Spiritual Nourishment: Food and Ritual in Performance Art

Raúl Ortega Ayala, Last Supper, The David Roberts Art Foundation, Fitzrovia, London, April 6, 2009; Harminder Singh Judge, The Modes of Al-Ikseer, in Triple Bill, Shunt Vaults, London, April 13–14, 2009; Amanda Couch, Dust Passing, SPILL Festival National Platform, National Theatre Studios, London, April 18–19, 2009.

Food shares with performance art its brief life span. Both are ephemeral in essence. As an organic, perishable substance, food is subject to change, decay, and ultimately dissolution—if left to its own devices. In culinary matters as in performance art, the period of preparation usually outlasts that of the actual consumption. A great deal of investment and effort often disappears without a trace, having fulfilled its function of nourishing our bodies and souls.

Using food in performance art is not in itself new. Some of the earliest practitioners of this art form—including Carolee Schneemann, Allan Kaprow, and Fluxus artists—had repeatedly turned to food in their work. Edited by Linda Montano, an issue of High Performance specifically devoted to “Food and Art” first drew attention in 1981 to the symbolic, economic, social, and religious implications of food explored by later generations of performance artists. The Montreal-based “Orange: A Festival of Food and Art,” which in 2006 set itself the task of acting as a “think tank” on present-day art exploring our relationship to food, testifies to a recent surge of interest in this subject.

Launched in 2007, London’s SPILL Festival of performance, live art, and experimental theatre made food and eating a theme of one of its informal discussion forums, the Spill Salons (Salon 2: “Feasts,” April 13, 2009), designed to stimulate debate on some of the major strands of artistic practice featured in the festival. Three weekly feasts punctuated the latest SPILL Festival (April 2–26, 2009), giving fifty artists and members of the audience a further chance to share thoughts, food, and wine in a convivial, albeit theatrical, setting. Held at the Toynbee Studios in London’s East End, with red velvet curtains and bright spotlights to set the scene, the feasts were a performance in themselves.

Coinciding with this year’s SPILL Festival, the three performances examined below, staged at different locations in central London in the span of two weeks, revolved (in one case quite literally) around food in its hieratic and ritual dimension. Foodstuffs loom large in sacred rites and functions of all religions, whether animistic, polytheistic, or monotheistic. Under the guise of sacrificial offerings, promised lands of milk and honey, prohibitions of one kind or another, they are repeatedly alluded to in the Bible as in the Qur’an, in sacred Buddhist as in Sikh texts. Yet this particular, highly symbolic function of food tends to be overshadowed by debates surrounding food production, consumption, and the waste that it generates, subjected to intense scrutiny by performance artists in recent years.

Coming at food from divergent aesthetic directions and cultural backgrounds, Raúl Ortega Ayala’s reenactment of the Last Supper, drawing on the research of food historian Daniel Rogov; Harminder Singh Judge’s churning of the Ocean of Milk to the sound of Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” in The Modes of Al-Ikseer; and Amanda Couch’s Dust Passing, involving home-grown ashes and foodstuffs ground to dust, lend themselves to comparison in so far as they gesture at sacred symbolism and rituals in the Judeo-Christian tradition, on the one hand, and in Hinduism and Sikhism, on the other.

All three artists have worked with food before. They have incorporated materials as varied as milk, meat, sugar, and their by-products into their individual practices, using them in imaginative and daring ways. Food is not an artistic medium in any ordinary sense of the word. When used in performance, it is generally deflected from its primary function. It becomes an object of contemplation rather than of instant sensual gratification. But as an organic and originally live matter, it can be an unruly, slippery object. Each in its own way, the three performances attempt to capture the process of transformation that food undergoes and...