created 2025-04-14, & modified, =this.modified
rel: The Art of Noise The Machine As Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age - MoMA Futurism Bites
Why I’m reading
Some of these Futurist texts are so ridiculous. This is one of the most famous, from Marinetti.
I’d can’t ideologically connect with the Fascist thoughts, but can read here critically and incredulously.
Though extremely aggressive bold in approach (the source of humor, carrying with it traits of those spectacles of early cinema trailers, “for the first time ever, behold!”), certain traits like thinking in novel ways towards the future, eating habits and disruptions are points I consider.
Men have historically fed themselves like ants, rats, cats or oxen. The first human way of eating is born.
The Dinner That Stopped at a Suicide
A man mourns the loss of his love, and he intends to kill himself. So he has his friends create the image of her, but in foodstuffs.
Aeropainting
Aeropittura is an expression of futurist painting.
The technology and excitement of flight, directly experienced by most aeropainters, offered aeroplanes and aerial landscape as new subject matter.
“The changing perspectives of flight constitute an absolutely new reality that has nothing in common with the reality traditionally constituted by a terrestrial perspective”
The screens vanished and there appeared the mysterious soft trembling sculptured complex which was her. Edible. In fact the flesh of the curve signifying the synthesis of every movement of her hips was even appetizing. And she shone with a sugary down peculiar to her which excited the very enamel on the teeth in the attentive mouths of his two companions. Higher up, the spherical sweetnesses of all ideal breasts spoke from a geometric distance to the dome of the stomach, supported by the force-lines of dynamic thighs.
I wonder if those food faces of Italian painter Arcimboldo were on the mind here?
‘Don’t come near!’ He cried to Marinetti and Fillìa. ‘Don’t smell her. Go away. You have evil, voracious mouths. You would eat her away from me without stopping for breath.
The Curves of the World and their Secrets, motorized and edible sculpture, perfect. 22 sculptures are made.
Their Reasoning for the creation
‘We love women. Often we have tortured ourselves with a thousand greedy kisses in our anxiety to eat one of them. Nudes seemed to us always tragically dressed. Their hearts, if clenched with the supreme pleasure of love, seemed to us the ideal fruit to bite to chew to suck. All of the forms of hunger that characterize love guided us in the creation of these works of genius and of insatiable tongues. They are our states of mind realized. The fascination, the childish grace, the ingenuousness, the dawn, the modesty, the furious whirlpool of sex, the rain of all mad cravings and caprices, the itchings and rebellions against age-old bondage, one and all have found here, through the medium of our hands, an artistic expression so intense that it demands not only eyes and admiration, not only touch and caresses, but teeth, tongue, stomach, gut – all equally in love.’
Giulio consumes her as they sleep,
At three that morning, with a terrible writhing of his loins, he bit into the dense heart-of-hearts of pleasure. Sculptors and sculptress slept. At dawn he devoured the mammillary spheres of all mothers’ milk…
Manifestos Ideology Polemics
Futurist cooking to renew totally the Italian way of eating and fit it as quickly as possible to producing he new heroic and dynamic strengths required of the race.
Eating, and taste had not yet matched the pace of humanity.
rel:Yummy. This is independently converging with some ideas I was playing around with in Yummy.Technological progress, in the plane and the automobile were completely disruptive, yet food, their target, seemed to be the same, like the poptart in the AI arms race.
Futurist cooking abandons pastasciutta (pasta and sauce apparently) and obsessive with volume and weight eating. It’s making the masses bovine.
They view as truth: men think dream and act according to what they eat and drink.
Comparisons to the Woman and the Man
They intend to harmonize the Italian male (stop him from becoming a solid leaden block of blind opaque density), with the Italian female way, “a swift spiraling transparency of passion, tenderness, will vitality, and heroic constancy.”
This is done in anticipation of technological progress, so to be better suited for the technology.
Let us make our Italian bodies agile, ready for the featherweight aluminium trains which will replace the present heavy ones of wood iron steel.
Death to Pasta? We believe it necessary to abolish pastasciutta “an absurd gastronomic religion.”
This is so entirely ridiculous, and I am enjoying it…
This idea of mastication (a more machinic method of consuming) makes me laugh. There’s a sense that combustive chewing, via dynamite inserted in the mouth would be on the table.
Signorelli: ‘In contrast to bread and rice, pasta is a food which is swallowed, not masticated. Such starchy food should mainly be digested in the mouth by the saliva but in this case the task of transformation is carried out by the pancreas and the liver. This leads to an interrupted equilibrium in these organs. From such disturbances derive lassitude, pessimism, nostalgic inactivity and neutralism.’
Tenants
- Abolish pasta
- Abolish volume eating, weight in food
- Abolish traditional mixes in favor of unique combinations
- Abolish everyday palate mediocrity
Perfect Meal
- Original harmony in table setting
- Absolute originality in the food
- Food sculptures
- Abolish of knife and fork for eating food sculptures (leave it to the tongue)
- Perfumes to enhance tasting (driven by fans to the table - seems gross)
- limited music between courses
- no speeches or politics at table
- sprinkled poetry and music as augmenting surprise
- rapid presentation of meals, some eaten some not, to arouse curiosity
- rapidly giving canapes meant to be tasted in a few seconds.
- use of scientific equipment in the kitchen (ozonizers and uv-lamps are mentioned)
The presentation of the food, as sculpture, and foodish foreplay seems important here. Almost as if to flirt with the meal.
What of a menu like that? The menu is where we select based on what we want, before even encountering the meal itself. But what of a menu that is art in itself, or a sculptural menu? The meals transformed into representative people (I think of passing each Arby’s and seeing a uniquely decorated cow in the front, but menuified and synesthesia-like.)
A highly literate menu that requires an hour to read through and is filled with stories. The patrons come and settle in a library, upon completion of the tales they eat.
Any pastasciuttist who honestly examines his conscience at the moment he ingurgitates his biquotidian pyramid of pasta will find within the gloomy satisfaction of stopping up a black hole. This voracious hole is an incurable sadness of his. He may delude himself, but nothing can fill it. Only a Futurist meal can lift his spirits.
Volcanic people, cultural tradition of eating:
Every nation must have its own way of eating and that of the Italian people must be based on the produce of this warm, restless, volcanic land; it should therefore be three-quarters composed of the marvellous vegetable products for which we are envied throughout the world and a scant quarter of animal products.
It’s not always correct to say they all hate pasta, but viewed purely by function they see it it as often poorly prepared, indulgent, overused/traditional and softening.
More Pasta-hate via Ostrogoth’s and Macaronic
surely more bestial than any other, looks to us like a female chimpanzee in a sentimental ladies’ drawing room: and it’s only through a mistaken respect for tradition that people have continued to tolerate its plebeian stench.
Ostrogoth:
Then their worthy consorts, worn and filthy, come and empty into these improvised bowls a slimy heap of worms called ‘macaroni’ and their hairy arms plunge into the fuming hole up to the elbow and their mouths open wide – gobble gobble – and tears run down their grimy cheeks in an excess of bliss.
Pasta ”is a dictatorship of the stomach”.
Spaghetti for Italians, Knives and Forks for All are banned in Futurist Manifesto on Cooking
Marinetti says
- no more spaghetti for the Italians.
- no more knives and forks.
- no more after-dinner speeches.
Besides the abolition of macaroni, Marinetti advocates doing away with the ordinary condiments now in use, and a consistent lightening of weight and reduction of volume of foodstuffs. The Futurist leader also pleads for discontinuance of daily eating for pleasure.
For ordinary daily nourishment he recommends scientific nourishment by means of pills and powders, so that when a real banquet is spread it may be appreciated aesthetically.
The Great Futurist Banquets
The futurists intend to open an experimental restaurant in Turin, called “The Holy Palate Restaurant.” It will not be expensive to dine there. It will restore enthusiasm in eating. Some meals there:
- Totalrice (with rice, salad, wine and beer)
- Sculpted Meat
- The Meal-in-the-Air (tacticle, with noises and aromas)
- Elasticake (a fluffy pastry ball oozing blood-red zabaglione and crowned with quivering licorice antennae.)
- Ultravirile (We will not dwell on minute details: suffice to say that this is a dish designed for the ladies.)
- Edible Landscape (the reverse of Ultravirile, only for gentlemen)
- Sunshine Soup
While recognizing that great deeds have been performed in the past by men badly or crudely nourished, we affirm this truth: we think, dream and act according to what we eat and drink.
Sculpted Meat
Sculpted Meat. This dish is a milestone in Futurist cooking. For the delectation of our lady readers we will transcribe the recipe: ‘a symbolic interpretation of all the varied landscapes of Italy, it is composed of a large cylindrical rissole of minced roast veal, stuffed with eleven different kinds of cooked green vegetables and roasted. This cylinder, standing upright in the centre of the plate, is crowned by a layer of honey and supported at the base by a ring of sausages resting on three golden spheres of chicken meat.’ A marvel of balance.
Eating futuristically one uses all five senses: touch, taste, smell, sight and hearing. Every dish will thus be preceded by a perfume attuned to it, which will be dispelled from the table by electric fans.
Aerofood
Not for the hungry. A slice of fennel, an olive and a kumquat. In addition there is a strip of cardboard on which are glued, a piece of velvet, silk and sandpaper. “the sandpaper – Fillìa explains – need not be eaten; it is only there to finger with the right hand and provide prelabial sensations which make the food much more tasty as contemporaneously the left hand tries to bring it to the mouth.”
In Aquila, an incalculable number of women united to sign a solemn petition in favour of pastasciutta. This petition was addressed to Marinetti. The women of Aquila, who had never agitated before about anything so important, felt this collective rising to be necessary, so deeply ingrained was their faith in pastasciutta.
The Definitive Futurist Dinners
Nocturnal Love Feast
August, the moon pours a stream of curdled milk straight down the tablecloth. The brown-skinned, heavy breasted native mamma enters carrying an enormous ham on a tray and speaks to the two lovers who are lying stretched on tow deck chairs.
This is a ham that contains 100 different pork meats. In order to sweeten it and free it from bitterness I have soaked it a week in milk. Real milk, not that illusory milk of the moon. … Then the War-in-Bed. The bed, vast and already full of moonlight, fascinated, comes to meet them from the back of the open room. They get into it, toasting each other and sipping from the War-in-Bed. It is composed of pineapple juice, egg, cocoa, caviare, almond paste, a pinch of red pepper, a pinch of nutmeg and a whole clove, all liquidized in Strega liqueur.
Official Dinner
All official dinners prior are as such
- embarrassed silence stemming from the fact there is no pre-existing harmony between the table companions.
- the conversation reserve, owned by diplomatic etiquette.
- moroseness of insoluble world problems.
- rancor of frontiers
- funeral and banal tone of dishes
Futurist dinner is
- The cannibals sign up at Geneva - various meats self cut with dipping bowls
- The league of the Nations - black salami sausages and tiny pastries (while this dish is being tasted a “twelve year old negro boy” hidden under the table will tickle the ladies’ legs and pinch their ankles)
- The Solid Treaty - multicolored nougat with tiny nitroglycerine bombs inside which explode every now and then, perfuming the room with a typical smell of battle.
Bachelor Dinner
Avoiding the pitfalls of eating alone:
- Anti-human solitude that fatally drains a part of the stomach’s vital forces.
- The heavy silence of meditative thought which taints food and makes it leaden.
- The lack of a living, human, fleshy presence, which is indispensable for keeping alive the palate of man who is confined to the zone of animal flesh.
- The inevitable speeding-up of the rhythm of the jaws as they take flight of boredom.
Futurist dinner is
- Blonde Food Portrait - a beautiful piece of sculpted roast veal with two long eye of garlic in a dishevelment of chopped boiled cabbage and small green lettuces. Dangling earring of little red radishes soaked in honey.
- Dark Man-Friend Food Portrait - well-modeled cheeks of pastry – moustache and hair of chocolate big eyes of milk and honey with pupils of licorice. A split pomegranate for the mouth. A nice necktie of tripe in broth.
- Beautiful Nude Food Portrait - a small crystal bowl full of fresh milk, two boiled capon thighs, the whole scattered with violets.
- Food Portrait of Enemies - seven cubes of nougat, each one with a little well of vinegar on top and a big bell hanging on one side.
Other dinners, declaration of love dinner, extremist dinner, cockpit dinner, holy supper, astronomical dinner