Letter from Rome: Mangiare Arte
Valery Oisteanu
On a recent visit to Italy, I visited the Plexus Studio of Sandro Dernini in Rome, Fabrizio Bertuciolli’s studio just outside the city, and Any Gallacio in Sienna’s Centro Arte Contemporane. What I realized is that the Italian avant-garde remains quite prolific, elitist, multimedia-oriented, and tasty.
Food combined with art has been a norm in the Mediterranean for almost 4,000 years, and in the Italian art scene the two coexist creatively. In his review of the Venice Biennale, Walter Robinson, the editor of artnet.com, notes, "On the Piazza Della S. Maria Formosa, not far from San Marco, Peter Liversidge (English) was handing out free ice creams, courtesy of Modern Painters magazine. Liversidge, who signed and dated the ice cream cups on their undersides, has given out hot dogs in London and gin in Liverpool. Free food (or free drink) is a great signature for an artist, almost as good as the nude."
Mangiare arte–"Eating Art"–is an old/new creation of Plexus, a group of artists creating public "artist-slave auctions" in Rome, New York, and even Dakar. Plexus was founded in New York by Sandro Dernini in 1982, and has attracted hundreds of artists and scientist from Rome, Amsterdam, Atlanta, Sardinia, and Australia, all helping to create a surrealist chain of traveling events. After two decades and hundreds of events, this group, under the energized by the impresario Dernini and his friends Massimo Sarchielli, Fabrizio Bertuciolli and Luisa Mazzuolla, has now upped the ante with even more outrageous events. While I was visiting Italy, two seemingly spontaneous events took place: one at Dernini’s studio and the other at Fabrizio Bertuciolli’s villa-studio, where the protagonists rehearsed for New York’s Food for All venue. According to Dernini’s Ph.D research, we experience the same biochemical response-reaction in our brains when eating as we do when looking at art.
Here is a quote from Dernini’s manifesto, "Eating Art in Order to Survive": "The rationale of ‘Eating Art’ is that ‘art’ as well as ‘food’ should be aesthetically and ethically packaged together. To bypass global market mechanisms, "Eating Art" is designed as an international-community-based traveling art event that will depart from the University of Rome’s La Sapienza on board the "Ark of the Well Being" toward New York City, Jerusalem and Dakar. This is the same route as the "Erosions and Renaissance Show," a traveling event in several acts in different parts of the world organized by Plexus International, a network of artists and scientists of various nationalities that Sandro Dernini initiated in the early 1980s.
"Do you think that it is possible," asks Dernini, "to eat ‘Andy Warhol’ if you eat a Campbell Soup Can?" Be ready for the Plexus International Eating Art event in New York City on December 10. Check the Plexus website: www.plexusforum.net.
Returning to our cast of characters…
Fabrizio Bertuciolli is an abstract painter who produces wall-sized works with gradations of subdued hues. He organized an Eating Art event at his villa-art studio in the suburbs of Rome for 16 artists, each of whom contributed with an artistic dish as in futurists-artichokes, paintings of food, Xeroxed brochures or group photos.
Frederico Wardal, another illustrious participant, is an ex-Fellini actor and blueblood by birth who created several performances in Egypt to benefit the Ancient Library of Alexandria: he ended up donating 1,500 books, some from the 17th century, that belonged to his family. He is now the director of special cultural events at the Alexandria Library.
In Siena’s Palazzo Delle Papese (Centro Arte Contemporanea), the Scot Anya Gallaccio presents "The Look Of Things," a presentation of trees, fruits, flowers, ice and chocolate in a site-specific installation in a continuous process of decay–just like the human condition. The air is permeated with the sweet smell of putrid fruits, and the sight reminds the visitors of the fragility of life.
Meanwhile, in Milan, over four days in May, the Association of Art to Eat invited the citizens "to see, to touch and to taste" an event held simultaneously with the Art Fair of MIART. Here too, food and art intersected in a parallel artistic production offering suggestions and emotions for the eyes and the palate. Here, artists contributed installations, performances, and tastings in one creative "menu." Another show, "Performance in Decline," had artists presenting works executed with edible material and serving them to the public in a symbolic gesture through which the art is subject to the laws of consumerism, while at the same time, the public becomes protagonists of the moment of creation.
Sex & Food
Fabiana Roscioli and Luca Curci recently inaugurated a new gallery with the exhibition "Sex & Food." In this exhibition two artists showed a video work, Impossible Love, projected on a giant screen. First shown in Belgrade, the piece reads contemporary life through the four primary human impulses: hunger, sexuality, fear, and aggression. Buono Appetito!
