Appeared as "Edible Art," Artforum (November 1989): 20-23.  Please
see published version for illustrations. 
===================================================================
The Futurist Cookbook, by F.T. Marinetti, introduction by Lesley
Chamberlain, translation from the Italian by Sue Brill, San
Francisco,  Bedford Arts, 1989, 160 pp. 40 photographs and line
drawings. $29.95 cloth, $19.95 paper. 

                              ...we think, dream and act
                              according to what we eat and
                              drink.
                                             Marinetti

          Futurist cuisine was launched by F.T. Marinetti from a
little radio microphone on the table of the Penna d'Oca restaurant
in Milan in 1930.  His Manifesto of Futurist Cooking  quickly
followed. Culinary experiments and lively debates that ensued in
the press culminated in La Cucina Futurista in 1932. Authored by
the "caffeine of Europe" (Marinetti) and "a saucepan always on the
boil" (Fillia), this brash assemblage of manifestos, ideology,
polemic, descriptions of banquets, and recipes extended Futurist
performance to new thresholds of zany illogic and sensory riot. 
Exploiting all the means of promotion for which the movement had
become famous, Marinetti and his coterie made Futurism edible. They
used their ideas about food to extend the physiology of aesthetic
response to the deep interior recesses of the body. 
          As an eating machine, the Futurist body was subject to
its own anatomy. Accounts of Futurist meals spoke of exciting the
enamel on the teeth, filling the nostril with heaven, choking the
esophagus with admiration. The face, genitalized, was composed of
"organs of adoration": the Futurist palate, tongue, and mouth were
voluptuous, insatiable, and attentive. Imagining the body from the
inside, Marinetti condemned the passist stomach as a sack filled
with pasta, an archeological midden, in contrast with the Futurist
body, ready in its emptiness for an artistic intervention: White
and Black was the poet Farfa's recipe for "A one-man-show on the
internal walls of the Stomach consisting of free-form arabesques of
whipped cream sprinkled with lime-tree charcoal. Contra the
blackest indigestion. Pro the whitest teeth."  Envisioning the
stomach as a surface to inscribe, not a vessel to fill, Futurists
lobbied for a body that was light, agile, and acutely sensitive to
aesthetic experience. Laughter was the laxative of the Futurist
body.
          The full stomach was the enemy, for it set a limit on
the duration and acuteness of gastronomic attention. Much Futurist
writing on food was a critique of satiety and its dulling
consequences. The first step in a Futurist gastronomy was to
separate hunger and nutrition from the pleasure of eating, to
dissociate food as fuel from food as art. Futurists proposed
meeting daily dietary needs by pills distilled and synthesized
scientifically in the laboratory and distributed free of charge by
the State. They wanted to confine eating proper to artistically
conceived dinners and banquets. In this way, Futurist gastronomes
dispersed the sites of appetite and shifted the scene of digestion
from the growling gut to the imagination.
          From a Futurist perspective, once food hits the lips
and vanishes down the hatch, the event is over before it has been
experienced.  The second step was to extend the gastronomic
experience by staving off satiety. Futurists advocated light food,
structured eating events around small units like the mouthful, and
eliminated or delayed swallowing. In the recipe for "Raw Meat Torn
by Trumpet Blasts," mouthfuls of electrified beef alternated with
"vehement blasts on the trumpet blown by the eater himself."  In
what might be termed gustatory foreplay, Futurists elaborated
"prelabile tactile pleasure" by banning the knife and fork and
encouraging diners to touch food with their hands before putting it
to their mouth. They also passed food around to be smelled and
seen, but not eaten, a technique suggestive of gastronomus
interruptus. 
          Though Marinetti declared in his 1921 "Manifesto on
Tactilism" that "the distinction of the senses is arbitrary," The
Futurist Cookbook began to address their differences. Taste, an
analytic sense, consists of four primaries--sweet, sour, salt,
bitter. Smell, a holistic sense, is far more subtle, complex, and
diverse.  Such differences suggest a physiological basis for the
great appeal of olfaction in Futurist theorizing about painting,
performance, and cuisine. They found in smell an atavistic sensory
experience that resisted analysis, evoked unpredictable
associations, and carried its concrete source in the very language
used to describe each aroma. In Marinetti's "Extremist Banquet," a
two-day orgy of pure olfaction, the guests open French windows by
means of an electrical keyboard and experience the "odours of
waterlogged grasses and old burnt reeds, giving off traces of
ammonia and a whip of phenic acid." Aerofuturists, the primary
contributors to Futurist gastronomy, also found in scent an
airborne, ambient stimulus that could be directed by small electric
fans placed in the hands of the diners. The whirring blades added a
desired kinetic element to the event. Reminiscent of propellers,
fans were a metonym for their favorite machine, the aeroplane, and
became the Futurist dining utensil par excellence.  
          The experience of food in the mouth is so complex, so
truly synthetic, that it defied even the most radical Futurist
efforts to fragment it.  Smell and taste are so tightly bundled
that most of what we experience as flavor is actually the result of
smell, not taste. While aroma could be and was served up as an
autonomous sensory experience, the components of what we experience
as flavor are not so easily detached for Futurist reshuffling. In
addition, the sensations of food in the mouth include touch
(temperature and texture), sound (crispness is largely experienced
as sound produced and heard inside the head), and irritation (the
astringency of red wine, the burn of chili). As a result, where the
sensory experience itself could not be split into independent
parts, they dismembered the culinary system, scrambled its
components, inserted the inedible, and using an alogic of affinity,
complementarity, and contradiction, created jarring combinations.
In an effort to isolate "pure gastronomic elements," Marinetti
proposed a meal that included a bowl of tomato soup, a big yellow
polenta, and white roses complete with thorns. Or, the sense of
sight might be turned off and the hierarchy and integration of the
other senses restructured. Diners closed their eyes or sat in a
darkened room. They buried their faces in salad to activate the
skin on the cheeks and lips. They fondled a tactile device  while
eating "Polyrhythmic salad," listening to music, and smelling
lavender perfume.  
          Smell and taste, unlike sight, hearing, and touch, are
chemical senses.  As such, they are subject to relatively rapid
sensory fatigue. A Futurist cuisine had therefore to find ways of
reestablishing "gustatory virginity." To annul one set of tastes
and smells before presenting the next set, a suction fan would draw
scents out of the room. To intensify sensory acuity, they
periodically changed the lighting and room temperature, suddenly
instructed the diners to quickly move themselves and their dinners
two places to the right, released a live turkey into a room where
diners had just eaten the bird, and presented blue wine, orange
milk, and red mineral water.
          Virtually all the major themes of Italian Futurism were
explored through food, including passism, machines, speed,
simultaneity, synaesthesia, words-in-liberty, art of noise, theatre
of objects, fisicofollia (body madness), a totalizing aesthetic
program of renewal, and the interpenetration of art and the
quotidien. Futurist gastronomy was consistent with the more general
tendency of Fascist aesthetics to separate objects from their uses,
as in Marinetti's aestheticization of war. Offered up as an
antidote to the suicidal tendencies of the bored palate, the
Futurist separation of eating from hunger--the heart of so many
eating disorders--was itself potentially fatal.
          The alimentary target of Marinetti's perennial attacks
on passism is appropriately enough pasta, the "dictator of the
stomach" and last bastion of obstinacy, the stereotypical emblem of
Italy, "crude materialist," and culprit in obesity and lassitude.
The rallying cry, "Pasta is Dead, Long Live Sculpted Meat," touted
the signature dish of Futurism: "the Sculpted meat created by the
Futurist painter Fillia, a symbolic interpretation of all the
varied landscapes of Italy, is composed of a large cylindrical
rissole of minced veal stuffed with eleven different kinds of
cooked green vegetables and roasted. This cylinder, standing
upright in the center of the plate, is crowned by a layer of honey
and supported at the base by a ring of sausages resting on three
golden spheres of chicken."  Phallic and patriotic, Sculpted Meat
was edible art for inspired cannibals.       
          The Futurist love of machines and industrial materials
can be seen in the scientific instruments (ozonizers, ultra-violet
lamps, electrolizers) proposed for the kitchen-laboratory, the
prediction of future "nourishment by radio" (the essence of the
best dinners would be broadcast by radio waves), the use of the
phonograph player as a lazy susan, and the flavoring of food with
steel. These Aerofuturists proposed vertiginous meals for the
cockpit, created an aviatory mise-en-scne out of aluminum for
their banquets, served rolls in the form of monoplanes and
propellers, and filled dining rooms with the sound of roaring
engines. The cape gooseberry was claimed as a Futurist fruit
because its disposable 'wings' made it resemble a parachute. 
          Their experiments with language resulted in what is an
artists' book and in a distinctive gastronomic discourse that
recovered the poetics of the recipe and delighted in neologisms. 
Their "little dictionary of futurist cooking" offered patriotic
Italian alternatives for French culinary terminology and codified
such Futurist principles as disprofumo, a "term that indicates the
complementary nature of a given perfume with the flavour of a given
food. Example: the disprofumo of raw meat and jasmine." Fillia's
"Edible Alphabet" and Marinetti's notion of bicarbonate of soda as
"the verb in the infinitive of all food and digestive problems"
carried Futurist experiments with typography and words-in-liberty
into the belly. "Intuitive Antipasto," a Futurist version of the
fortune cookie, featured an orange stuffed with salami, pickled
mushrooms, and olives in which are hidden surprising sayings such
as "With Futurist cooking, doctors, pharmacists and grave diggers
will be out of work." At the opening in Turin of that aluminum
shrine to Futurist cooking, The Holy Palate Restaurant, Marinetti's
role was to respond in rhyme to complaints about the food.  Fillia,
in his capacity as Speaker, would gastrocast, as it were, by
announcing and illustrating each course. 
          A postprandial offering by the inaugural movement of
the historical avant-garde, The Futurist Cookbook is a casualty of
the exclusions of art historical periods and canons. Coming too
late in the "less important" second phase of Italian Futurism,
tainted by Fascism, misogyny, and Orientalism, and using the lowly
medium of food and cookbook, Futurist gastronomical forays have all
but vanished from accounts of the movement. Had their culinary
adventures occurred early in the history of Futurism, they, like
the serate, or evenings where Futurist declamations were met with
rancid pasta flung from the audience, would have been written into
the 'origins' of Futurist performance. Futurist menus and recipes
are like sintesi, the brief scenarios and scripts on which Futurist 
theatrical performances were based. Futurist restaurants and
theatres share scenographic principles. Several of the key players-
-Fillia, Depero, Prampolini, Russolo, Folgore, and Marinetti
himself--were active in Futurist theatre and cinema.  Coming at the
end--a year later in 1933 Marinetti issued his last major
programmatic statement, "Total Theatre Manifesto"--The Futurist
Cookbook seemed anomalous, or even anti-climactic to later
historians. Long out of print, it occasionally appeared in lists of
ever more remote "applications" of artistic ideas that had outlived
the glorious early years of the Futurist movement. Yet, in many
ways Futurist cooking, much of it still worth eating, was the
ultimate art of the concrete and very apotheosis of Futurist
performance theory and practice.  

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett chairs the Department of Performance
Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

--------------------------------------------