The Taste of Art

Cooking, Food, and Counterculture in Contemporary Practices

Silvia Bottinelli, Margherita d'Ayala Valva, Silvia Bottinelli, Margherita d'Ayala Valva

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781610756075
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art général

The Taste of Art offers a sample of scholarly essays that examine the role of food in Western contemporary art practices. The contributors are scholars from a range of disciplines, including art history, philosophy, film studies, and history. As a whole, the volume illustrates how artists engage with food as matter and process in order to explore alternative aesthetic strategies and indicate countercultural shifts in society.

The collection opens by exploring the theoretical intersections of art and food, food art's historical root in Futurism, and the ways in which food carries gendered meaning in popular film. Subsequent sections analyze the ways in which artists challenge mainstream ideas through food in a variety of scenarios. Beginning from a focus on the body and subjectivity, the authors zoom out to look at the domestic sphere, and finally the public sphere.

Here are essays that study a range of artists including, among others, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Daniel Spoerri, Dieter Roth, Joseph Beuys, Al Ruppersberg, Alison Knowles, Martha Rosler, Robin Weltsch, Vicki Hodgetts, Paul McCarthy, Luciano Fabro, Carries Mae Weems, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Janine Antoni, El?bieta Jab?o?ska, Liza Lou, Tom Marioni, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Michael Rakowitz, and Natalie Jeremijenko.

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 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” 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 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. 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 mid-1980s 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 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 restaurant, 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). 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, 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 wean...