KVT eats with the Futurists

What a delicious meal at the Goethe on Wednesday night courtesy of the Italians and Germans!

I got there late and managed to squeeze in at the top and oh so wished I was one of the lucky sixty who managed to get a seat at a silver foiled table, have their senses tantalized and their crockery and cutlery manipulated and swept off tables onto the floor and able to witness close up the cannibalistic finale.The Futurist movement which had  some of its formative  roots in cubism, disdain for traditional art forms and for power to the proletariat (et al) was put into a manifesto by Marinetti and one of the most fabulous parts of this was the part about gastronomy which culminated in La Cucinna Futurista or Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook set out in 1932 and played out in cafes and theatres by futurist artists and adherents.

Last night the participants certainly got their fill of some of the Futurists, ideals. They were gastronomic virgins. They started with their pasta sack stomachs being turned into vessels awaiting artistic intervention. They were invited to enter the gastronomic experience with bodies that were light and acutely sensitive to aesthetic delight. They were asked to excite the enamel of the teeth, fill their nostrils with heaven, choke their esophagi with admiration, realize that their genitalized faces were composed of organs of adoration, that their tongues and mouths were voluptuous, insatiable and attentive, that their guts would shift from organs of digestion to imagination, that food can be smelled, touched, heard, imagined but not necessity eaten and most importantly that their laughter was laxative for their futurist souls.

They would come to realize that they were experiencing food for inspired cannibals.

They would explore all the major themes of Futurism through food: passion, machinery, speed, noise, theatre of objects, body madness………….

One question! Were the artists last night part of the Neo Futurist movement that aims to feed intellectual anarchy and chaos through irony, satire and pure belly laxatives?

What ever, they were amazing and their performance was truly sensational. I wish I could get to experience the other 30 or so courses of Marinetti’s cookbook ….and next time I’ll get their early enough to get desired ring side seat in the gastronomic circus particularly as I’ve wanted to be part of the theatre of the Italian futurists since my long haired days of studying art history in art school ten years ago.

Like all movements, the futurists in Italy ran out of steam as various cells defected and changed ideals and sadly Marinetti defectively ended up supporting Mussolini. But Italian futurism and its branches throughout Europe decidedly influenced the direction of 20th century artistic and literary landscapes (and, with the absurdities of now passé Nouvelle Cuisine, the eatscape of food and 5 star restaurants).

Hopefully all local performance artists  managed to get a look at this as I’m fairly sure that their art form had  a lot of its genesis in the theater of the Futurists.