Food and art

The eating experience intersects the personal and the shared, combining childhood habits and adult fantasies. A companion is someone you break bread with (from the Latin com – with – and panis – bread). Public eating cements social trust. Originally, eating rituals involved proving to a host that the guest trusted he or she would not be poisoned; the host ate from the same pot to show he hadn’t poisoned it. The sharing of food has often been less concerned with satisfying hunger than with diplomacy.

Today, nothing gives you such a chilling sense of capitalist production than the chemical landscape of agribusiness – from baby chickens receiving hormone injections and recombinant fruit that ships well but tastes like the truck it rode in, to petrochemical industries coating seeds with fluorescent fertiliser so they can plant at night. Nothing tells you more about simulation than olestra, an entirely synthetic oil made of sucrose polyester. Nothing defines the hyper–real so much as the MacDonald’s cover version of hamburgers: the way they taste like tomato sauce, pickle, sugary bread, and are held together by a warm elastic paste (they’re an impression of a hamburger, not a hamburger). And nothing defines postmodernism so much as restaurant menu descriptions that are more scrumptious and filling than the food itself.

Food is a rich source not only of kilojoules and vitamins, but of metaphors. Metaphors are the way we bridge our realities and fantasies, and the stock-in-trade for artists. In medieval times, for example, the vices and virtues associated with food led to allegorical treatments, and lives poised between certainty and shortage provided the platform for the value given to food in premodern Europe.

See Pieter Bruegel The fight between Carnival and Lent 1559
In the Christian calendar, Lent is a period of enforced abstinence and spiritual purification leading up to Easter. It is represented in Bruegel’s painting by an emaciated man on a cart, while the figure of Carnival rides a wine barrel, wearing a pie on his head.

See Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593)
Italian painter Arcimboldo’s regal faces composed of fruit or seafood were greatly admired by his Renaissance contemporaries who loved riddles and puzzle paintings, and remain a source of fascination today.

See Caravaggio Basket of fruit c1595–1600
This work by another Italian painter, Caravaggio, is one of the first examples of pure still life. The term ‘still life’ only appeared during the middle of the 17th century; before 1650, people spoke of fruit, banquet or luncheon paintings.

See Abraham Mignon (1640–1679)
German painter Mignon encoded a Christian message in his work, especially references to the Eucharist, with its idea of eating the body and blood of Jesus Christ through the symbols of bread and wine. In his Still-life, painted after 1672 and now in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, images of ephemerality (flies and snails perforating the plants) are countered by grapes on a vine and their promise of eternal life.

See Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944)
Marinetti was the founder of the futurist movement, publishing its manifesto in 1909. He recognised that ‘men think, dream and act according to what they eat and drink’ so cooking and eating needed to become subservient to the proper aesthetic experience that futurism favored. Marinetti's recipe for carneplastico, ‘an original dish suggesting the Italian landscape’: Surround a tall, upright cylinder of minced veal stuffed with 11 vegetables by a ring of sausages draped between large balls of minced chicken. Crown the whole with golden honey.

See Daniel Spoerri (b1930)
Spoerri is known for his ‘snare-pictures’ – assemblages of objects which often include the remains of meals. The theme of food extends further in his work, in an area he calls ‘Eat art’. He has, like Miralda, established restaurants as art projects and has published Mythology and meatballs: a Greek island diary cookbook. In 1961 he sold in an art gallery store-bought canned food that he had signed and stamped with ‘Attention: Work of Art’.

Then there are the conceptual and performance takes on the subject. Artists like Joseph Beuys and Wolfgang Laib have used rice, honey, salt, pollen, chocolate, fettuccine, banana splits, pizzas and noodles in their work. Restaurateur Gay Bilson cooked large quantities of food on a Solstice evening for the cost of the bowl, emphasising the Eucharistic and communitarian origins of eating: Mutatio carnis in spiritum (Take eat, this is my body). Likewise, AIDS activist Felix Gonzalez-Torres at the Sydney Biennale in 1996 had spills of gold-wrapped candy fill an entire room, inviting viewers to eat the work.

Another contemporary tributary has been food as abject, yucky and disgusting. From Cindy Sherman’s de-luxe cibachromes of food going off or Hany Armanious’ polychrome plastic informe, we’re back at a certain medievalism, where food becomes the site of a neurotic terror – this time, about weight.