Food: a versatile topos

As a universal element, food is a versatile topos and with a high symbolic value, used by painters and sculptors, albeit in different times and styles different, to explore a vast range of themes that touch on aesthetics, symbolism, rituality, social research.

Every era has offered a vision of itself through the depiction of dishes - from imperial banquets intended as an invitation to enjoy earthly goods to the contrast between poor food and lavish lunches, to the romanticisation of workers' dishes - but it is with the advent of modernity that the figurative aspect becomes increasingly marginal in favor of a not too veiled transposition of other issues.

And paradoxically, in a field like that of art which has always had a clear male predominance, it is the artists who break the mold and claim a privileged role in the context of the relationship between visual arts and food, giving life to new perspectives that break the rules and go beyond traditional gender canons.

Meret Oppenheim, discomfort at tea time

In 1936, the just twenty-three-year-old Meret Oppenheim was inspired to cover a cup and saucer purchased in a Parisian department store with lynx hair. An idea as simple as it is ingenious: fur is pleasant to the touch but disgusting when it rests on the mouth: two incompatible elements are therefore put together to produce an object that creates discomfort.

The work, entitled Object or Breakfast in Fur, is one of the most iconic of Surrealism and was so successful that it was the first by a female artist to enter the collection of MoMA in New York. If women have the role of caring for and protecting the domestic hearth, artists take on the burden of demolishing it.

Judy Chicago's dinner party: the first feminist work

It is impossible not to mention the famous The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago from 1974, rightly considered the first truly openly feminist work in the history of art.

Read also: udy Chicago: “To the new generations, I want to leave as a legacy the desire to fight”

Judy Chicago sets an enormous table, of a triangular shape that resembles a vagina, for thirty-nine great women of history and mythology. A sort of revisiting of the Last Supper, recalled by the thirteen guests arranged on each side of the triangle, this time all women.

Alison Knowles' giant salad

Food is individual and community, a combination explored in a considerable number of performances. Among the best known is Make a Salad, which Alison Knowles, belonging to the group Fluxus, has been staging around the world since the 1960s. for museums and galleries. It involves preparing a giant salad in front of the eyes of the spectators who, at the end of the performance, will also have the opportunity to taste it.

Chocolate and lard: Janine Antoni

Tastes, trends and representations change, but what is brought to the table has always been an object of art and a sign of the times.

In 1992, the American artist Janine Antoni created Gnaw, two sculptures, one of chocolate and the other of lard, made from two enormous 300 kilo blocks shaped solely through the use of the mouth.

Drawn, represented, introjected, bitten, spat out, the variations on the theme are many.

Sissi's baroque (sculptural) dinner

In 2016, Sissi created L'Imbandita, a sculptural dinner inspired by the gastronomic ceremonies of the Baroque era.

Nothing is left to chance, from the table set with a service of biscuit ceramics glazed in white, created ad hoc, to the menu cooked by the artist and made available to all public who can touch, smell, eat.

This also happens in the series dedicated to "Dinners" in which a certain liturgical theatricality asserts itself in the table setting and is expressed in the communion of the guests. Tables decorated in the most unexpected ways, in the most unusual places, with delicious foods and live snails left free to move, with an audience ready to complete the ritual in the gesture of consuming the work.

Time suspended in Laura Letinsky's shots

The photographs of Laura Letinsky seem to be at odds with the opulence of Sissi's dinners, who in the series To Say It Isn't So suspends the time at the exact moment when the banquet is over and almost everything has been consumed.

What remains are only leftovers, discarded polystyrene cups, paper napkins, plastic cutlery, paper plates, crushed cans: Letinsky re-proposes the classic topos of the still life but as a space for denouncing the waste that so much afflicts modern consumer civilization.

It is the ecological turning point of the 2000s, in which the timeless beauty of nature merges with the chaotic banality of contemporary consumer culture.

Text by Mariacristina Ferraioli