All posts filed under: Issue 14

Introduction / Issue 14: Aesthetes and Eaters

Issue 14: Aesthetes and Eaters – Food and the Arts (Winter 2010) Introduction: Help Yourself Alexandra Alisauskas In 2006, Documenta 12 director Roger Buergel announced Ferran Adrià’s inclusion in the 2008 fair. Best known as an avant-garde chef specializing in sensory-challenging, conceptual cuisine at his restaurant El Bulli, Adrià’s place on the roster of artists marked the first time that Documenta had invited a professonal chef. Adrià’s practice has never been far from concerns of the art world, however. Beginning in 2001, he began creating a visual catalogue of all of the dishes conceived at El Bulli, as well as at its experimental culinary laboratory workshop, El Taller. In 2008, Phaidon, best known for producing glossy, coffee table art books, published A Day in the Life of El Bulli, which tracks the operations of the restaurant through 600 pages of lush photographs of dishes, the kitchen, and food-stained, handwritten recipes. Adrià had also previously made visual contributions to art exhibitions. These include photographs and thought-boards for an exhibition about chefs and their creative processes at the Palau …

Contributors / Issue 14: Aesthetes and Eaters

Issue 14: Aesthetes and Eaters – Food and the Arts (Winter 2010) Issue Contributors    Alexandra Alisauskas is a Ph.D. student in the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY. She is currently researching for her dissertation on art collectives and theories of the body in the period of Soviet transition, particularly in Poland and Lithuania. Paula Pinto is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. She is writing her dissertation on French nineteenth-century photographic reproductions of works of art: “Art Reproduction and the Origins of Photography as a Form of Visual Representation (France, 1816-1886).” She has a Masters Degree in Architecture and Urban Culture from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Spain. She is the former co-editor of the urban culture journal InSi(s)tu (2001-2006). Paula has worked as a researcher and a producer in the Museum of Fine Arts School of the University of Porto and the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art (Portugal). She is the co-producer of a documentary film about performance art in the …

Eating My Words: Talking About Food in Performance

Issue 14: Aesthetes and Eaters – Food and the Arts (Winter 2010) Yael Raviv Speech leaves no mark in space. . . . But writing contaminates; writing leaves its trace, a trace beyond the life of the body. —Susan Stewart, 1993 Following a recent presentation of Miwa Koizumi’s installation NY Ice Cream Flavors at Umami: food and art festival (2008) I heard an audience member comment on Koizumi’s lox ice cream: “this could use more acid.” This remark, though insightful from a culinary point of view, seemed somehow irrelevant in this particular case. When I later tried to understand why the comment disturbed me, I realized it embodied many of the questions I had regarding the discussion and analysis of food in the context of artistic performance. The slippage between food as artistic medium and food as culinary medium is most pronounced in live performance, particularly performances involving actual consumption. This ambiguity calls into question the tools we currently use for the analysis of these performances: whether we use terminology borrowed from the culinary world or from …

The Language of the Banquet: Reconsidering Paolo Veronese’s Wedding at Cana

Issue 14: Aesthetes and Eaters – Food and the Arts (Winter 2010) Kate H. Hanson British filmmaker Peter Greenaway’s video installation during the 2009 Venice Biennale took Paolo Veronese’s Wedding at Cana (1562-63) as its subject.1 The installation, based on a digital reproduction of the painting recently placed in its original home of the San Giorgio refectory, used multiple screens as well as digital and audio effects to dissect the work’s formal structures, highlight specific characters in the scene, and create dramatic effects with music and imagined conversations. Greenaway, in line with the scores of admiring artists preceding him, chose to highlight the more worldly aspects of the work: the gossip amongst guests, worries of servants about food supplies, and soaring music. The continued popularity of this sixteenth century painting clearly indicates that Veronese’s work has the ability to speak to viewers in the twenty-first century as well as its original Renaissance audience. Two years after Paolo Veronese (1528-88) completed the Wedding at Cana for the refectory of the monastery San Giorgio Maggiore, resident monk Benedetto Guidi …

You Are What (and How) You Eat: Paul McCarthy’s Food-Flinging Frenzies

Issue 14: Aesthetes and Eaters – Food and the Arts (Winter 2010) Cary Levine Paul McCarthy’s 1974 performance Hot Dog was an intimate affair, enacted before a small group of friends in his basement studio in Los Angeles. McCarthy began by methodically stripping down to his underwear and shaving most of the hair off his body. These opening routines, performed without acknowledging the spectators he had invited, served to immediately re-assert the privacy of his performance and its locale, leaving the audience in the awkward position of having gathered to witness someone consumed by his own personal habits. In what came next, McCarthy put his visitors’ most fundamental standards of individual and social propriety to the test. Artist Barbara Smith later described the scene: He stuffs his penis into a hot dog bun and tapes it on, then smears his ass with mustard. . . . He approaches the tables and sits nearby, drinking ketchup and stuffing his mouth with hot dogs. . . . Binding his head with gauze and adding more hot dogs, he finally …

Distasteful: An Investigation of Food’s Subversive Function in René Magritte’s The Portrait and Meret Oppenheim’s Ma Gouvernante—My Nurse—Mein Kindermädchen

Issue 14: Aesthetes and Eaters – Food and the Arts (Winter 2010) Janine Catalano People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? . . . They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft. . . . [I]t happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it . . . and warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied . . . and it is all one. . . . There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.1 Despite its daily importance—necessity, even—food has often been glossed over, taken for granted, not seen as appropriate fodder for those working in the arts, and certainly not for those studying the arts. Legendary food writer M.F.K. Fisher’s above words, written in 1943, suggest this general attitude to be the case among writers between and during the world wars, contrasting the “honor” of writing with an implied humility, unworthiness, …

Breaking Dalinian Bread: On Consuming the Anthropomorphic, Performative, Ferocious, and Eucharistic Loaves of Salvador Dalí

Issue 14: Aesthetes and Eaters – Food and the Arts (Winter 2010) Julia Pine What man cannot do, bread can. —Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, 19421 “Bread,” wrote Salvador Dalí in 1945, “has always been one of the oldest fetishistic and obsessive subjects in my work, the one to which I have remained the most faithful.”2 Despite having been largely overlooked in Dalí’s work, bread—like the crutch, the lobster, and the detumescent clock—does in fact appear with remarkable frequency throughout the artist’s oeuvre.3 This essay considers the presence and significance of bread in Dalí’s visual and literary production from the 1920s to the 1970s by reviewing his many bread-related writings and works of art; it also assesses the artist’s attempts to establish the image of bread as a personal device or “trademark” in terms of what media history scholar Paul Rutherford calls “the Dalí brand.”4 Dalí’s famous persona as artistic showman, exemplified by his mountebank’s moustache, was in large part established through the use of various images that were intended, like contemporary product branding, …