Gastro-Vision: Antidiets of the Avant-Garde

Daniel Spoerri, Eaten partly by: Visitors of the Biennale of Sydney 1979, 1978-79. Dinner debris: knives, forks, plates, bread, bottle, glasses, glued to a screenprinted tablecloth mounted on wood, overall 100 x 220 cm. Gift of the artist, 1979 NGA 1979.2341.A-B © Daniel Spoerri. Licensed by Pro Litteris, Zurich & VISCOPY, Australia.

Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art -- a fascinating new text in food-art history -- is due out in January. Learn more about the book in my interview with author Cecilia Novero:

Nicole J. Caruth: How do you define “antidiet”? Is it synonymous with the rejection of “taste” in art (i.e. anti-taste) or related to the French idea of dégoût/disgust?

Cecilia Novero: Antidiet is not always dégoût–that would work with Dada but not with Futurism. Antidiet is meant in the sense of anti-art, without being a synonym of it. If diet is a set of regulations that orders ways of eating, table manners, etc., the anti-diet counters these “bourgeois” and “Western” rules. For example, the ways in which we take pleasure, appreciate what is considered/constructed as the beautiful, and especially the ways we “taste” art and thus stop thinking about inherited concepts of beauty. In the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde, anti-diet also refers to acquired notions of “progress,” hence traditional historicist approaches to art and civilization.

Read the entire piece on the Art21 blog.