Food has come a long way since Stone Age man started hunting and painting the beasts he killed on caves. What was basic nutrition (later to become a status symbol) has been refined, polished and taken to new highs, catering for both rich and poor.
But now chefs are claiming food, as well as being a feast for the eyes, can be art, while art critics ask whether something that is functional, and a temporal thing that doesn’t hang around, can be art, which is traditionally meant to last for centuries.
Food has been a common theme in Christian art for more than 400 years (look at Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper), representing deep religious symbolism. For instance, the pomegranate suggests potency, and the apple, as used by Eve against Adam, is a symbol of temptation.
In modern times, much of this symbolism is taken out of art, but still the painter, at best, tries to create a three-way connection between himself, the work and the viewer. John Olsen, who makes darned good paella, is a prolific painter of food, from his famous paella to barbecue prawns to prints of women doing the washing-up. But it is his work, not the food, which is the art.
Italian chef Massimo Bottura (pictured), recently visiting Melbourne, took on the theme of food and art, saying he is not just looking to satisfy the diner’s hunger, but to communicate with the diner, too. “I cook to feed hungry minds,” he says. “We must transmit emotions. We must return to the kitchens of our grandmothers and grandfathers.”
Bottura’s favourite artist is the late German art theorist, performance artist and sculpture Joseph Beuys, much of whose work is inspired by an incident during the Second World War, when his plane crashed and he was subsequently rescued from the snow by tribesmen who wrapped him in felt and fat. While claims of this rescue are dismissed by historians, it is a common theme of Beuys’ performance art, as well as his artisan cooking. And it is the authenticity of Beuys, keeping true to himself rather than tradition, that Bottura seeks to replicate in his restaurant Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy. Examples include foam inspired by thoughts of being buried in snow, and a cube of foie gras filled with the finest balsamic vinegar and rolled in nuts to resemble a Golden Gaytime ice-cream bar.
Ferran Adrià, arguably the most influential chef of the past decade, took food beyond the point of pure function with his avante-garde cuisine presented in a degustation of 35 courses or more. Such is the level of his performance that two million people a year apply to eat at his Michelin three-star restaurant, El Bulli. In January 2010, he announced he would be closing it for good in 2011.
In 2007, Adrià was invited to participate in Documenta 12, one of the most important exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, held every five years in Kassel, Germany. Adrià’s contribution was to, each day, fly two festival-goers to El Bulli at Cala Montjoi – two hours drive north of Barcelona – to experience his performance, which he would then write about. The collected words and photographs formed the publication Food for Thought, Thought for Food: A Reflection on the Creative Universe of Ferran Adrià.
Author Jay McInerney, recently said in Vanity Fair: “The selection of Adrià was not without controversy, some questioning the idea that cooking and art were co-extensive. But Adrià is proud of the fact that the question has been raised …I’m not entirely certain whether what Adrià creates is art, but I can say that dining at El Bulli is the most exciting aesthetic experience I’ve had this year.”
Documentation of performance and installation art and detailing the philosophical questions behind it are part of what makes it credible. And Adrià has been documenting his recipes and photographing his creations each year since 1983 to create highly detailed tomes, simply called, for instance, El Bulli 2003-2004.
It’s a manual for wannabe molecular gastronomes and it’s taken the idea of the cookbook to a new level. The same could be said for the recent book Noma, from the Danish chef René Redzepi, whose restaurant of the same name is currently rated the world’s No.1. In the book, Redzepi details his philosophy of using only local produce, and most of the recipes are lost to all but the Scandinavian forager. This makes it largely useless as a cookbook, but it remains important documentation of Redzepi’s performance, which includes shooting elk and serving a freshly picked radish in a flower pot.
The debate continues. With Andy Warhol’s use of common objects as themes and the replication of art in commercial quantities, or Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde shark driven more by ideas and commercial avarice than pure artistic talent, it’s a difficult question to answer. Is it art or is the joke on us?
In 2005, British artist Doug Fishbone installed a pile of 40,000 bananas on a New York street. More recently, the Sydney Fringe Festival hosted a two-hour silent dinner party. In Melbourne, artist Alana Kennedy included some 200 macarons in her exhibition Orpheus Diningroom Project MMX, which referenced the philosopher and mystic Marsilio Ficino, whose patron Catherine de’ Medici introduced the macaron to Paris from Italy in 1533, upon marrying Henry II.
It seems performances and installations can include food. But food itself as a comestible can’t be art. Although you can disagree.
Watch Eating Art at 6:30pm Mondays on SBSTWO. Restaurateur and art connoisseur Oliver Peyton journeys throughout Europe investigating how food is depicted in landmark works of art.