Antidiets of the Avant Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art (review)

In her sophisticated and rigorous study, Cecilia Novero provides readers with a novel understanding of the objectives and achievements but also the contradictions and shortcomings of twentieth-century avant-garde movements. She does so through a meticulous analysis of the role alimentary concepts and the operation of incorporation (devouring) play in the construction of avant-garde aesthetic systems inimical to "bourgeois" notions of art and taste. While the term "antidiets" connotes the oppositional stance characteristic of the historical as well as the neo-avant-garde, its broad application in the book does not subsume the profound ideological and aesthetic differences among the various groups. Rather, the concept of "antidiets" as employed by Novero illuminates commonalities between the historical avant-garde and postwar movements in regard to questions of production and consumption and reveals the movements' persistent utopian impulse to serve as a counteractant to the reified structures of modern life and art.

The temporal arc of the study announced in the title encompasses the historical avant-garde of the early twentieth century (futurism, Dada, surrealism) and artists of the neo-avant-garde, primarily the Romanian-Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri and various Nouveaux Realists, members of Fluxus, and contemporary artists (Ben Kinmont, Rikrit Tiravanija). Novero's analysis of the variegated temporalities informing the neo-avant-garde's complex relationships to the avant-garde confirms that the later movement(s) cannot be viewed, as some critics maintain, as merely an ironic or parodic citation of the historical avant-garde, or, in more starkly negative terms, its failed repetition.

At the center of the study is a complex set of configurations between art and food in the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde that go far beyond a gastrosophical inquiry in a narrower sense. Rather, the term "antidiets" sets up a sharp demarcation that separates food-writing practices such as cookbooks, gastro-philosophical treatises, or nutritionist-alimentary texts from the metaphorical, ritualistic, and performative (nonmimetic) uses of "food" by avant-garde artists. This demarcation, or rather opposition, encompasses a much broader bifurcated differentiation of cultural practices and history (modernity): idealist aesthetics, "bourgeois" consumer capitalism, the notion of the autonomous subject and autonomous art are opposed by a counter-aesthetic discourse of incorporation (devouring), indigestibility and disgust that connects the activities of writing (reading) to the distressed body, and to un-representable otherness. Such a blurring of inside/outside borders and the focus on the stomach (entrails) rather than the head (intellect) reorganizes the hierarchy of the senses prevailing since classical antiquity that equates vision with knowledge and the "lower" senses—smell, touch, and taste—with excessive pleasure and dangerous disruptions. The avant-garde's displacement of the mind to the body also brings with it the disintegration of the aura constitutive of bourgeois art.

Gastrosophical writing (such as recipe books or nutritional texts) since the late eighteenth century established norms and laws for the emerging bourgeois class, stressing moderation of desire, balance, control, and exercise. This model of the unified body, however, tried in vain to suppress the excessive pleasures disrupting such a system of signification. That excess emerged and found expression in the dysfunctional, mocking, disgusting, and devouring antidiets of the historical avant-garde (futurism, Dada) as well as the neo-avant-garde ("Eat Art") whose inedibility and decomposition counter the functionality and taste of capitalist production.

The "antidiets" of the various avant-garde movements share constitutive elements, like the compulsive épater le bourgeois attitude expressed in their anti-aesthetic, non-conciliatory, impractical, mocking (often ironic) strategies, and Novero, while clearly delineating the differences of each movement, reveals their salient commonality through analyses of the role played by the concept of incorporation and of the refractory effects of differing temporalities on the subjects who experience them. Incorporation disrupts a contemplative aesthetic (and its privileging of the "higher" senses) and introduces the body as the "site of confrontation, the laboratory for interrogating and testing the conventional relations between subject and...