All art is a revolt against man’s fate.—André Malraux
THE SURREALIST ARTISTS of the 1930s took delight in paradox, in the juxtaposition of the unexpected with the unconventional—whether deliberately to shock and to challenge bourgeois sensibilities, or ingenuously to push back the boundaries of perception and representation. In like fashion, the banquet presented by Gay Bilson, Yanni Kyritsis and the team of Berowra Waters Out for the Seventh Symposium of Australian Gastronomy in Canberra in 1993 confronted diners with images demanding intellectual as well as physiological digestion.
‘Confronted’ and ‘demanding’. I choose the words deliberately, for this banquet was not for the faint-hearted. It was not one of those easy-going dinners that invite gluttony but rather a ‘spectacle’, in the Rousseau-ist sense, and as much theatre as gastronomy. And if its intent was to reflect the spirit of the surrealist creations that hung in the gallery above us as we ate, then its interpretation must be sought at the deeper level of symbolic association.
This 1993 exhibition at the National Gallery offered, as an aperitif, two cases of Barry Humphries’ dada art, including his Cakescape: squashed lamingtons and slices of jam roll which, unexpectedly, seemed more at home in a frame than on the tea table. The variations of texture and colour in his creations made them quite entrancing—childish, innocuous and superficially appealing. Not so Gay Bilson’s introduction to the banquet, which also made use of edible materials. Beneath the harsh glare of surgical lights, we were faced with a long narrow table draped with the stomachs of several large beasts, turned inside out to display surfaces of fine-textured honeycomb and warty protrusions, in colours of dirty beige, muddy brown and brindled black: the guts, in all their glory, as if to say, ‘This is where the processes of transformation and incorporation take place; this is the beginning.’
Unexpected? Undoubtedly; and for some, also obscene. But once the connection with animal insides is ignored, the visual effects can be appreciated: the contrast of textures, surfaces that invite a cautious caress, secret orifices. The result is fascination more than revulsion, a fascination that is not merely scientific but includes more than a hint of empathy. We, too, are mortal.
The spectre of mortality overlay this banquet. Not that we were constantly faced with a vision of intestines—after the necessary time for seating all the guests, these were neatly rolled up in undertaker’s plastic and removed to another place. The table was then set with the conventional implements: glass, knife-fork-spoon laid on a microscope slide, carafe of water. For this act, and for the rest of the evening, the waiters discarded their customary white shirts and, with them, their customary role. Bound with a bandage over the right shoulder and around the diaphragm, they became the walking wounded, the battle-scarred, those who have brushed with death and glimpsed the nether world.
No menus were provided to tell us what we should be eating or drinking. We were left with our senses. Surprisingly, the visual sense came to dominate, recognition leading to trust, and trust to tasting. Reliance on sight was such that some dishes were practically untouched—as though the eyes had direct connections to the consciousness, which could easily be persuaded that what looked like bull’s pizzles actually were …
In fact, the banquet began in a fairly conventional fashion with a dish most of us recognised: a nest of raw beef, in short strips, in which sat a raw egg yolk, topped with anchovy fillets, capers and finely chopped onion. We doused it with warmly golden olive oil, and crackled thin, crisp wafers of bread in accompaniment. The consommé, ladled from tall white jugs, appeared equally orthodox—until we discerned the gelatin-richness as it slipped from the ladle, and admired its intensity of flavour. With the consommé came a jumbled mass of marrow bones, some gilded with gold leaf. Their core could be spread over the slice of toasted brioche or added to the broth, making glistening circles of fat on its limpid surface.
By the time we received the next dish, crisply fried sheets of fish skin atop token shreds of vegetable, a pattern was emerging. We had eaten flesh, bones, marrow, skin—what next? Almost inevitably, it was blood, in the form of a crisp-coated boudin or blood sausage—a very rich and impeccably seasoned boudin, accompanied by pan-fried wedges of apple. The wine changed to sparkling burgundy for this course, though all the wines were red, even the blood-tinged kir royale which preceded the banquet (the waiters had been given orders not to serve the champagne solo, but only with the cassis). Why sparkling burgundy? Perhaps its bubbles were meant to invoke the oxygen-carrying role of blood in the body. Or perhaps the element of cultural sophistication associated with bubbles in the booze was meant to accentuate the crudeness of consuming blood, the very essence of the body, and the paradox of offering this most primitive of foods as part of a formal banquet.
There was more to come: a dish of rare pigeon breast, served on caramel-sweet red cabbage, the whole surrounded by pinkish-brown cones (skewered hearts of duck and pigeon) that looked so like miniature pizzles. And a cheese course: a melting wedge of almost unnaturally fresh cheese, lightly seasoned with pesto, inside puff pastry of buttery ephemerality. I began to long for a salad, vegetables, anything to break the carnal sequence. Instead, we were given a blindfold.
Certainly, the revelation deserved a blindfold; the element of surprise was all-important. But the blindfold also signified a turning point in the meal, as we moved to fruit and cereals, the domain of Demeter, goddess of fertility and mellow fruitfulness. It is Demeter’s daughter and alter ego, Persephone, who, after an enforced sojourn in Hades, returns annually to earth for the sowing and harvest. We, too, were condemned to darkness before the re-awakening—to find before us purple figs and black grapes, dark damson jelly and firm white cream, glazed yeast cakes topped with juicy grapes and, in the centre of the table, a bandage-swathed young girl, covered in figs and grapes.
This was no nubile Lolita leaping out of a chocolate heart. As she stiffly raised her head and shoulders from the table, I saw her as the Life that succeeds Death—that same Death that had attracted the funerary tributes heaped about her. On the eternal roundabout, she was both Life and Death, transformed from the dead to the living by the offerings of fruit and bread. This banquet was a celebration of Life through Death, a reminder of our fate to be born, to die, to be recycled.
With coffee, too, came Life and Death, as if to affirm this natural sequence: Virgin’s Breasts (moulded almond cakes with glazed nipples) and Dead Men’s Bones (thin, crisp, pale brown biscuits). Eating these, we incorporated both future and past in our own present, absorbing them into our bodies which, metaphorically as well as physiologically, include these three dimensions.
Shocking as it was to some, Gay Bilson’s banquet could not have been designed simply to jolt us out of complacency. Nor could it have been merely a joke on us, gluttons all to some extent, and greedy for the next and newest taste sensation. Its significance must lie elsewhere—not only in surrealism, but also in the theme of the symposium, Nature and Culture.
Culture is often seen as corrupting of innocent Nature, and cookery is an application of Culture. (This was the view of the cynic Diogenes, who shunned cooked food and, indeed, all forms of civilisation.) Physically, we were on the side of Culture—inside an art gallery, separated by plate glass from the garden and gum trees outside. The foods we were served represented the basest of Nature—viscera, bones, blood—transformed by culinary artists in a demonstration of the triumph of Culture. And this transformation was necessary; in their natural form, few of us could have stomached such ingredients. This banquet was an affirmation of the relevance of Culture to our lives.
But I saw it, too, as a form of sacrament, as much a sacrament as the supper of bread and wine. It contained all the elements of ancient worship and sacrifice to the Gods—though we were not witness to the ascent of the aromatic smoke. Its carnality (emphasised by the serving of red wine only) spoke also of primal rituals.
This affinity with ancient religion underlined the transience of life and inexorability of Fate, and accentuated the theme of mortality that ran throughout the entire banquet. And, given that a banquet is a formalised and celebratory occasion for eating and drinking, this is perhaps the ultimate paradox.