Taste of Museum
Making sense of taste in a humanist museum
I have always been intrigued by the ways and means how the sense of taste can feature, compliment and articulate the museum experience. Indeed, a successful museum experience is one that gets you to engage with all the five senses and food can certainly be put to good use. Months working with chefs and restaurant staff to develop a bespoke culinary experience brought me in touch with the potential that food holds for the 21st century museum and the challenges to bring it to fruition that is nothing short of a culture change, indeed, a complete rethink of the traditional museum model.
With this in mind, I still fail to understand how the traditional museum experience has, by and large, so far ignored the potential that food in general and a bespoke menu in particular have for museum interpretation. The foreword looking museum institutions and the thinkers that run them are certainly not sitting on the fence and the latest projects and experiments do suggest that food is slowly but surely changing the way we understand and experience museums.
A good synthesis of this fascinating subject, including the latest developments, has just been published by Bloomsbury too. I would consider Food and Museums as the very first, tentative and cautious approach to the relationship between food and museums. It takes a very broad overview of the subject featuring contributions by and interviews to cultural historians, anthropologists, neuroscientists, and food studies scholars, museum professionals, artists and chefs. The critical case studies from a wide range of cultural institutions and museums are also informative.
The visual consumption?
Let me get the focus right. There is a relationship between the five senses that goes beyond their belonging to a group of five. Indeed, when we look at an apple or a carafe of fruit, as in the case of the hero image of this blogpost, we oftentimes recall the memory of taste, sound and other senses with the visual reading of the picture. We can feel the taste of grapes and apples in the picture, the texture of the leaves in contrast to the smoothness of the plate and the crunch of the apples as we bite into them and get to taste of the fruit. This is what we call the semiotics of art whereby the image stands is described as a signifier, meaning that it stands for a specific object or idea which is in turn called the signified. In this case the image of the carafe of fruit, which recalls Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s famous carafe of fruit stands a signified experience experienced thanks to the fact that we regularly consume this fruit.
Visual consumption is key to understand the latest developments in this exciting new venture. From the ever-growing list of food-inspired projects, I thought of highlighting three case studies from the last twenty four months that certainly point in the right direction. These three projects stand for possible developments yet to happen in the coming months.
1. Food Bigger than the Plate — an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London)
This is the latest in a series of food-centred projects exploring how innovative individuals, communities and organisations are radically re-inventing how we grow, distribute and experience food. Visitors were taken on a sensory journey through the food cycle, from compost to table, posing questions about how the collective choices we make can lead to a more sustainable, just and delicious food future in unexpected and playful ways. The well over seventy contemporary projects featured included new commissions and creative collaborations by artists and designers working with chefs, farmers, scientists and local communities. These also sat next alongside 30 objects from the V&A collections including influential early food adverts, illustrations and ceramics that provided historical context to the contemporary exhibits.
The experience at the Cafe is an integral part of the exhibitions’. The mushroom farm featured in the exhibition waste coffee grounds (a source of valuable nutrients) collected from the museum’s own cafés, to grow oyster mushrooms that return to the café as ingredients for a variety of dishes, closing the nutrient loop.
This project stands for one possible direction that the relationship between food and museums can take. The restaurant experience is an extension of the exhibition made the more easier by the choice of subject and focus areas. Indeed, the project can be described as a very good example of the one weave concept whereby historic object and material culture complement contemporary art projects that also engage with visitors across all museum spaces including traditional display galleries and the restaurants.
2. Olafur Eliasson at the Terrace Bar — Tate Modern (London)
Olafur Eliasson is a Danish-Icelandic artist known for sculptures and large-scale installation art employing elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature. In his latest retrospective exhibition project at Tate Modern in London, Eliasson took over the terrace bar as an integral part of the exhibition space with a special menu created in collaboration with Tate Eats, the catering provider at the four Tate sites. The signage at the entrance to the Terrace Bar is a good synthesis of Eliasson’s vision and ambition
As part of the Olafur Eliasson: In real life exhibition, the Studio Olafur Eliasson Kitchen have collaborated with Tate Eats and created a special menu for the Terrace Bar while the space itself has been transformed with installations by the artist and, alongside the programme of events, forms an integral part of the exhibition experience.
I was not at all surprised to learn about Eliasson’s project and the ways and means how his studio took over the culinary experience and displaced what is generally understood to be an ancillary space. Eliasson considers the restaurant akin to a display gallery and, in doing so, completely removes any distinction between restaurant and display galleries.
3. The Thyssen on a Plate — Museo Thyssen Bornmeisza (Madrid)
A few months ago in late 2018, the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum turned history around by commissioning 25 prestigious contemporary chefs with a gastronomic reinterpretation of some of the museum’s most outstanding canvases. The replicas now feature in a luxury recipe book that will undoubtedly become iconic for painting enthusiasts and lovers of haute gastronomy alike.
The project has been described as a reaction to cuisine as a visual art, understood in the collection of works of art that the Thyssen holds including works by Dutch seventeenth century artists Gabriel Metsu, Willem Claesz Heda and Emanuel de Whitte depicted the culinary delights and customs of their time. The chefs’ proposal was to create paintings as culinary art that can be consumed and which is inspired and informed by the painting on display. The lamb dish featured here is by ten michelin star Martin Berasategui who is inspired by Hacker’s Landscape with the Palace at Caserta and Vesuvius.
The Thyssen Bornemisza project is the closes we get to exploring the potential of food as an interpretative medium and, by consequence, to be considered an integral part of the museum visitor experience. Indeed, it assigns a palate of taste and visual cues to old master paintings much like the semiotic experience regarding the plate of fruit we discussed earlier on. The twenty five chefs participating in this project can be acknowledged as curators in their own right, creating their own personal interpretative take on the choice of paintings.
These three projects stand for three possible developments that can bring food much more into the picture. I consider all three of them as success stories in their own right. Each of the three holds potential in its own right, depending on the museum’s mission and objectives, irrespective of whether there is a collection to curate or otherwise. There are at least two main challenges on the horizon for those museum institutions willing to assign food a more central role in the museum experience.
Curators need to get exposure to developing culinary experiences …
This is not an easy one. Most curators, particularly those with a traditional academic formation, are not keen on anything beyond collections and their management. Missing out on the potential to bring food into the museum’s interpretative strategy goes against the ambition to bring in new audiences. The works of art or the material culture on display is now secondary to the experience and food is fast becoming a necessary component.
… and restaurant staff need to be conversant to curatorial practice.
I don’t mean the proverbial tour around the museum and its collections. This would have to do much more with considering the restaurant and the cafe is an integral part of the museum experience, indeed an extension to it rather than being an ancillary space. Much as the case with museum outreach projects, food would become one other means at the public’s disposal for him to understand, make use of and interpret what it really means to be a human being which is, at the end of the day, the business of museums.
Last but not least there needs to be the will power to think differently, beyond systems that are cast in stone and with a mindset that considers the human as the measure of the 21st century museum experience.
