The Futurist Banquet

Stylo alerted me to this a while ago, describing it as the worst television program he'd ever seen, or words to that effect. It's a 1989 episode of Channel 4's experimental arts show Club X that involved the recreation of a Futurist banquet, with  "annotations" in the form of clips explaining the Italian Futurists and Marinetti's epater le bourgeois / pasta-is-passé approach to avant-garde cuisine.  

Having finally gotten around to watching it, I'm not sure if I'd agree that it is "TV Hell" (apparently a common verdict on Club X's output). Okay, it's unslick by today's standards (Club X was broadcast live, directly opposite The Late Show, a gauntlet thrown down to the BBC). It is about 80 minutes long. And yes, it's "pretentious" - but we like pretentiousness here. Various art world types talk about the Futurists, including the vexed issue of whether we should pay attention to them given their fascist sympathies. There's an ice sculptor and Paul Morley inevitably pops up at about the half-way mark, talking about Zang Tuum Tumb.  Obeying Marinetti's etiquette edicts, the guests are all wearing pajamas. 

The peg for the program was the republication of 1932's The Futurist Cookbook.  Editor Leslie Chamberlain appears at the Channel X banquet and here, 25 years later, she recalls the program and the publication of the book.  (She's also the one who YouTubed the program from a faded VHS, which also captures some vintage late '80s UK commercials and a chunk of the programming that followed).

Chamberlain writes: 

"... Marinetti took a fresh and funny look at food. Cooked dishes were calories, but also shape, texture and sign. Recipes on the plate were exciting, colourful and suggestive, a bit like paintings and a bit like poems. We’d call them mini-installations today. I was always fond of the little diversion Marinetti thought up instead of a sideplate: strips of velvet and sandpaper would be provided to exercise the tactile sense, while nose, palate and eye went to work on the main course. Main course? That would be food plated by a cook with a cubistic eye. Diners might expect perfume to be sprayed in the air and sounds to be relayed by a Futurist music box, to complete the multiple sense-nourishing experience....

"What made Marinetti turn to food? Sheer creativity and a desire to have fun. Turn to any of the recipes in La Cucina Futurista and watch what happens as you carve out the cylinders of meat and amass the ballbearings. This is architectonic food you’re shaping. For a colour opera in the kitchen you’ll also need food dye and interesting lighting.... 

".... Futurism was trying to introduce an industrial edge into the kitchen, although never with an eye to mass-production. Making Futurist Food involves a conveyor belt for one, and you work with it as if you were an artist in the studio. Just one proviso: the stress on architectonics is exactly why there’s no such thing as Futurist soup. Any guest asking for soup can go back to the nineteenth century!

"The Futurist Cookbook is only partly a collection of recipes and arguably its avant-garde inventiveness really comes to the fore in Marinetti’s food charades. The charades, or tableaux vivants, are like screenplays for chic tv ads today.  They were staged who knows where. Probably in restaurants or private homes, or somewhere out in the country, or at least in the garden. Futurist actors dressed up and danced, smoozed, lunched and lounged in stylized poses."

Chamberlain does mention the Mussolini-fanboy problem, but moves swiftly on: 

"Even now La Cucina Futurista is a book that evokes much more interest in the anglophone world [than in Italy] because we don’t have the awkward associations to deal with. We need to understand them though, and I’ve explained that in my introduction to the classic English-language version....   It was difficult to find a publisher for an English Cucina futurista. Penguin was less bold in those days, and one or two small publishers also said no. Copyright problems deterred them. Step up Conway Lloyd-Morgan at Trefoil, who bravely took the project on, commissioning a translation from Sue Brill and a wonderful design from Liz Mcquiston. My role was to edit the translation and write an introduction..... "

"Since that gorgeous pink and green and black and yellow volume came out in 1989 The Futurist Cookbook has become a frequent point of reference in all manner of art and history books. The edition was a great success. So now, finally, Penguin have reprinted that edition, in a sober black-and-white livery, and with a photograph on the cover from the 1930s that stresses the historical reality of the Futurist banquets blueprinted inside. Actually our 2014 edition is closer to Marinetti’s original, which looks as if it were issued in wartime, when there was a shortage of paper and not much scope for design flair.

"In 1989 we took much of our inspiration from Marinetti’s earlier books, like Mafarkar the Futurist, which were typographic fantasies closer to the Russian Futurists, and pointed the way forward to the Concrete Poetry of the 1960s."

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Molecular gastronomy -  with its weird foams and smokes, its deployment  of industrial-style techniques involving blow torches and liquid nitrogen - seems like a modern day actualization of the Futurist culinary approach, but with a view to be tasty as well as startling and eye-catching. 

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Incidentally, Victor Lewis-Smith 's first work on television took place on Club X - he contributed the standalone Buygones mini-programmes (later to become a newspaper column), the focus being obsolete gadgets and quaint appliances, once-popular toys, fads, and foodstuffs, dead media and forgotten TV personalities, etc etc... Things like the Spirograph, candy cigarettes, the Stylophone, Frank Bough ... 

Buygones was an early example of retro-futurism,  perhaps even that conjunction of  comedy and hauntology. 

Stylo points to this other chunk of Lewis-Smith spoofage from Club X