Antidiets of the Avant-Garde
From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art
Cecilia Novero
University of Minnesota Press | 392 pages | 38 b&w photos | 2010
ISBN 978-0-8166-4601-2 | paper | $19.00 (reg. price: $27.50)
ISBN 978-0-8166-4600-5 | cloth | $57.50 (reg. price: $82.50)
Cecilia Novero discusses an aspect of the European avant-garde that has often been neglected—its relationship to the embodied experience of food. She exposes the key roles that food plays in the theoretical foundations and material aesthetics of works ranging from the Italian Futurist Cookbook to the magazine Dada, Walter Benjamin’s writings on eating and cooking, Daniel Spoerri’s Eat Art, and the French New Realists.
“The history of taste has long harbored a repressed field of knowledge, that of cuisine, which had been metaphorized out of existence in traditional aesthetic theory. Today, as the culinary has finally found its place in theoretical and museological endeavors, certain works promise to become the foundation of a new, pluridisciplinary field that includes gastronomy. Among them is Antidiets of the Avant-Garde. It may be said that this book illuminates the culinary unconscious of our modernity. It is essential reading for all those interested in modern art, and for all those who love to eat.”
—Allen S. Weiss, author of Feast and Folly: Cuisine, Intoxication, and the Poetics of the Sublime
“Caringly dismantling the misunderstanding that has often limited modernist aesthetics—namely, that avant-garde art is to be ascetic and skeptical of bodily experience—Cecilia Novero’s impressive study takes a more playfully Nietzschean approach by demonstrating that the European avant-garde cannot properly be understood without appreciating the role that allegories and material practices of incorporation play within it. This book is a delicious morsel.”
—Gerhard Richter, University of California-Davis
More information + the table of contents:
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/N/novero_antidiets.html