Monatshefte

In her sophisticated and rigorous study, Cecilia Novero provides readers with a novel understanding of the objectives and achievements but also the contradictions and shortcomings of twentieth-century avant-garde movements. She does so through a meticulous analysis of the role alimentary concepts and the operation of incorporation (devouring) play in the construction of avant-garde aesthetic systems inimical to "bourgeois" notions of art and taste. While the term "antidiets" connotes the oppositional stance characteristic of the historical as well as the neo-avant-garde, its broad application in the book does not subsume the profound ideological and aesthetic differences among the various groups. Rather, the concept of "antidiets" as employed by Novero illuminates commonalities between the historical avant-garde and postwar movements in regard to questions of production and consumption and reveals the movements' persistent utopian impulse to serve as a counteractant to the reified structures of modern life and art.

The temporal arc of the study announced in the title encompasses the historical avant-garde of the early twentieth century (futurism, Dada, surrealism) and artists of the neo-avant-garde, primarily the Romanian-Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri and various Nouveaux Realists, members of Fluxus, and contemporary artists (Ben Kinmont, Rikrit Tiravanija). Novero's analysis of the variegated temporalities informing the neo-avant-garde's complex relationships to the avant-garde confirms that the later movement(s) cannot be viewed, as some critics maintain, as merely an ironic or parodic citation of the historical avant-garde, or, in more starkly negative terms, its failed repetition.

At the center of the study is a complex set of configurations between art and food in the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde that go far beyond a gastrosophical inquiry in a narrower sense. Rather, the term "antidiets" sets up a sharp demarcation that [End Page 663] separates food-writing practices such as cookbooks, gastro-philosophical treatises, or nutritionist-alimentary texts from the metaphorical, ritualistic, and performative (nonmimetic) uses of "food" by avant-garde artists. This demarcation, or rather opposition, encompasses a much broader bifurcated differentiation of cultural practices and history (modernity): idealist aesthetics, "bourgeois" consumer capitalism, the notion of the autonomous subject and autonomous art are opposed by a counter-aesthetic discourse of incorporation (devouring), indigestibility and disgust that connects the activities of writing (reading) to the distressed body, and to un-representable otherness. Such a blurring of inside/outside borders and the focus on the stomach (entrails) rather than the head (intellect) reorganizes the hierarchy of the senses prevailing since classical antiquity that equates vision with knowledge and the "lower" senses—smell, touch, and taste—with excessive pleasure and dangerous disruptions. The avant-garde's displacement of the mind to the body also brings with it the disintegration of the aura constitutive of bourgeois art.

Gastrosophical writing (such as recipe books or nutritional texts) since the late eighteenth century established norms and laws for the emerging bourgeois class, stressing moderation of desire, balance, control, and exercise. This model of the unified body, however, tried in vain to suppress the excessive pleasures disrupting such a system of signification. That excess emerged and found expression in the dysfunctional, mocking, disgusting, and devouring antidiets of the historical avant-garde (futurism, Dada) as well as the neo-avant-garde ("Eat Art") whose inedibility and decomposition counter the functionality and taste of capitalist production.

The "antidiets" of the various avant-garde movements share constitutive elements, like the compulsive épater le bourgeois attitude expressed in their anti-aesthetic, non-conciliatory, impractical, mocking (often ironic) strategies, and Novero, while clearly delineating the differences of each movement, reveals their salient commonality through analyses of the role played by the concept of incorporation and of the refractory effects of differing temporalities on the subjects who experience them. Incorporation disrupts a contemplative aesthetic (and its privileging of the "higher" senses) and introduces the body as the "site of confrontation, the laboratory for interrogating and testing the conventional relations between subject and object, self and other, and thus the very language of aesthetic experience" (259). The specific usage of "incorporation," however, differs greatly, as Novero shows in her expansive readings of the futurist cookbook, Dada manifestos, "Eat Art" multiples, and Walter Benjamin.

The first chapter of the study, entitled "Futurist Banquets," offers an extensive analysis of how Italian futurists re-imagined the national diet as means of a revolutionary development for body and mind. Novero illustrates how the impractical, artificial, and polemical "formulas" collected in the Futurist Cookbook (published in 1932) not only set out to discredit traditional culinary and social precepts but also continued the radical break with bourgeois aesthetics (art production and consumption, the museum, art criticism) already programmatically enacted by the first-wave futurists (the original Futurist Manifesto appeared in 1909). Yet, as Novero shows, there is another rupture inherent in the collected accounts of the Futurist Cookbook: the futurists' insight into the impossibility of their own rigorous demand for an absolute modernity casts an ironic light on the efficacy of their ideological agenda, an agenda which they nevertheless continue in the constructions of the Cookbook banquets. [End Page 664]

That agenda also included the demand for the creation of a qualitative new modern (futurist) body and mind commensurate with the contemporary advanced technological environment. In this endeavor, futurism aligns itself aesthetically and politically with many aspects of Italian fascism. Yet while Novero acknowledges this overlay (and also shows the misogynist, racist, and chauvinist aspects of futurism as found in Definitive Dinners and various banquets), she also provides interesting illustrations of how second-wave Futurism remonstrates fascism's constricting agenda through its polemical and provocative elements, its literary and fantastic status, and its irony and impracticality.

Impracticality, as Novero demonstrates, is a central trait of the Futurist cooking manifesto. The "formulas" proposed in the Futurist Cookbook do not offer actual alimentary alternatives to the traditional Italian diet but are rather a mise-en-scène of the manifesto's unfunctional program, its dramatic reconfiguration (performance) as evinced in the Definitive Dinners. Such textual aspects of the Cookbook require, thus Novero, a "readerly reception" (51), an awareness of its performative aspects. Novero accedes to this requirement with a series of magisterial readings, such as her analysis of Heroic Winter Dinner and Dinner—White Desire.

Dada artists and poets, while sharing the Futurists' antipathy to bourgeois culture, opposed its militarism and the concomitant ideology of the efficient soldier machine so prevalent in Marinetti's writings. Rather than hallucinating modernity's technological body, Dada's parodic attacks on capitalist consumer society aimed at the instantiation of an alternative subjectivity. As the second chapter of the study, "Antimeals of Antiart: Dada-Diets" shows, the use of food metaphors played an important role in this endeavor. In opposition to bourgeois notions of taste, consumption, and pleasure, Dada's "kynical" anti-diets destabilize the organic ideality of the body (and of consumption) by their focus on the body's dysfunctionalities: indigestion, diarrhea, nausea, and disgust. Expanding on Nietzsche's claim that aesthetics is nothing but "applied physiology," Dada artists and poets expand the project of a physiology of art by creating a poetics based on processes occurring in the body. This highly metaphorical discourse sets itself against idealist conceptions of bourgeois art and its market place, and against the communicative function of the word. For Dada artists, language, like thought, is directed from the stomach. This semiotic constellation, however, no longer participates in a signification of meaning that reconciles body and pleasure, like earlier gastrosophic texts; rather it points to an increased pathology of both the individual and the collective social body, a pathology that is constitutive of modernity.

Dada's vocabulary of food undergoes, as Novero demonstrates, a metaphorization of such radicality that the words achieve the status of "free-signifier," disrupting ("incorporating") the conventional, ingrained meaning and opening up the possibility of new experiences. It is this disruptive effect of "incorporation" that provides Novero with the connecting point between the historical avant-garde and various texts by Walter Benjamin, especially the Denkbilder ("Thought-Images") entitled Essen ("Eating/Food") from 1930. In the chapter "Walter Benjamin's Gastro-Constellations," Novero focuses on the correlation between incorporation and reading in Benjamin's writings. Reading here assumes the status of a "physical operation on and through the body, an operation that is disruptive, even disturbing, yet always magic/alchemical" (142–143). By analyzing the different Benjamin texts with singular concentration on [End Page 665] the trope of "incorporation," Novero is able to bring essential features of Benjamin's critical constructs into sharp, and I would add, novel focus, in relation not only to the avant-garde but also Freud, Brecht, Karl Kraus, and Kafka. The aphoristic nature of Benjamin's "food" writings is reminiscent of the language of dreams, a language outside the constricting forms of bourgeois consciousness, flowing from a corporeal mind that encompasses unprompted memories as well as forgetting, but also the discipline of revolutionary conviction. "The body that dreams and eats is the body infused with insuppressible desire for change" (117).

The last two chapters of the study, "Daniel Spoerri's Gastronoptikum" and "Convivia of the Neo-Avant-Garde," investigate new embodiments of "antidiet" practices (among them the use of food in material forms) by the post-war avant-garde movements and their complex imbrication with earlier avant-garde projects. Through a meticulous analysis of various post-war developments (trap-paintings, "Eat Art," arte povera, food multiples) Novero is able to show that the creative (mis)appropriations of avant-garde strategies allow for novel repositionings in the old struggle against key concepts of "bourgeois" aesthetics and art production/consumption, concepts such as "originality," "authenticity," "taste," even "art" itself. In contrast to nay-saying critics proclaiming the end of the avant-garde, these new "food arts" demonstrate the continued importance of their "antidiet" concepts (such as inedibility, indigestibility, transience) as instruments of institutional critique.

Antidiets of the Avant Garde requires full and sometimes strenuous engagement from readers. This is partly due to the heavy use of theoretical concepts and partly because Novero's narrative itself displays a highly self-conscious, performative quality, especially when demonstrating the efficacy of avant-garde's intentionalities. Those demonstrations sometimes run the risk of repetitiveness but this is a minor quibble compared to the highly original insights into the role of food/the culinary for avant-garde (negative) aesthetics that this excellent account provides. It will be difficult for future avant-garde research to ignore this study.