BiblioVault - Books about Food in art

Antidiets of the Avant-Garde

From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art

Cecilia Novero

University of Minnesota Press, 2009

Discussing an aspect of the European avant-garde that has often been neglected-its relationship to the embodied experience of food, its sensation, and its consumption-Cecilia Novero exposes the surprisingly key roles that food plays in the theoretical foundations and material aesthetics of a broad stratum of works ranging from the Italian Futurist Cookbook to the magazine Dada, Walter Benjamin's writings on eating and cooking, Daniel Spoerri's Eat Art, and the French New Realists.

Starting from the premise that avant-garde art involves the questioning of bourgeois aesthetics, Novero demonstrates that avant-garde artists, writers, and performers have produced an oppositional aesthetics of indigestible art. Through the rhetoric of incorporation and consumption and the use of material ingredients in their work, she shows, avant-garde artists active in the 1920s and 1930s as well as the neo-avant-garde movements engaged critically with consumer culture, memory, and history.

Attention to food in avant-garde aesthetics, Novero asserts, reveals how these works are rooted in a complex temporality that associates memory and consumption with dynamics of change.

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Culinary Poetics and Edible Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature

Stacie Cassarino

The Ohio State University Press, 2018

In her new study, Culinary Poetics and Edible Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature, Stacie Cassarino traces the tradition of avant-garde food experimentation across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to show how a fixation on the materiality of edible things, expressed through the language of food, became a way for American writers to respond to the culinary, political, and aesthetic tastes of the nation.
Cassarino takes the reader through the changing dynamics of food production and consumption, from wartime sensibilities of patriotic eating to the postwar excess of culinary cosmopolitanism and finally to contemporary supermarket pastorals. She pairs chefs and poets—Julia Child and Gertrude Stein, Poppy Cannon and Frank O’Hara, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor and Harryette Mullen—to argue that each converts eating into an aesthetic opportunity that has the power to impact how people consume. In this way, Cassarino reveals the modern cookbook not just as a literary counterpart to contemporary poetry but also as vital to the literature and art occurring around it. From Futurist cookbooks to fast food lyrics, from Gullah recipes to Eat Art, she reminds us that global foodscapes are connected to aesthetic movements in literature and art.

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Food in Art

From Prehistory to the Renaissance

Gillian Riley

Reaktion Books, 2014

From Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s painting of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II as a heap of fruits and vegetables to artists depicting lavish banquets for wealthy patrons, food and art are remarkably intertwined. In this richly illustrated book, Gillian Riley provides fresh insight into how the relationship between humans and food has been portrayed in art from ancient times to the Renaissance.

Exploring a myriad of images including hunting scenes depicted in Egyptian Books of Hours and fruit in Roman wall paintings and mosaics, Riley argues that works of art present us with historical information about the preparation and preservation of food that written sources do not—for example, how meat, fish, cheese, and vegetables were dried, salted, and smoked, or how honey was used to conserve fruit. She also examines what these works reveal to us about how animals and plants were raised, cultivated, hunted, harvested, and traded throughout history. Looking at the many connections between food, myth, and religion, she surveys an array of artworks to answer questions such as whether the Golden Apples of the Hesperides were in fact apples or instead quinces or oranges. She also tries to understand whether our perception of fruit in Christian art is skewed by their symbolic meaning.

With 170 color images of fine art, illuminated manuscripts, mosaics, frescoes, stained glass, and funerary monuments, Food in Art is an aesthetically pleasing and highly readable book for art buffs and foodies alike.

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Food in Painting

From the Renaissance to the Present

Kenneth Bendiner

Reaktion Books, 2004

From the hearty meals being devoured by peasants on a Bruegel canvas to the lush and lifelike fruits of a trompe l'oeil, food has enjoyed a central place in painting for centuries. These two great sensory pleasures come together in the sumptuously illustrated Food in Painting. Here Kenneth Bendiner journeys from the Renaissance to the present day—through the works of artists from Rembrandt to Manet to Warhol—to make the case that, though understudied, paintings of food are so important that they should be considered a separate classification of art, a genre unto themselves.

Bendiner outlines the history of these paintings, charting changes in both meaning and presentation since the early Renaissance. The sixteenth century saw great innovations in food subjects, but, as Bendiner reveals, it was Dutch food painting of the seventeenth century that created the visual vocabulary still operative today. Alongside paintings that feature food as the central subject, he also considers topics ranging from Renaissance menus to aphrodisiacs to bottled water to the portrayal of dogs at the table—always with an eye towards how the meaning of food imagery is determined by such factors as myth, religion, and social privilege. Bendiner also treats purely symbolic portrayals of food, both as marginal elements in allegorical paintings and as multi-layered sexual references in Surrealist works.

Packed full of images of markets, kitchens, pantries, picnics, and tables groaning under the weight of glorious feasts, Food in Painting serves up a delicious helping of luxuriously painted meals certain to win a spot on the shelves of art lovers and gastronomes alike.

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Sacred Consumption

Food and Ritual in Aztec Art and Culture

By Elizabeth Morán

University of Texas Press, 2016

Making a foundational contribution to Mesoamerican studies, this book explores Aztec painted manuscripts and sculptures, as well as indigenous and colonial Spanish texts, to offer the first integrated study of food and ritual in Aztec art.

Aztec painted manuscripts and sculptural works, as well as indigenous and Spanish sixteenth-century texts, were filled with images of foodstuffs and food processing and consumption. Both gods and humans were depicted feasting, and food and eating clearly played a pervasive, integral role in Aztec rituals. Basic foods were transformed into sacred elements within particular rituals, while food in turn gave meaning to the ritual performance.

This pioneering book offers the first integrated study of food and ritual in Aztec art. Elizabeth Morán asserts that while feasting and consumption are often seen as a secondary aspect of ritual performance, a close examination of images of food rites in Aztec ceremonies demonstrates that the presence—or, in some cases, the absence—of food in the rituals gave them significance. She traces the ritual use of food from the beginning of Aztec mythic history through contact with Europeans, demonstrating how food and ritual activity, the everyday and the sacred, blended in ceremonies that ranged from observances of births, marriages, and deaths to sacrificial offerings of human hearts and blood to feed the gods and maintain the cosmic order. Morán also briefly considers continuities in the use of pre-Hispanic foods in the daily life and ritual practices of contemporary Mexico. Bringing together two domains that have previously been studied in isolation, Sacred Consumption promises to be a foundational work in Mesoamerican studies.

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The Taste of Art

Cooking, Food, and Counterculture in Contemporary Practices

Silvia Bottinelli

University of Arkansas Press, 2017

The Taste of Art offers a sample of scholarly essays that examine the role of food in Western contemporary art practices. The contributors are scholars from a range of disciplines, including art history, philosophy, film studies, and history. As a whole, the volume illustrates how artists engage with food as matter and process in order to explore alternative aesthetic strategies and indicate countercultural shifts in society.

The collection opens by exploring the theoretical intersections of art and food, food art’s historical root in Futurism, and the ways in which food carries gendered meaning in popular film. Subsequent sections analyze the ways in which artists challenge mainstream ideas through food in a variety of scenarios. Beginning from a focus on the body and subjectivity, the authors zoom out to look at the domestic sphere, and finally the public sphere.

Here are essays that study a range of artists including, among others, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Daniel Spoerri, Dieter Roth, Joseph Beuys, Al Ruppersberg, Alison Knowles, Martha Rosler, Robin Weltsch, Vicki Hodgetts, Paul McCarthy, Luciano Fabro, Carries Mae Weems, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Janine Antoni, Elżbieta Jabłońska, Liza Lou, Tom Marioni, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Michael Rakowitz, and Natalie Jeremijenko.

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