Food might be an infinitely potent and incredibly flexible metaphor. This fluidity of meanings captivates artists who locate their studios in their kitchens.
“Flux Gourmet”, a new film by Peter Strickland, premiered at last year’s 72. edition of Berlinale. The British director was hailed as “the discovery of a year” during the award ceremony of the European Film Awards after his debut thriller “Katalin Varga” set in the Karpaty Mountains. A year later, he expressed his vivid interest in the audiosphere in the horror-style “Berberian Sound Studio” (2012) and a concert documentary “Björk: Biophilia Live” (2014). His latest film and script are based on music composition. In “Flux Gourmet”, Strickland takes viewers on a journey to the fictional Sonic Catering Institute – a prestigious residency center in which an elite group of performers specializing in sonic-culinary activities areoffered an opportunity to hone their skills.
The film follows a month-long residency of a trio of performers led by the charismatic (and despotic) Elle di Elle (Fatma Mohamed). The rhythm of a story is determined by public performances of a collective transforming cooking, braising, frying and baking into a trans-techno symphony. During these sonic spectacles, Elle plunges into the jams that are reminiscent of blood, at times smearing herself with chocolate cream, which looks like excrement – after applause, she gives herself over to the erotic and culinary adoration of an audience in her own dressing room. The time between spectacles is also punctuated by the meals. During glamorous dinners organized by the curator, the table is filled with sophisticated dishes – however the residing artists are certainly the main course.
“Flux Gourmet” is a surreal satire of the art world along with its rules and correlations. The fact that the main narrative thread of Strickland’s film is the so-called ‘sonic gastronomy’ – a quite bizarre discipline that lends itself to a prominent cinematic portrayal – might be considered a cheeky nod to the audience, a subtle ridicule of the a stereotypically hermetic nature of contemporary art. At the same time, choosing the kitchen as a main location adds a universal quality to the story and spawns a whole range of diverse topics – just like sleep and sex, eating is one of the basic human needs and the most commonly practiced carnal pleasure. And if you think about it, food as depicted in “Flux Gourmet” actually nourishes an artistic practice, though perhaps not as often as sex, and as frequent as sleep does.
Do not enter with food
Although the aforementioned ranking might have been based on intuition, the fact that what we eat is one of the oldest motifs in art remains unquestionable. Representations of meals can be found on the walls of prehistoric caves, in tiny ancient sculptures and finally in the centuries-long tradition of still life painting portraying fruits, vegetables and “our daily bread.” What’s interesting is the fact in the thousands of years of history of food as the topic it hadn’t been until recently, about several decades ago, that food became the medium, and not just an easily accessible subject.
Early usage of food as medium of artistic expression dates back to the 1960s, the decade when ‘The Happening’ and conceptual art were both flourishing. In 1964, Allan Kaprow, an American painter and performance pioneer, organized the performance titled “Eat” in the Bronx, New York. All interactions during this event were related to food. While walking through a narrow and dark cave, viewers could sample fruits hanging above, collect scattered loafs of bread and taste potatoes boiled by the performer. This chaotic feast was accompanied by a hypnotic ticking sound and regularly uttered male scream of “Get’em!”. In the previous year, a consumable matter was used by Joseph Beuys, one of the most influential artists and critics of the 20th century Europe, in his piece titled “Fat Chair”, in which he placed a pentagon of fat on a seat of an old chair with a tied metal wire. The use of “non-artistic” material, to borrow Beuys’ own description, in the piece, which is often interpreted as the metaphor for the atrocities of the Holocaust, was a methodically calculated decision. “My original intention was to stimulate discussion; I was captivated by the elasticity of fat,” said the artist, specifying that what he meant was especially the plasticity of the material under temperature and time passing, as well as its potential for various interpretations on an intellectual and psychological level.
This fluidity of meanings remains alluring to the artists currently working with food products, as food is still an infinitely potent and flexible metaphor. It can be used to tell moving and intimate personal stories – like in the case of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, an American artist born in Cuba, in his installation “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)” created in 1991. The sublime and moving piece consists of 79 kg of candy, the weight of Torres’ partner before he contracted AIDS. Each viewer is encouraged to sample the sweets and thus take with them a portion of the legacy left behind by the deceased man.
An interpretation also focus on the critique of an art world: abiding rules and nature of artistic heritage. Whereas in 2019, Maurizio Cattelan, an Italian artist, presented an installation “Comedian” during the Art Basel Miami, which consisted of a banana attached to a gallery wall with a grey tape. First and second edition of the conceptual work of art was sold in a blink of an eye for a record price of 120.000 USD. A similar artistic gesture was performed by Matthew Griffin from Australia earlier this year, when he entered the Michael Lett Gallery in Auckland, New Zealand armed with a McDonald’s burger, took a pickle out of it and threw it with such a force that it stuck to the ceiling. He proceeded to sign the piece (listing the ingredients of a burger as materials) and valued it at 10.000 NZD.
The London-based collective Cooking Sections consisting of Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe certainly stands out among other “culinary artists.” Their artistic and research practice explores various systems that “organize the world through food.” One of the well-known long- term projects of the duo entitled “Climavore” examines, for instance, the techniques for catching seafood and edible yet ignored plants growing in the desert terrains, highlighting the strain exerted on ecosystems by contemporary food production.
Your kitchen is your home
There are several connotations among the multiplicity of meanings carried by the use of food in art practice that seem to be especially powerful and understood instinctually in all corners of the world. They originate from a special place in social life occupied by an act of consuming food. It brings together communities on different scales, starting from one’s home to a whole country. It can also define an individual’s role in the structure of those communities. For these reasons, food become an effective tool for telling stories about the position and situation of women. One such pieces with a feminist message was a notorious performance “Obieranie Ziemniaków” (“Peeling Potatoes”) enacted by Julita Wójcik in the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw in 2001. During a performance, the Polish artist in an apron, was peeling potatoes on a stool (as one could deduce from the title) in the monumental vestibule of Zachęta. The action was meant to direct public attention to an ambiguous role of women in public spaces, forced by the social climate to stay at home and perform traditionally assigned roles. The work went beyond sheer criticism – the status of this everyday activity was also elevated by placing a mundane task performed daily by millions of housewives in the context of a prestigious art gallery.
A similar combination of a critique and apotheosis is represented by the practice of two artists from New York: Elaine Tin Nyo and Zina Saro-Wiwa. The first artist was born in Burma, the latter in Nigeria, so the United States istheir second home. In her works, Tin Nyo often explores a network of relations in which she is embroiled as a migrant: traditions of the country she left as well as the culture of the region where she is now living. What binds this network together is a kitchen. In her regular performance “Sour Cherry Pie” (2004-), the artist adopts a role of an American housewife in an act of “reversed colonialism,” baking a traditional cherry pie and visiting friends. She performs a famous series of gestures recognizable all over the world owing to their cultural representation even though it belongs to the past in the USA itself. Zina Saro-Wiwa also emphasizes the cultural significance of a meal and its fundamental role in community integration. In her action “The Mangrove Banquet” (2015), she takes a stance against a masculine and aggressive narrative dominating public discourse in Nigeria, depicting its reverse side by feeding participants of her performance: she speaks of the women from the areas near the Niger River, who strengthen the physical and spiritual ties ofcommunities, their identities, and almost intimate bond to a place by preparing and serving meals.
The most prominent artist who blurs the boundaries between a gallery and a dining room is Rirkrit Tiravanija, a Thailand-born artist living in the US who has been inviting an audience to dine with him in exhibition spaces for over thirty years. Rarely does he create original objects – instead he creates situations. Key component of his practice made an appearance in one of the first actions of this kind under the title “pad thai” staged in Paul Allen Gallery in New York (1990), when he decided to take a departure from traditional art mediums, put on an apron and cook the Thai specialty for the visitors. Over the years, Tiravanija has exhibited his work in MoMa in New York, Serpentine Gallery in London, and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, among others. He also participated in the Venice Biennale. Each time, he managed to unite culinary and artistic elements (e.g. readymades and videos). Apart from art creation, the Thai artist wants to first and foremost create communal experiences. You are never an observer of Tiravanija’s performance – you are an active participant, creating a work of art through your interaction with a bowl of tom kha or curry. “I think we just need to make a space where people can listen to each other,” he said in the Washington Post article in 2019. “We need to say what we think, and we are going to say and think differently. We need to understand that we can exist together. It doesn’t have to be a divide.”
Regardless of the way in which Tiravanija’s practice resonates with us personally, there is something incredibly inspiring and modern in his approach to exhibition space as a place open for exchange of ideas, dialogue and meetings. You might want to keep in mind his words during a next visit to his show even if food might be offered as a staple snack at an opening instead of playing the main role in the show.
