Art, Food and the Sublime

Art, Food and the Sublime
Gastronomy Symposium New Zealand - November 2015

Food or Art, Art or Food, what came first ?
Food of course, food came first and food was probably the inspiration for the invention of art and quite possibly religion. While they are interlinked and great art has been inspired by both food and religion I will not contend that food is either art or religion.
The word art has many meanings. Disciplines such as sculpture, painting, architecture, music, poetry, dance and film are called “fine arts”, and the people who produce art are united in their drive to capture the raw essence of their immediate experience. Their power, as makers of works of art, comes down to their sensitivity to the mystery of existence and the ability to channel that mystery into a work of art using arrangements of symbols and colour.

For Jung colour was the primary manifestation of images, patterns, and symbols that rise out of the collective unconscious. Colour influences us through our associations of emotions and feelings; exciting reds, calm green, cool blues. Today these associations have been appropriated by corporations, using the psychology of colour in packaging and displays in supermarkets.
 
Symbols, constructed from line, mass, space and rhythm within works of art, are dynamic, not static, and can only emerge within a field of awareness, within the context of the life experiences of the viewer. Geometric symbols, such as triangles and circles can give indicators of stability, direction or wholeness.
 
It is when the viewer approaches the work of art as though it was intended especially for them, as though the artist has specifically used a particular combination of colours and symbols especially for the viewer in question, that the viewer can utilise the artistic experience to influence the dynamics of their life.
Aristotle noted that knowing art, provides more understanding and more profound insights than any other way of knowing. Even that great scientist, Einstein noted that the most important function of art is to arouse and keep alive in those people, who are receptive, a feeling for fundamental truths about the universe.
The artist need not be driven to make a work of art by metaphysics or philosophical musings on the human condition. For the artist it is, at the most fundamental, the need to accurately express an artistic vision. For the viewer, if they are open to the demands of art to feel and think of the mysteries of our existence, they can come to the realization that the world, the universe, is not quite what we think it is. Something hidden, something hard to communicate, though clearly expressed in the art, has come into existence. 
The word “Art” can also be defined as the skill or craft of making something that is technically perfect. It is this meaning that I take as relating to food preparation, cooking and presentation, as in the art of cake baking or decorating. The final product is a decorated cake that is designed to please your eye and stimulate the salivary glands. However attractive the finished product may look, it is not one of the “fine arts”. This is not to denigrate food or its importance. Art is a matter of the mind while food is a more complex matter of the body. Food must ‘talk’ to all of our senses; satisfy the urge to keep the body functioning, to stay alive. At the base level, if you are starving, anything edible can give satisfaction, but just as art can influence our lives through the way we think of and see the world around us, so food is capable of providing experiences that can transcend the basic need to eat to live. The power of people who are able to process, prepare, cook and serve food is the ability to transform the raw into the divine.

While a lot of food is beautiful to look at, it was probably the lack of food, or the yearning for desirable food that prompted early people to draw on cave walls with ochre and charcoal, to carve in stone, bone and ivory, to conjure up images of that food. It has been supposed that these depictions of food animals in Palaeolithic times were done as “Hunting Magic” to ensure meat for the tribe. There is also conjecture that “Hunting Magic”, over time developed into religion. There is a good argument that food and the urge to eat well could be seen as a precursor in the creation of art and religion. Over time religion, food and art have been thoroughly interlinked.

Food has long been a subject of an artist’s focus, from the earliest records food has featured in the art of the times, ancient Egyptian tomb paintings featured hunting, harvesting, preparation and banquets, of course today we call these images art but to the ancient Egyptians they may have been thought of as documentation or religious texts. Early Chinese, Greek and Roman civilisations documented similar subject matter, with beautiful imagery.

A bowl of fruit painted in an alcove near the exit to a Roman villa was not just a beautiful painting these was a function, as a substitute for a small votive gift, which in earlier times, had been given to a departing guest.

Documentation and religion were the first patrons of artistic output, to record the production and processing of food in the case of the former and in the case of the latter to transmit to the population the glories and mysteries of religious belief. Religion very early on recognised the ability of art to make us feel and think of the mysteries of our and the world’s existence, and became possibly the greatest patron that art has ever had. While artists were commissioned to deal with religious matters, they did not totally forget about food. In fact the history of food can be traced through the images depicted in various art works. In Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” for example the food, plates, glasses, utensils and the table cloth have been depicted in the style as used by the Dominican friars at the time the work was painted.

“The Butcher’s Stall” by Pieter Aertsen from the early 1500’s, on first glance depicts every variation of butchered meat that could be found in a butcher’s shop, it is only by a detailed examination that you will see through a window at the back of the stall a representation of the biblical story of the flight into Egypt. The artist seems more obsessed with meat than the bible but at the time, and even still today, food was often used by the way of allegory, in this case on physical and spiritual food, contrasted to the Holy Family distributing alms on their journey into Egypt. Just one example are the two fish on a plate just below the flight to Egypt, they are placed on the plate in the form of a cross.

Gradually artists were getting more experimental and less religious in their subject matter, Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldi, also from the 1500’s is best known for painting portraits made entirely of such objects as fruit, vegetables, flowers and fish, in such a way that the whole collection of objects formed a recognisable likeness of the portrait subject, they are thought to be satirical.

Another Italian, Caravaggio mainly known for his religious paintings pushed the boundary of realism in his depiction of fruit in the still life compositions included in these works. Apples on the table were not shiny perfect fruit but straight from the tree complete with worm holes.

A Frans Hals's painting from 1616, of revelers at a festival, includes two figures from popular comedy, Pickled Herring and John Sausage. Pickled Herring wears a garland of salted herring and mussels, which symbolized the male and female genitals, eggs, considered an aphrodisiac and is wearing a pig's trotter at his waist, a symbol of gluttony. Sausages dangle from John Sausage’s cap and are also on the table, which is strewn with an array of items alluding to "male" and "female" genitals. This coupled with the obscene gestures made by the men indicated that it was painted for the private enjoyment of an enthusiast of bawdy comedy, certainly not for religious purposes.

During the next few centuries as the population became better educated and less reliant on imagery and more reliant on new technology such as the printed word, art, while still important in the depiction of religious iconography, developed independence through people wanting art to depict their own stories through portraits, possessions and livestock. In the ages of travel and scientific expeditions art became the record of foreign lands, people, animals and food.

From the mid-1800’s technology, in the form of photography and then moving film, challenged painting to again reinvent and art’s response was the impressionists. Still life and food remained subject matter but in new startling palette of colour and new insights into how the world can be seen. Cezanne’s still life paintings reinvented how we see an apple.

Technology still drives changes in our art as well as food.  In a news report earlier this year it was announced that later in 2015 a 3D printer called the Foodini is scheduled for mass production in Spain. The printing cartridges are separately filled with food such as white sauce, pasta dough and meat. Press print and you have a lasagne. The article then suggested that some of the possibilities included a pirate ship pizza. The mind boggles at what might soon be produced by the home cook; but I still would not label this as art.

Walking through a local shopping Mall  I came across a large banner for an ”exhibition of food art” , and there laid out for all to see was a portrait of Michael Jackson made from almonds, coffee beans, dried white beans, dried banana slices, liquorice allsorts and sunflower seeds.
You only have to Google “food as art” to see bizarre interpretations ranging from nudes to portraits and mixed up amongst it examples of the Asian craft of vegetable carving.

In the art world, as in other aspects of our lives, everything has speeded up and in the last 100 odd years, since the late 1800’s and the “Impressionists”, the world has gone through more art movements; abstraction, cubism, modernism, minimalism, pop and contemporary to name a few, than in the previous 2000 years.  The way the food image is depicted in all these different movements is a far cry from the food in paintings, sculpture and other art works, from the cave art “food animals” to the Italian portraits and Dutch still life.

It is not hard to understand that the average onlooker may find it hard to discern the difference, non-art verses  art (apart from humour), between a white pointer banana on a Food as Art internet site and Andy Warhol’s Polaroid still life of 6 bananas. Or to relate to performance and contemporary art when all manner of things from naked people to musical instruments are covered variously in chocolate, honey or toffee and strewn around art galleries.

The media do not help in the matter of what is art and what is not.
During the last two Festivals of Sydney a giant inflatable rubber duck has been set up on the Harbour and referred to by all and sundry as a work of art. If this is the case then every giant potato, merino, pineapple, prawn and banana, need to be rounded up and deposited in the National Gallery.  It is also interesting to note that virtually all giant things littering our highways are inspired by the edible.
In the matter of food, the media and the food industry itself are complicit in constantly referring to food as art, more so I admit in the top end restaurants.

While food at home is just as attractive and will taste just as delicious, it is in a different context and less intellectual in approach, though conviviality and enjoyment are the same, and this combination of food, friends and fun can produce a high that is hard to beat.

At the top end of the food industry, you only have to look at the food to see that it is beautiful on the plate, and so it should be, the craft of preparing and plating refined food at this level of the restaurant business is to give the diner a unique experience to maximize exposure of all the senses, from hearing and the sizzle of the hot plate through sight, smell, taste and mouth-feel.
 
At the start of this paper I stated that food is not art.
Art , through the intellect, can influence our lives through the way we think of and see the world around us.
Food through the senses, is capable of providing experiences that can reach the sublime.
 
I’ll finish with a quote from “The Table Comes First” by Adam Gopnik:
 
“The truth is that we have a hard time treating cooking as an art because it is so easy for us to experience it as a miracle.
We have trouble thinking that food is art, but no trouble at all imagining that it might be divine.
Our difficulty with the idea of food as a fine art is not that we have trouble elevating it that high; it is that we have difficulty in making it descend that low.”

Max Dingle  
Artist, independent curator & writer                                                         November 2015
www.maxdingleart.com

References
Aristotle  Metaphysics  http://classics.mit.edu
Adam Gopnik The Table Comes First  Penguin Random House 2011
C. G. Jung The Portable Jung  Portable Library 1976
W. Kandinsky Concerning the Spiritual in Art Dover 1977 (reprint of the 1914 Constable edition)
S. Langer Feeling and Form: Theory of Art 1977 Longman
J. F. Martel Reclaiming Art in the age of artifice  2015 Evolver Editions