Kitchen Table Kibitzing Friday: “The great artist of tomorrow will have to go underground”
| Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that many who post in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table and hope to make some new friends as well. Please do not attack Democratic candidates or drag primary fights into our community. |
Recently there have been stories of social distancing rage including the arrest of a woman in her thirties for manslaughter of a 86 year old woman she pushed to the ground. Bad attitudes in the age of Bad Barnum, captured by surveillance video. People not leaving each other alone, as renegade, antisocial behavior makes one less happy with the anonymity of isolation. Artists are no different.
Marcel Duchamp did a lecture on the artist of the future going underground and it seemed apropos of thinking about the anonymity of artists’ lives in contrast to their public relations and marketing. Artists have tended to be defined by their patrons, and their workshops or “schools”, even as their politics, their social network, and their biographies lie often in stark contrast to the history of their products.
“Besides, it's always the others who die”(“D'ailleurs, c'est toujours les autres qui meurent”).
Marinetti’s musings could not have predicted the role food would come to play in art nearly a century later. Contemporary artists have used food to make statements: political (especially feminist), economic, and social. They’ve opened restaurants as art projects, conducted performances in which food is prepared and served in galleries, and crafted elaborate sculptures from edible materials like chocolate and cheese. Horrifying as it might have seemed to Marinetti, some artists today even embrace food as a rejection of everyone and everything that is future-obsessed.
www.vice.com/…
One recipe calls for beef sliced with “vehement blasts on the trumpet.”
What made Futurist “cooking” so revolutionary was that it drew on food as a raw material for art and cultural commentary reflecting the Futurist idea that human experience is empowered and liberated by the presence of art in everyday life, that osmosis of arte-vita. Marinetti himself framed the premise of the cookbook in his introduction to the original 1932 edition:
The Futurist culinary revolution … has the lofty, noble and universally expedient aim of changing radically the eating habits of our race, strengthening it, dynamizing it and spiritualizing it with brand-new food combinations in which experiment, intelligence and imagination will economically take the place of quantity, banality, repetition and expense.
Futurist meals comprised a cuisine and style of dining advocated by some members of the Futurist movement, particularly in Italy. These meals were first proposed in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Fillia's Manifesto of Futurist Cooking, published in the Turin Gazzetta del Popolo on December 28, 1930.
Futurist Mixology collects stories, anecdotes, details of Marinetti & co.’s cuisine with particular attention to the mixed drink world. It illustrates, between philology and trend, 18 curious polibibite and it is enriched by a significant appendix with place for the tricks to create a futurist aeroaperitivo and a neo Manifesto of the futurist bartender.
www.cocchi.it/…
We had to compile a menu from the cookbook, which wasn't easy—every recipe seemed very deserving to be made. We made a selection based on how inspired we felt by a dish, by how difficult it would be to prepare, and by the aesthetics and name of it. That meant that too complicated dishes like “Sculpted Meat” or not Futurist enough sounding dishes like “Divorced Eggs” (“Divide some hard boiled eggs in half and remove the yolks inside. Put the yolks on a mashed potatoes and then the whites”) were off the table.
In the end, we decided on “Tummy Tickler,” the “Excited Pig,” and the “Black Shirt Snack” as starters. The main dish would have to be the “Fasces”—according to the recipe, its shape ought to bring to mind a fasces—a symbol of authority in the Roman Empire that later became the symbol of Italian Fascism. To accompany it all, we'd have a “polibibita” (poly-drink, the Futurist version of a cocktail) with the suggestive name “Devil in Black Key.” It consisted of two quarters orange juice, one quarter grappa, one quarter liquid chocolate, and a floating hard-boiled egg yolk. Just to be safe, we also bought cheap beers.
