Art & Exhibitions
At Laurel Gitlen, Eric Bell and Kristoffer Frick Tape Food for a Futurist Feast
THE DAILY PIC: Videos of hare and tongue give eating the challenge of art.
Blake Gopnik
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A 17-minute video called Hunting in Heaven presents our food culture as Futurist (and Surrealist) feast. (Click on my image to watch some clips.) The piece is by Eric Bell and Kristoffer Frick, and I saw it in a group show at Laurel Gitlen gallery in New York. Bell and Frick took the recipe suggestions in Filippo Marinetti’s 1932 Futurist Cookbook, and had them interpreted by a professional chef who trained at St. John in London (my favorite restaurant in the world, as it happens.) Marinetti’s dishes include hare in cocoa with sparkling wine and boiled calf’s tongue with prawns, lobster and cockscombs, so we’re talking nose-to-tail meets Eraserhead – although I have to admit that, jaded as I am, my principle reaction to the piece was simple hunger. One other effect: Because the video includes a few passages of deluxe footage from real food commercials, it makes you realize the extreme artifice, and surreality, of our everyday gustatory culture. In food, maybe more than in art, Marinetti’s strange future is now, everywhere. (Image and clips courtesy the artists and Laurel Gitlen, New York)
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