“My enlightenment is born and propagated through my guts”: alimentary art

Abstract

This article focuses on cases studies where artists prepare, display, and serve food to audiences both within museums and galleries, and in less formalized settings. A brief overview of gastronomic art practices is provided. Surrealism (Salvador Dalì, Meret Oppenheim), Italian Futurism, and the Food Art movement (Daniel Spoerri) in Germany are discussed in relation to contemporary practices by Karen Tam and collaborative duo Hannah Jickling and Helen Reed. These case studies deliberately harness the materiality of food and, in so doing, occasion bodily, gustatory experiences for their audiences. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s text “Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium” (1999) provides a theoretical framework for the discussion.