann, Gerhard, 86, 311, 312 Newhall, Nancy, 338 Nice, Richard, 332 Nicosia, Nic, 156 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 314, 341 Nilsson, Magnus, 35 Nitke, Barbara, 66 Noah, 136 North, Michael, Norton, Bryan, 349 Norton, Peter, 314 Notari, Delia and Umberto, 304 Nova, Alessandro, 318 Novero, Cecilia, vi, 4, 16, 86, 191, 297, 301, 305, 308, 310, 311, 312, 320, 326, 331, 333, 334, 342 Nut, 136 O’Connor, Aidan, 301 O’Neill, Molly, 67, 307

360 index

Oden, Michael, 339 Ohmes, Jeremy, 341 oil, 109, 254, 286 Okita, Shuichi, 307 Oldenburg, Claes, 215–16, 266, 337, 338 Olin, Ferris, 321 olives, 51, 56 onion, 175 Onions, Charles Talbut, 318 Oppenheim, Meret, 336 orange, 146, 254 Orem, Reginald Calvert, 331. organic material, 13, 18, 86, 205, 258, 261 Oristrell, Joaquìn, 307 Ossawa Tanner, Henry, 151, 324 oven, 15, 148, 154, 160, 163, 171, 186, 202 Owens, Craig, 327 oyster, 49, 64 Page, Patti, 218 Paik, Nam June, 218, 345 Pairet, Paul, 29 pan de sal, 227 pan, 13, 64, 73, 81, 122, 186, 216 Panella, Marco, 301 pantry, 64, 147 Paoletti, John, 318 Parasecoli, Fabio, V, 11, 61, 298, 303 Pardo, Jorge, 332 parmesan, 109 Parreno, Phillippe, 332 parsley, 159 Parson, Donald Craig, 338 Pasini, Francesca, 127, 318 pasta, 48, 50, 52, 61, 303–5, 334 pastries, 175 Patterson, Benjamin, 264, 266, 343 Paul, Frédéric, 336, 337, 338 Peabody, Rebecca, 336 peach, 107, 109, 119 peanut, 159 peas, 49, 254 peeps, 161 Penning, Lothar, 313, 314 Penone, Giuseppe, 43 Pentecost, Claire, 349 pepper, 167, 312

Pereza, Nilda, 324 permaculture garden, 111–12, 316 Pernlochner-Kügler, Christine, 314 Perry, Charles, 311 persimmon, 55 Perullo, Nicola, v, 8, 10–11, 23, 298, 301, 303, 310, 316, 319, 349 Peterson, Elmer, 345 Peterson, Michael, vi, 10, 17, 225, 297, 332, 339, 341 Petronio, Stephen, 113, 316 Phidias, 80 Philip, Kavita, 349 Phillips, Patricia, 108, 315 Piatti-Farnell, Lorna, 322, 323 Picasso, Pablo, 146 Piccinini, Patricia, 350 pie, 63, 214, 229, 237, 283, 325 Pierangelini, Fulvio, 40 pig, 243, 253, 342 pigeon dung, 89 Pilliod, Elisabeth, 310 pine needles, 17, 216–18 pizza, 28, 38, 227, 347 Plath, Sylvia, 145, 147, 149, 322, 323 Plato, 23, 132, 137, 212 plum, 109 Poetter, Jochen, 327, 328 Poîlane, Lionel, 208 Point, Fernand, 26 poison, 192, 193, 304 Polke, Sigmar, 15, 165–68, 327, 328 Pollan, Michael, 342 polyurethane, 192, 209 polyvinyl, 208 Pontiggia, Elena, 127, 318 Pontormo, Jacopo Carucci, 82, 90, 310 Poprzęcka, Maria, 329 potato, 55, 88, 147, 175, 182, 254, 257, 310; mashed potatoes, 69; peeled potatoes, 181–82, 251, 259, 331 poultry, 55 Prasad, Shilpa, xi, 308 prawns, 61 Price, J. L., 315 Prima, Luis, 69 Prince, Richard, 327 pudding, 87

index 361

pulses, 81 pus, 98, 100 rabbit, 201–3 Räderscheidt, Barbara, 309 raisin, 88, 216 Rakowitz, Michael, 108, 241, 341 Rales, Emily Wei, 326 ramen, 63 Ramirez Jonas, Paul, 108, 111–12, 316 Rancière, Jacques, 183, 332 Rauschenberg, Robert, 215–16, 337 Raven, Arlene, 153, 323-25 Ravine, Chávez, 219, 338 raw materials, 13, 42, 78, 113, 115; raw ingredients, 34, 55, 87, 95, 108, 109, 112, 163, 171, 227, 284, 312, 319 readymade, 23, 147, 164, 235, 264, 265, 268, 272, 273, 276–78 Reagan, Ronald, 222, 339 Redzepi, René, 26, 34, 36, 281, 303, 347 Reed, Christopher, 322 refrigerator, 15, 148, 163, 171, 196 Relman, David A., 349 Rendall, Steven F., 329 Restany, Pierre, 199, 207, 335 restaurant: Alinea, 38, 57, 282, 305; Al’s café, xii; Combal Zero, 34; Conflict Kitchen, 241; Dal Pescatore, 28; El Bulli, 27, 29, 38, 54–57, 72, 281-82, 305-06; El Celler de Can Roca, 29, 72; Faviken, 35; Holy Palate (Santo Palato), 47–48, 52; Food (Gordon Matta Clark), 5; Il Gambero Rosso, 40; Koya, 239; Next, 231–32; Nihonryori RyuGin, 282; Noma, 34, 281–82, 303, 347; Park Avenue Summer, 107–10, 112, 117, 119, 317; Restaurant Spoerri, 180, 191; Sea Horse Inn, 337; Ultraviolet, 29; wd~50, 282 Revel, Jacques, 39 Rhea, 136 Rhoades, Jason, 105, 342 rhubarb, 169 Ricci, Giovanni, xi rice, 50, 88, 109, 254, 304

Richards, Ellen, 348 Richardson, Tony, 306 Richter, Gerhard, 328 Ringgold, Faith, 151, 153 risotto, 49, 69 roast beef, 229 Robinson, Julia, 331, 344–46 Roca brothers, 29 Rockhill, Gabriel, 332 Rodenbeck, Judith, 270, 345 Rodo, Sandra, 323 Roger, Mike, 7 Roosth, Sophia, 284–85, 347–48 roots, 118, 289 Rorschach, Hermann, 125, 131, 137, 318 Rose, Peter G., 312 Rosenberg, Douglas, 237 Rosenberg, Harold, 326 Rosenquist, James, 334–35 Rosenthal, Stephanie, 312 Rosler, Martha, 14, 143–44, 146–51, 153, 155, 321–25 Roth, Dieter, 15, 16, 116, 163–64, 166, 191–92, 198, 202–6, 208, 253, 316–17, 327, 334–35 Rothenber, Mika, 7 Rothfuss, Joan, 319, 343 Rottenberg, Anda, 181, 331 rotting foods, 13, 203 Roudiez, Leon, 314 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 257 Rübel, Dietmar, 313 Rubinstein, Meyer Raphael, 318 Ruddick, Sara, 176, 329 Rüdiger, Bernard, 318–19 Rumohr, Carl Friedrich von, 12, 77, 79–90, 294, 308–12 Ruppersberg, Allen, 4, 17, xii, 336–39 Ruscha, Edward, 15, 164–65, 167, 327 Ryan, Barbara, 321, 324 Ryan, Leslie, 349 Ryan, Zoë, 349 Saar, Alison, 322 Saar, Betye, 146, 151, 322 Sachs, Jesse, 111 Sachs, Sid, 322

362 index

salad, 55, 165, 175, 180, 217, 255, 266, 269, 274–75, 307, 344 Salaris, Claudia, xi, 303, 305 salmon, 62 salsify, 55 salt, 55, 109, 132, 254, 280, 291, 310, 326 Sandler, Irving, 325 sandwich, 193–97, 230, 326 Sanouillet, Michel, 345 Santini, Nadia, 28, 35 Saporta, Isabelle, 347 sardines, 55 sauce, 10, 38, 61, 62, 73, 89, 109, 196– 97, 254 sauerkraut, 260, 312 sausage, 14, 15, 49, 94, ix, 205, 227, 230, 254, 326, 328, 336 Scabin, Davide, 34 scalpel, 230 Scapp, Ron, 330, 332 Scappi, Bartolomeo, 25 Schama, Simon, 313, 314 Schapiro, Miriam, 145, 320, 321, 323 Schiller, Friedrich, 87 Schmit, Tomas, 267 Schneemann, Carolee, 116 Scholliers, Peter, xi, 301 Schor, Mira, 324 Schröter, Carlo, 191 Schumacher, Rainald, 162, 326 Schütte-Lihotzky, Margarete, 6 Schwander, Martin, 139 Schwartz Cowan, Ruth, 348 Schwartz, Alexandra, 327 Schwarz, Arturo, 272 Schwegler, Fritz, 312 Scott, Campbell, 307 Scrapp, Ron, 316 screwdriver, 56 seafood, 69, 109 Searle, Adrian, 306 seasonal ingredients, 89, 107–9 Seifert, Carolyn J., 321, 322, 325 Seifert, Oliver, 308 Seitz, Brian, 316, 330, 332 Selz, Dorothée, 192 Senie, Harriet, 315

Sennett, Richard, 17, 212, 223, 302, 336, 339 Serroy, Jean, 302 shallot, 62, 109 Shaviro, Steven, 307 shellfish, 61, 93 Sherman, Cindy, 151, 156, 327 Sherry, Michael S., 339 Shinoda, Jeannine, 230 Shiva, Vandana, 342 shrimp, 62, 63, 291, 349 Sider, Sandra, 321 Siegel, Deborah L., 325 Sieglohr, Ulrike, 330 Sienkiewicz, Karol, 182, 331 Silk, Gerard, 333 Silverman, Gilbert and Lila, 343, 344 Simmons, Laurie, 151 Simpson, Lorna, 151 Singer, Peter, 342 Siskind, Aaron, 324 skin, 13, 108–10, 113, 118–19, 205, 224, 243, 272, 278, 287, 307 Smith, Barbara, 229–30, 340 Smith, Caroline J., 322 Smith, Joe, 175, 329 Smith, Melanie, 105 Smith, Stephanie, 301, 340 Smithson, Robert, 213, 349 smoke, 61 soap, 51, 67, 114 Sobchack, Vivian, 68, 307 Socrates, 341 sodium alginate, 286 Soler, Juli, 305, 306 Solimano, Sandra, 309 Söntgen, Beate, 326, 328 soufflé, 286 soup, 3, 55, 71, 175, 259, 274, 303, 312; blood soup, 85; bread soup, 84–85, 310; Campbell soup, 251; coconut soup, 56; svartsoppa, 85; pig-brain soup, 243; Tapioca soup, 49; trakhana, 84; Ursuppe, 84 soy/soya, 10, 109, 254 spaghetti, 38, 61, 69, 193–97, 335 Spang, Rebecca L., 340

index 363

Spaulding, Jonathan, 338 Spector, Nancy, 326, 328 Spector, Tami, 349 Spence, Suzy, 320 Spencer, Lily Martin, 154 spices, 89, 164, 203, 205, 335 spinach, 79, 229 Spoerri, Daniel, 4, 5, 6, 12, 16, 163, 180–81, 186, 253, 276, 301, 308–12, 326, 331, 333–36, 342, 343, 346 spoon, 56, 71, 164, 286 Stagaman, Keaton, 349 Stage, Sarah, 348 Stalin, Iosif, 13, 14, 121-23, 134, 318 steak. 5 Steen, Eric, 234–35 Stegner, Wallace, 221–22, 339 Steichen, Edward, 290, 349 Stein, Christian, 123, 125, 138, 317, 318 Stein, Gertrude, 266 Stengers, Isabelle, 287, 348 Sterbak, Jana, 5, 7, 302 Stern, Steven, 338 Stevens, Connie, 218 stew, 81, 175 Stiglitz, Joseph E., 342 Stiles, Kristine, 343 still life, 4, 12, v, 146, 312–15, 322 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 343 Stone, Allan, 333 Stone, Julie K., xi stove, 3, 61, 73, 154, 203, 242, 306 Stracey, Frances, 349 street, 17, 211–12, 214, 219, 223-24, 225, 266, 292 Suaudeau, Julien, 134, 320 sugar, 109, 113, 134, 192, 201, 207, 229, 254, 289, 320; sugar-coated, 161, 334; sugar thumb, 191, 198, 206–7; sugary legs, 200 sushi, 109 sweets, vii, 317 Świtek, Gabriela, 182 Szylak, Aneta, 331 table, 29, 35; 44, 51, 66, 71–73, 78, 101, 148, 150–51, 154, 168, 173–74, 177,

179, 183, 185, 199, 214, 223, 237, 242, 310–11; convivial table, 43; decorated table, 93; metal-topped table, 214; shared/communal table, 232; tablecloth, 167; table manners, 12; tabletop, 166, 276; tableware, 112; tableau, 154, 170, 180, 224, 236, 242 tapioca, 49 tavern, 71 tea, 109, 178, 254, 269 teapot, 166-67 technology, 41, 46, 52, 54, 56, 258, 287–88, 290, 348, 349 Teughels, Nelleke, 301. theater, 23, 27, 65, 224, 234, 240, 266 Thimann, Michael, 308 This, Hervé, 283–84, 286, 302, 347–48 Thomas, Paul, 349 Thomkins, André, 191, 308 Tinguely, Jean, 194, 329 Tiravanija, Rirkrit, 7, 183–84, 187, 238, 239, 316, 329–30, 332, 346 toast, 216 tobiko, 62 Todoli, Vincent, 302 Tolnay, Alexander, 331 Tomasik, Timothy J., 329 tomato, 38, 88, 109, 193, 304 Topor, Roland, 309, 312 tortelli di zucca (pumpkin-stuffed tortelli), 28, 35 tortillas, 227 trash, 89, 105, 224 treacle, 229 treats, 121–22 Trebitsch, Michael, 329 Trigoboff, Dan, 338 Trippi, Laura, 316, 330 Trockel, Rosemarie, 342 Troisgros brothers, 26 Trubek, Amy B., 302 truffle, 49, 336 Tucci, Stanley, 307 Tucker, Marcia, 324, 325 tuna, 55 turmeric, 109

364 index

twigs, 43, 216, 220 Twilley, Nicola, 347–48 Tygiel, Jules, 339 Tyler May, Elaine, 347 Ujma, Magdalena, 173, 329 Ukeles, Mierle Laderman, 178, 330 urine, 230 ursuppe, 84 vacuum stills, 52 van der Marck, Jan, 335 Van Der Zee, James, 152, 324 van Elk, Ger, 215 Van Esterick, Penny, 329 van Gogh, Vincent, 154 vanilla, 49, 51, 62 Vanouse, Paul, 349 vapor, 61 Varriano, John, 301 Vasari, Giorgio, 310 Vautier, Ben, 15, 16, 168, 191, 193, 197, 198, 266 Vazquez, Edward A., 14, 15, IX veal, 49, 55 vegetable, 81, 82, 85, 110, 169–70, 175, 182, 258; cooked vegetables, 49, 284; cut/sliced/chopped vegetables, 64, 175, 180; curry vegetables, 183; fresh vegetables, 251; sauté vegetables, 73; vegetable garden, 257–58 Velilla, Nacho Garcìa, 308 Verjux, Michel, 138, 318 Viestad, Andreas, 305 Vincenti, Virginia B., 348 vine, 111 vinegar, 55, 109, 113 Virgil, 136, 138 Vischer, Theodora, 327, 335 vodka, 109, 117, 329 von Müller, Achaz, 310 waffles, 330 Wagner, Monika, 302 Wall, Jeff, 165, 327 Wallace, Michele, 324

Walser, Martin, 205 Walser, Robert, 164 Walter, Bernadette, 327, 335 Wang, Xin, 240 Ward Williams, Pat, 151 Ward, Frazer, 324 Warhol, Andy, 154, 251, 344 wasabi, 62 water, 83, 114, 220, 230, 281, 292, 310, 343; watershed, 235; waterways, 280; boiling water, 61; hot water: 109; mineral water, 254; saltwater, 291; sink water, 154; tap water, 347; underwater, 286 watermelon, 176 Watkins, David, 316 wax, 67, 130, 208, 319 Webster, Sally, 315 Weems, Carrie Mae, 14, 144, 150-52, 154–56, 321, 324–25 Weibel, Peter, 349 Weightman, John and Doreen, 313 Weinstock, Jane, 323 Weiss, David, 14, 15, ix, 326–28 Weltsch, Robin, 14, 143, 147, 320, 323, 325 Wesselmann, Tom, 146, 322 Westcoast, Wanda, 147 Weston, Edward, 167 Wetzel, Gereon, 33 wheat, 254-55 Whiting, Cécile, 220, 322, 338 Wicker, Tom, 339 Williams, Carla, 324 Williams, Emmett, 16, 79, 82, 86, 193, 195–96, 264, 308, 309, 334, 345 Williams, Linda, 68, 307 Williams, Mason, 165 Williford, Stanley, 338 Willis, Debra, 324 Wimmiams, Pat Ward, 151 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 80 wine, 31–33, 89, 93, 109, 132, 184, 229–30 Witherspoon, Kimberly, 305 Witkovsky, Matthew S., 327, 328 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 161 Włodarczyk, Justyna, 330 Wójcik, Julita, 181–82, 187, 331

index 365

Wojda, Sylwia, 331 Wolfe, Cary, 350 Wollenberg, Charles, 339 Woods, Nicole, 19, xv, 309, 331, 342 Woolf, Virginia, 7, 95 worcestershire sauce, 89 wrapper, 121, 122, 130, 133, 135, 137 wurst, 15, ix, 326, 329 Yamamoto, Seiji, 282 Yates, Donald A., 344 yeast, 89, 225, 283 Yee, Lydia, 324 Yeomans, Barbara, 309

yogurt, 202, 229, 347 Young, Chris, 305 Young, La Monte Thornton, 264 Yun Su, Jeon, 307 Zanchetti, Giorgio, 129, 319 Zbyszynski, Michael, 348 zeppelinwurst, 162 Zeus, 136 Zittel, Claus, 308 Zott, Lynn, 315 Zurr, Ionat, 349 Zwirner, Rudolf, 167

366 index