El Bulli is Dead: Long Live El Bulli is Dead: Live Long
The Medium and the Message for the Emotional Culinary Process…?
There is, after all, a hierarchy instructing here, beginning with the physical; then the rational; and, now and then, for Pete’s sake, the emotional… Then that physical and here we go rolling around in the hay again — go ahead, roll that around on your tongue...
Everything made sense one cool winter’s morning in Madrid. The dog was sleeping by the fire. I made lunch. Leftovers again. Couscous re-imagined into a pita pot with Bavarian white veal sausages and Bulgarian feta wrapped up in khorasan pita dough. I should have known; mixing up all that and expecting the same, similar, every day; you’re not going to get away with it!
ARCO: Madrid’s International Contemporary Art Fair
I leave the hanger-like building of an exhibit space where Susanne is designing a stand for a security trade fair and slipped out the side door with my neighbour, a promising young painter, Adrian, in search of free tickets to ARCO, the International Contemporary Art Fair next door. Adrian scores first, but I get a VIP pass from a gorgeous blond showing “artistic” separated by sophisticated lingerie. We get through the gates. He goes one way and me the other. Passing through the hallway connecting the buildings I come upon an enigma wrapped into a conundrum repeated by a riddle doubling as a dialogic imaginary hidden by a mysterious fog: Ferran Adriá in Madrid’s International Contemporary Art Fair. But this wasn’t the beginning of Adriá’s arrival onto the artistic stage: He’s also got a major exhibit at New York’s Drawing Center.
“Why, Why, WHY!”
— Ferran Adriá
Vincent van Gogh — Ferran Adriá planning, on the back of a napkin, the path to the known culinary world and the map for exploring the future.
WHAT!
The medium is no longer the message; yet, for post-mediated communication, the medium was the message, but the message is now the medium rarity of Ferran Adrià at ARCO.
This is the Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test: Why did he close El Bulli at the height of its success; El Bulli has died, long live El Bulli! The medium, the El Bulli — ness became the message for the 6,000 diners a year with the luck of a confirmed reservation, but what of the millions on the waiting list; A dining room with an eternal waiting list? What happened to supply and demand; then what do you do about those 2,000 cooks in the kitchen flown in from around the globe. Is the process as art the message. What is Ferran Adriá up to…? ‘There are so many bits and pieces of information’, he must have thought, ‘so they’ll need a map; a map of the “Genome of the Culinary Process”. And I’ll expose my preliminary studies to the world at the International art fair in Madrid, ARCO — so these cooks can find their way around and those millions of unrequited dinners will have an explanation.’
Albert Einstein
