Food For Thought
Busting a gut
When I was a child my parents used to take me to the Tate or the National Gallery on Sundays. As a small and extremely truculent girl I counted the years until I could refuse to go and look at art, but these trips had two highlights: the shop and the café. The reward for making it round an exhibition was a weak orange squash and a bourbon biscuit, followed by a trip to ‘choose a postcard’. Who would want a postcard when faced with the allure of a jumbo pencil with a Canaletto printed on it, or a comb in a dapper leather sheath embossed with Picasso’s signature? A couple of decades later, public art institutions have got wise to the fact that ‘art appreciation’ is one of many possible expressions of lifestyle choice for a much wider audience. Shopping and dining out - two other glorious consumer pastimes - now easily dovetail into the gallery-goer’s experience.
The ICA has known this for a long time: it has always had a café and shop. Right now the café offers trendy global ‘street foods’ (Thai satay, mixed mezze, or udon noodles) served by Eurosquaws to the accompaniment of Japanese import albums. It is straight from the Beginner’s Guide to Postmodernism, no doubt available at the ICA’s own bookshop. But in the last year the Wallace Collection, the National Portrait Gallery, the Courtauld Gallery and the new Tate Modern have all opened restaurants. All of them, with the exception of the Tate’s, are managed by professional restauranteurs and are of a standard that makes them notable in themselves.
Oliver Peyton seems to be trying to do for Somerset House (home to the Courtauld Institute) what Mario Testino’s campaign did for Burberry: make tradition trendy. The ambience of The Admiralty is gentleman’s club meets art-deco sleek; there are dark wood tables, dark wood and turquoise leather banquettes and beautiful white roses in old silver milk jugs. Two Don Brown sculptures, attesting to Peyton’s long familiarity with the contemporary art world, share the space with a stuffed crocodile and a turtle shell - more aristo-chic. On my visit the other diners included several well-bred Tories in pinstripes and Loakes shoes. The menu is classic French cuisine, done very well. My companion had French onion soup, followed by cod braised with Parma ham and Puy lentils in a delicate creamy sauce, while I had cream of pumpkin soup with ravioles de Royans, followed by a mystery mammal. I thought I had ordered lamb with flageolets, but halfway through the second mouthful I became convinced that it was beef. Having sent it back to the chef, the supercilious waiter smirked and assured me that it was lamb. It was delicious anyway. At dessert my dining companion mentioned that my tureen of chocolate mousse looked like mud but perhaps this was a pre-emptive strike intended to prevent me from mentioning that his poached pear with cinnamon wafer stick resembled a certain Sarah Lucas sculpture.
At the Tate Modern the best strategy is to arrive early, as it is both impossible to book and inordinately busy. The gallery has two cafés and an espresso bar, but we chose the seventh-floor restaurant for its views, which are indeed magnificent. Sadly we couldn’t get a riverside seat since Lars Nittve had reserved the table we wanted. In-between the views is a functional café with a clean but not over-fussy design and an educational twist. Two elderly ladies next to us asked about the murals on the wall (’art or design?’) so the waiter went to fetch a lean man in a dark suit and those ‘I’m a graphic designer from Stuttgart’ glasses. The waiter-curator, as we christened him, explained that it was art, and pointed out the more extensive notes in the menu. Suitably enlightened, we shared a starter of red onion tart with melted taleggio. Sadly, the taleggio was too obese and bland, the onions too sweet and the pastry too crap. Not very good. The main courses, seared salmon with black beans and pickled cabbage for me, field mushroom (yes, one) with polenta and vegetables for my companion, were an improvement - marginally - although the black beans didn’t exist: it was a tablespoon of Amoy black bean sauce. The vegetarian option was better - I don’t really get polenta, but this looked nice and firm.
Back in town, The Portrait Restaurant at the National Portrait Gallery also boasts a view - not so much the cosmopolitan metropolis, more the great British establishment - over Nelson’s Column and Whitehall to the Houses of Parliament. Correspondingly, the clientele mostly wear blazers. My companion had white bean soup with truffle oil, which he curiously chose to describe as ‘un-set concrete’, although he was definitely pleased with it. My pork terrine was nice and chunky, and the accompanying prune particularly good. My friend’s guinea fowl arrived arranged with a single leg rigidly sticking up out of its jus, which made me feel rather uncomfortable. I was glad that I had chosen the salt cod fishcake - no danger of it eyeing me from my plate. In fact the fish was so heavily disguised that the little pattie on my plate seemed to be all potato and no fish. Although the fresh garlic mayonnaise was delicious, this swanky urbane version of Southern French aïoli was not a success.
Mirroring the Anglo-French provenance of the collection, The Bagatelle Café at the Wallace Collection is the product of an entente cordiale between Stephen Bull and the extremely capable French restaurant company Eliance (who also run the restaurant at the Louvre). It takes its name from the central decoration, the bronze fountain from Sir Richard Wallace’s French pile the Château de Bagatelle. The menu also thoughtfully provides the dictionary definition of ‘bagatelle’ as a ‘trivial, light or airy thing’. The rather self-deprecating suggestion is that the cuisine is a lesser art complementing the seriousness of the Wallace Collection; as an accomplished lady might adorn a frock-coated and bewhiskered Victorian gentleman. However, located in the expansive glass-roofed space of the ‘sculpture garden’, The Bagatelle is the most carefully thought-out of London’s gallery restaurants and by far the most graceful. We were attended to by an utterly charming French waiter, a far cry from the type found at The Admiralty who was rather disdainful of the two pixies come to eat among the grown-ups. The food, from the bread (hand-made on the premises) to the rice pudding brulée, is simply stunning. If you fancy perfect onion tarte tatin or smoked haddock with potato cake, poached egg and hollandaise, or exquisite steamed toffee pudding, then remember to book because the place was full of similarly content customers.
Beatrice Collier
Food For Thought
Rirkrit Tiravanija
What does it mean that art-culture continues to focus our attention on the display of exotic objects in near-empty rooms when most of the world does not have enough to eat? To what extent does the art community’s discourse of values and meanings function as a mere shield, protecting against the realisation that we have constructed a microcosm that keeps itself arrogantly positioned beyond the issues of the general populace? Although this waning century has been full of autocriticality, such questions never seemed to bother earlier generations of 20th century artists in quite the same way as they bother us today, perhaps because they had something called ‘art’ that they could rail against. Or, perhaps more accurately, when such issues did arise, they were responded to with a gesture of futility, or else by the rare decision to leave the art world behind in order to devote one’s energies to making life more bearable for at least a handful of others.
As art in the postmodern era has struggled to break down the cycle of its own objectification through style, what has replaced the exclusive code of an aesthetics based on historically-derived models is the license to link one’s production to virtually any form of social ritual or exchange. However, this loosening of art’s bonds to its own past has not prevented art historical references (including those to very recent art history) from cropping up within the work itself. If anything it heightens the possibility that such allusions might be freely mixed with sources and materials that bear no relationship to the history of art, but do lend themselves easily to a polymorphic mix of gestures and partial forms that allow the work to perpetually slip back and forth across the already amorphous boundary between art and daily practice.
Somewhere between these two separate lines of inquiry, a cultural space has opened up to allow Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work to occupy an important role within the evolution of these ideas in their physical form. His art, while appearing to be essentially formless, is in fact based on very precise calibrations of social perceptions outside the art world as much as within. The environments that he creates are conceived in order to mingle with their surroundings, even if that means that they are frequently mistaken for situations that take place between or instead of ‘art’ experiences. His 1992 installation, Untitled (Free) at 303 Gallery, New York, was the first time his work was seen by a larger gallery-going public, and in it there were essentially two different activities taking place. The main event consisted of the transformation of the gallery’s exhibition and storage spaces, so that the art being stored was placed on display in the centre of the space, while the racks, supply closet and bathroom were literally stripped clean. At regularly scheduled intervals during the exhibition, Tiravanija would also prepare a large curry to be freely shared with anyone who happened to be passing by, thus disrupting the social space of art in a second distinct way. The switching of private and public spaces within an art gallery did suggest a kind of excavation of a site. But the more lasting effect of both activities was as an analysis and comparison of the ways in which human energy and resources become concealed behind the seamless apparatus that constitutes an exhibition in a contemporary art gallery.
Food is central to Tiravanija’s investigation because it occupies a critical symbolic position in the way humans categorise their experience. Because we no longer live as hunters and gatherers, the extent to which we distance ourselves from the social processes involved in the production of food - not cuisine or cooking, but production in its most basic sense - acts as a way of measuring the ways in which we are uncomfortable with our nature as animals. Most recent art that has dealt with food in an interactive way has chosen to focus either on the pageantry of the event surrounding the meal (MiraIda), or else on playing with the aura of participation attached to the consumption of food (Gonzalez-Torres). In Tiravanija’s case, the act of serving the viewer becomes vital to the effectiveness of the piece, since it allows the distinctions between art and non-art to break down of their own accord, without having to be forced.
A good example of this socio-aesthetic transformation was with the work Untitled (Artificial Flavoring) which constituted Tiravanija’s participation in the 1991 group show ‘Wealth of Nations’ in Warsaw. Filling two large suitcases with a particularly irresistible flavour of American potato chip (bacon yoghurt), Tiravanija arranged that the suitcases would be opened as the public arrived, the predictable result being that the chips were eaten in a blur and the empty suitcases left behind as a form of sculptural afterthought. By exposing the notion of American consumption for a few moments in the form of a brief public snack in Poland, the artist is also subtly addressing the inequalities that exist between the two economic systems. The reason the chips taste even better in Poland is that they cannot be as easily replaced by more of the same. Tiravanija’s piece for the 1993 ‘Aperto’, Untitled (Twelve Seventy-One) explored similarly charged socio-historic ground, at least insofar as the title refers to the year that Marco Polo set off from Venice to explore the world. Making sly reference to the fact that one of the things Polo brought back from Asia was the now ubiquitous noodle, the artist showed a canoe; a set of propane burners boiling large vessels of water; tables and stools; and a seemingly endless supply of cups of instant noodles, now recycled back to the Venetian public. Most recently, in a group show at Metro Pictures organised by Friedrich Petzel, Tiravanija set up a free water bar in front of the gallery’s Greene Street picture-window, allowing viewers a chance to enjoy the same kind of sitting privileges which at other Soho windows would have cost them at least the price of a cappuccino.
Giving art away is, of course, a utopian prospect that has existed in one form or another since the earliest days of the century. But it is not a Marxist proposition because it cannot be maintained as part of a coherent social structure without a lot of hidden economic machinery (galleries, collectors, etc.) Nor can Tiravanija’s practice be correctly called utopian in the concrete sense of acting as a model for some larger activity that might be applied to any of the world’s problems, in the way that Gordon Matta-Clark’s ‘Food’ restaurant, which opened in Soho in 1971, provided an operating system for an art/business principle that has since spawned numerous variants over the years, each based on a different localised set of conditions. By comparison, Tiravanija’s situations are much more ephemeral, less contained by the intricate relationships found in community infrastructures and more attached to the idea of portability, of ease and simplicity in presentation. Their particular nature as events arises from the placement of the spectator at the centre of the piece, allowing each one to determine the duration and nature of their interaction with the work at hand.
In the 1992 work Untitled (Lure), which was produced for the exhibition ‘Poverty Pop’ at Exit Art, Tiravanija delved much deeper into some of the social issues that inform his work. Providing the viewer with a loosely flapped orange tent that permitted a sensorial escape from the visually overfilled exhibition outside, the piece literally produced a break in the flow of the group exhibition. Tiravanija effectively captured the idea that defining culture in too exclusive a way - as in the exhibition’s premise - can veer towards redundancy, whereas leaving definitions open often leads one to question the context from which such ideas emerge. Because this relaxation of two seemingly opposed principles is not intrinsically a Western concept, the artist is also directing us back to an awareness of our own expectations about what we get from the act of contemplating a work of art. Tiravanija seems to imply that the nature of the meditation does not change that much, whether we contemplate the artwork itself or simply the nature of our own contemplation.
Because of the elusive nature of the issues in which he is involved, it seems misleading to succumb to the critical fashion of referring to Tiravanija’s work as ‘real’ art. Although he is certainly questioning the process by which ideas are institutionalised into form, he is not doing so from the pragmatic basis that such a term might imply. There should be no doubt either that Tiravanija wishes his work to be experienced as art, or that he is involved in consciously adapting the definition of art to whatever conditions seem most pertinent to the situation in which it is encountered. If we could limit ourselves strictly to the opinion that as a body of work it is grounded in its author’s observations about the world and its inhabitants, then the epithet ‘real’ might indeed apply. But in the last analysis, the only thing that remains truly real about Tiravanija’s art is his desire that we experience it in the form of a pause that helps us to forget the distinctions between the artwork and the world to which it must eventually return.
Dan Cameron
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