Rezept of Hirn, Rezept of Hoden
(Tragically reactivated by a vegan castration of Marco Bruzzone)
Curated
by Gigiotto Del Vecchio
Mar 07
– Apr 09, 2020
Alexander Levy
Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse 26, Berlin
Three
questions by Gigiotto Del Vecchio to Marco Bruzzone
Gigiotto
Del Vecchio: How do you define your interaction between art and food?
Marco
Bruzzone: I believe that food and art have always had a relationship that got
mediated by the artist. I often think of those instances were the fur of boars
was put aside after their slaughter, so that later on, brushes could be made
out of it. Or when only two out of three eggs were eaten, while the remaining
one was used as a binder for colors. I also think that in more recent times,
certain dynamics have reversed. Immediately after the World War II, many
artists have started to work with poor or everyday materials and as result, the
work of art itself has become dematerialized, as can be seen in conceptual art.
Food and waste became components of performances, videos and sculptures or
furthermore were the parts that constituted them. Later on, during the economic
recession in the nineties, this concept was broadened as some artists started
to organize dinners in museums and galleries, some put Christmas trees on
display. We got by with what we had.
In the
winter of 2010, yet again in the midst of an economic downturn, I go invited to
participate in an artist residency program in Brussels. Besides a return
ticket, I was provide a room and a kitchen. Every week, I would also receive
two boxes full of organic vegetables. That’s when I started using food as a
means to make art. I believe that today more than ever, food has become a
material in the sheer range of media that art has to offer (such as neon,
corrugated cardboard or watercolors).
GDV:
And what fascinates you the most about food?
MB:
Food, particularly compared to art, so inexorably passes through my body, from
lips to anus. It is a strong experience that bears a certain degree of danger.
It is a form of pleasure that is more visceral and less metaphysical than the
mere look at painting. It is more like a sexual act, a surgery or even physical
violence.
GDV:
What is your approach to Spoerri‘s recipes?
MB:
When you invited me, I immediately thought that one cannot simply slaughter off
animals only for the sake of an exhibition, just to redo Spoerri’s recipes: The
nose, the brain, the foot, the testicles – it’s too much. But then I looked at
the cookbooks and I realized that the illustrations were really beautiful,
delicate, sometimes abstract. They didn’t have anything to do with violence and
death.
I
figured I could only do something with those cookbooks if I ruled out death and
animal sacrifice. Also, in my view, Spoerri‘s recipes seemed to be about humans
not animals. I read this as a critique towards certain human behaviors, perhaps
very close to cannibalism (World War II just came to an end when Spoerri
started to work as an artist). So I chose to cook human testicles and brains.
Veganly. Vegan death in itself is only staged. No animals or human beings were
harmed during the process, as they say in movies. I am fascinated by the idea
of vegan cannibalism and decided to use Knödel dough for the testicles and
cauliflower that were cut into halves as brains. Castrations, lobotomies... I
don‘t know. Is that okay?
GDV:
Very well ...
...Flouting
the principles of 18th-century aesthetics, Daniel Spoerri fuses physiological
taste and aesthetic taste. Food and eating have provided the major axis of
Spoerri’s projects throughout the many years of his artistic pursuits. He has
staged several banquets, which have proved important hallmarks of art history.
As restaurant-and gallery-owner, he has regularly put on display the celebrated
“snare-pictures” – compositions of food rests and meal remnants...
...Dinner
as such is a pure performance that spans only as long as people eat and can
never be replicated in the same form. The remains are what is usually
discarded, both after dinner and after a performance, but they are also the
only remnants left, representing nostalgia and a desire to preserve what cannot
possibly be perpetuated. Spoerri explores the limits of taste and possibilities
of preserving it, at the same time interrogating the limits of art.
...Spoerri’s
art poses an ontological challenge to the identity of artworks which refuse to
relinquish their embedment in the everyday. What is it that makes the everyday
(a meal) mutate into an artwork (a performance)? I intend to answer this
question drawing on pragmatist perspectives, which interrogate the relation
between experience and action in the context of artwork...
...Daniel
Spoerri’s work tended to redefine the perception of common objects or settings.
He thereby largely contributed to Francesco Conz’s collection of “Fetish”,
unaltered everyday objects turned into art solely by the fact that they were
chosen by the artist. His most notable work, a series of assemblages
collectively called the “Snare-pictures”, depicts dinner tables after meals...
In
Marco Bruzzone’s “Ruin”, a collection of ceramic vessels evocative of the common
men’s urinal, the artist explores the materialistic infrastructure of modern
masculinity. As the title suggests, manliness, for Bruzzone, labels a social
and historical construct to which he feels an ambivalent and alienated
commitment. Thus, “Ruin” thematizes the looming (and in some respects, already
accomplished) obsolescence of contemporary masculinity. It does so with humor
and beauty, in a manner uncolored by nostalgia or resentment.
“Ruin”
explores a certain queerness, imagining (and asking the viewer to work towards)
a speculative future in which the material objects that give form to manliness
are themselves artifactual rather than vital – objects of curiosity that stand
at a certain historical-cultural removal, inviting the viewer’s imaginative
reconstructions.
The
textural, handmade quality of the works evince the care with which Bruzzone
inhabits this speculative future, where, by a series of imagined historical
reversals, manhood and its ready-mades are themselves long in ruins. Bruzzone
thus asks his viewers to join him in an archaeology of the future anterior,
asking us to imagine what manhood will ultimately have been, and enjoining us
to bring about its ruin...
(From
„Marco Bruzzone RUIN“ at SUNDY, London. Text by David Lê. Mousse 2019)