You arrive at a dinner party and are promptly asked to strip down to your skivvies and don a pair of pajamas covered in steel wool. A few moments later, in a dark room, you discover, through touch, other loungewear-clad guests, their pajamas covered in sponge, sandpaper, aluminum, or silk. You are instructed to choose a dining companion on the basis of his or her tactility, and you go with aluminum. The pair of you make your way noisily over to a two-top and sit down.
The first course arrives. It is a “polyrhythmic salad.” You pick lettuce from a bowl with your right hand while turning the crank on a music box with your left. Your waiters begin to dance. Later, there is a “tactile vegetable garden,” which you must eat without the use of your hands. Every time you look up to chew, bovine-like, you get a spritz of eau de cologne to the face. You stroke your companion’s aluminum pajamas as the evening comes to a close.
No, you’re not at some underground dinner party in Bushwick. You’ve just participated in an evening of Futurist cuisine, the brainchild of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder, in 1909, of the Italian social and artistic movement known as Futurism.
The cuisine—part of a larger revolution that sought to wrench Italy out of the past and, through the glorified swiftness and sleekness of technology, send it hurtling toward the future—has gone mostly uneaten and unexperienced since the death of Marinetti, and his movement, in 1944. But at the Guggenheim Museum on a recent Tuesday, bold diners shelled out two hundred dollars to eat—or, rather, to experience—a meal complementing the exhibition “Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe,” which ends today. Following a Futurist musical recital in the rotunda—the white-haired pianist, Daniele Lombardi, banged out quick, dissonant melodies, earning himself lots of hesitant applause—about sixty guests filed into the museum’s restaurant and took their seats, prepared for no one seemed to know exactly what. One diner, seeing a small piece of sandpaper beside his cutlery, raised an eyebrow.
The banquets and dinners that Marinetti lays out in “The Futurist Cookbook,” which was published in Italian in 1932 and translated into English in 1989, are as much little plays as they are feasts. “The brown-skinned, heavy-breasted native mama enters carrying an enormous ham on a tray and speaks to the two lovers,” opens one dinner, called Nocturnal Love Feast. In Heroic Winter Dinner, each mouthful of a barely cooked cube of beef must be “divided from the next by vehement blasts on the trumpet blown by the eater himself.” How invigorating.
At the Guggenheim, a senior curator named Vivien Greene gave a brief introduction, assuring the assembled diners that they’d be following “more the spirit than the letter” of what Marinetti called his formulas. The idea for the evening, Greene said, arose from the difficulty she’d had in putting together a comprehensive exhibition on a movement that influenced painting, sculpture, architecture, music, literature, and cuisine. “You can’t put a plate of food on display,” she said. “Here, you’re a part of the exhibit.” It was a fitting realization of Futurism’s ideals: the art was fleeting, and it became a part of the eater.
As the first course arrived—four leaves of romaine, some julienned beets, and a pile of orange mixed with smoked salmon—Greene introduced the evening’s chef, Mimmetta Lo Monte, an Italian cookbook author who just happens to be Greene’s mother. “I didn’t want to present you with a plate of mortadella and Nutella,” said Lo Monte, referring to one of Marinetti’s more shocking antipasti. “It just wasn’t fair.” So she hunted for more approachable options, settling on a four-course meal that adhered closely to Futurist convention.
But Marinetti didn’t want his food to be approachable. He wanted it to be provocative. As he wrote in his “Futurist Manifesto,” which ran on the front page of France’s Le Figaro in 1909, “We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.” Futurism would embody the spirit of the twentieth century: fast, ruthless, light. Museums and libraries, which glorified the past, would be kaput. Planes and trains and automobiles would be given their artistic due. The movement’s first wave, which lasted roughly from 1909 through the start of the First World War, yielded artwork exemplifying these principles. Umberto Boccioni’s “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space,” from 1913, arguably Futurism’s most famous piece of sculpture, depicts a headless figure striding hurriedly forward, scarves of bronze trailing behind him. Futurist painting is all swooshes and dynamism. Futurist poetry, using a new writing style called parole in libertà (words in freedom), rid itself of conventional grammar and linear typography, with a hodgepodge of words running in swirls around the page. And Futurist food—which arose as part of the movement’s second wave, after Marinetti’s flirtation with Il Duce and Fascism—aimed to create a country of light, fit, quick men.
First on the chopping block: pasta. As Marinetti wrote in his 1930 “Manifesto of Futurist Cooking,” pasta “ties today’s Italians with its tangled threads to Penelope’s slow looms and to somnolent old sailing-ships in search of wind.” Rice, on the other hand, would contribute to the creation of a corps of “lithe, agile peoples who will be victorious” in the “likely event of future wars”—all the while minimizing wheat imports.
At the Guggenheim, as the second course—rice mixed with a purée of peas, spinach, and leeks—was served, Greene noted the dish’s political peculiarities. “He wanted to keep people fit with vegetables so that they could fight, and he wanted to promote Italy’s rice industry,” she said. “Of course, there is this Fascist dimension which needs to be brought up, but we won’t think about that while we enjoy this course.”
A few moments later, Lo Monte came over to a table of diners. “The rice, you know, it is a bit watery,” she said, apologetically. “It could use some Parmigiano Reggiano,” said Mimi Sheraton, a former restaurant critic for the Times and a longtime fan of Futurist cuisine. “Marinetti would be turning in his grave!” said Lo Monte. “But yes, a little Parmesan would have been very good.”
For every prescient dictum of Marinetti’s that is being restated in today’s food culture—pasta makes you fat and sluggish, technology should be a part of the kitchen, people should consume “nutritional equivalents . . . in the form of pills or powders” (Soylent, anyone?)—there are as many, if not more, that seem ludicrous. “The really miraculous idea, which may even have escaped Marconi, is the possibility of broadcasting nutritious radio waves,” he writes in one essay.
In an effort to rid the Italian language of any foreign words, Marinetti included a glossary of neologisms at the back of his cookbook. Instead of drinking a cocktail at a bar, you’d have a polibibita (“poly-beverage”) at a quisibeve (“here-one-drinks”). Instead of enjoying a picnic, you’d enjoy a pranzoalsole (“lunch-in-the-sun”). Was it all a joke? Well, yes and no. Surely Marinetti didn’t believe that Italians would forgo a panino to soak up nutritional waves from their transistor radios. But the wild ideas, the odd flavor combinations, and the anti-pasta treatises were all part of his larger vision for the world of tomorrow.
As Greene sees it, “He threw ingredients together to shock people out of monotony, to shock them out of cooking bourgeois food.” Case in point: the last dish of the evening, Libyan Airplane. Marinetti’s formula calls for candied chestnuts to be steeped in eau de cologne and milk, then served on a purée of bananas, apples, dates, and peas “shaped into the form of a slender aeroplane.” Lo Monte’s take was benevolent: she nixed the cologne and included two cannoli as “wings” on top of a small Martini glass filled with the chunky green purée. Alas, even her interpretation couldn’t lift this poor dish out of sludgedom.
“It’s chalky,” said one diner.
“You know, I really prefer desserts that are sweet,” said another. “This just isn’t for me.”
Everyone ate their cannoli wings and quietly let their purée fuselages be.
