The aesthetics of street cooking

[imomus]

About a year ago, I blogged about Mike Meiré's Farm Project, a kitchen environment in which sheep, rabbits and chickens shared a cluttered space -- medieval style -- with human cooks. A slap in the face to the minimalist aesthetic, the Farm Project was also very much the work of a family man; there's no way you can live an uncluttered life with two small kids.



Mike's new project (again for Dornbracht Edges) is a tribute to the look, feel and (presumably) smell of global street food, and particularly improvised kitchens in public places. It's a cheap, cheerful aesthetic, and one I appreciate; the look -- and the gestural skill -- of this chai wallah on an Indian street, for instance, is great. Or how about this corner pavement restaurant I photographed in Koenji, Tokyo, in which the tables are made of plastic beer crates? Isn't that just the most welcoming place to hang out and watch the world go by?



Meiré likes the improvisational aspect of these informal open-air kitchens, their sense of lightness and happiness. It's something you see on Temple Street in Hong Kong -- I ate at a restaurant there without running water -- or on the street corners of Bangkok, where aluminium trolleys allow nomadic chefs to cook you up anything from fried locusts to gang kari.

It could also be the look, smell and sound of a Japanese matsuri, where octopuses sizzle on a hot plate then get stuck on a stick -- who needs cutlery and plates? Or it could be some sort of self-service high concept Pan Asian restaurant in London or San Francisco where they charge you lots of money for the "authentic" experience of queuing up under an umbrella to give your order to a man with a wok and lots of fire.



As Meiré says in this interview, his Global Street Food project is the fruit of a year's travels through Vietnam, Uganda, China, Sudan, Mexico and Argentina, a search for "a functioning unit in the smallest of spaces, which is also mobile". In Vietnam he discovered a saucepan-shaped terracotta chicken grill and a boat with a kiosk and a kitchenette, a floating canteen designed to service other boats on the move.



I learned about Meiré's new project at an 032c party last night -- with, ironically enough, Cyril Duval toiling away thanklessly as a vodka wallah in the background. My friend Jan pointed out that this conceptual bar and Meiré's new project could both be relational aesthetics of a kind. But of course there's a limit to the amount you can aestheticize this stuff without pointing out (once more) that it's the product of -- and possibly a glamourisation of -- poverty. Is it too obvious to say that when Cyril Duval gave the Bernhard Wilhelm flagship store in Tokyo the look of a Japanese homeless person's hut he was deliberately making a very expensive place look like the cheapest place possible? Should there have been a loop of the Public Blue documentary playing in the store to keep this point perpetually in well-heeled consumers' minds?



Or what about when I interviewed Japanese video artist Koki Tanaka in New York in 2006 and raved about his cooking video Each and Every? "There's an aesthetic of the kitchen, the lighting in the kitchen and the stainless steel equipment, there's a certain kind of aesthetic quality. Personally I love this light, and the shape and the colours of the food, it's very beautiful." Tanaka replied:

"I think that the chef is kind of like a performer, good performer, but nobody knows. And he knows... He doesn't know about his moving. He's always thinking about something like tomorrow's special dishes and he prepares something... At first I thinking about, like cooking is linear, like "prepare, cooking and washing dishes". But at the moment I shoot at the restaurant he's doing like many stuff at the same time, and it's really complex. I found like every moment is really special. I just cut some parts, and put it together."

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A tougher -- but more sentimental -- view of street food vendors can be seen in Man Push Cart, a 2006 drama about a Pakistani immigrant who hauls a coffee and donut cart around New York -- an aesthetic borrowed by video director Bernard Gourley for his Paper Planes video for M.I.A. the following year.

Comments

Even more Street Food

[(Anonymous)]

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=3FE5D45DFC9BDCB8

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

It's all fun and games until you get food poisoning.

[paperbacktourist.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

Yeah, art galleries are rife with it...

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

You'd be surprised.

[(Anonymous)]

Since no one seems terribly interested in discussing your street cooking piece, can I ask you what you think about Simon Reynold's latest on Animal Collective:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/feb/06/simon-reynolds-animal-collective

"Recently I've been thinking about the importance of a strong middlebrow culture. A middlebrow that could include a record like Merriweather or Saint Dymphna strikes me as valuable. Whereas abandoning middlebrow to the Coldplays and Elbows of this world seems cowardly."

I know you're generally dismissive of Kid A-like attempts to water down experimentalism for the masses, but isn't that precisely what made pop so good in the 60s and 70s? Isn't something fundamentally lost if you only aim your music towards tiny groups of people on the margins? Wasn't one of the important things about 70s Bowie, for instance, was that he was incredibly popular?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

This isn't a terribly hard problem to resolve. People all too quickly assume that if you come down in favour of Thing B and against Thing A you are somehow calling for the utter eradication and destruction of Thing A, like a Nazi or a fundamentalist Christian calling for a book burning or a Beatle bonfire. This binary is not the right way to look at taste relationships. They're symbiotic and dialectical.

Condemning, say, Kid A is simply declaring a position on a spectrum of convention to experiment which depends on there being a full range of things in between Coldplay and, you know, Oorutaichi (http://imomus.livejournal.com/395955.html). I can condemn the middle ground -- as a statement of my advanced tastes, my class position, my cultural capital, my attitude to "progress" and so on -- while being entirely conscious that I depend upon it for the economic and cultural background that makes everything I like possible. So I think I'm on the same page as Simon -- I'll go and read his piece (http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/feb/06/simon-reynolds-animal-collective) now.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Simon says:

"you might say that middlebrow calls into question both the mainstream and the margins: pop, for its lack of risk and reach, and the unpop peripheries, for their pointless extremism, concealed macho, impotent inconsequentiality. At its best, middlebrow really does offer the best of both worlds.

I think that's another way of saying that moving from the margins to the mainstream is a doubled-edged sword. This came up in my Mike Mills interview; I asked him whether making commercials didn't risk over-exposing and therefore exhausting his style. He replied that it gave him the financial freedom to make documentaries and art shows, that it was good technical practice for his film work, and that actually TV commercials allow a good deal of creative freedom, whereas making middlebrow art cinema (Sundance-type stuff) is where you get told to go away and do a more commercial edit.

And that last point is a really important contra to Simon's argument. If you make leftfield experimental art, nobody can tell you to go away and re-edit the material, because you're making up the rules as you go along. There is no wrong. As soon as you hook up with Sony Classics and Sundance and make a movie like Thumbsucker, however, you start playing by rules that are fairly well-established. People can hack away at your work, tell you how to do it. There are rules and formulae. The more mainstream you go, the more these rules apply, and the less you can do in the medium. Sure, in progressive and experimental decades like the 60s and 70s there's a big public who want artists to be relatively daring, so there can be figures like Bowie, who span the whole distance from boppy to zany. But demographically and culturally we're not in such a time now, especially not in pop music, which is an exhasted medium overshadowed by past glories and ravaged by digitization. The "right" and "left" wings have never spoken to each other less. And that may be another argument in favour of Simon's case -- but wishing won't make it so.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, it's all a trade-off, isn't it? Which I guess is the point Reynolds is making. If you stay resolutely in the margins, you risk being inconsequential. Because the meaning of the thing is in the eye of the beholder, isn't it? If there are no beholders, there is no meaning. And you are limiting yourself in different ways as well - particularly if you're a filmmaker dependent on funding. Even you, Momus, if you wanted to make a record like, say, Scott Walker's The Drift, you'd never be able to do it because no one would ever give you the money for it.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh don't you believe it -- I know a butcher where I can get cheap meat!

[(Anonymous)]

Schiller, by way of Klimt:
"If you cannot please everyone with your deeds and your art, please a few. To please many is bad."

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

"If there are no beholders, there is no meaning."

The only meaning that can ever come from an artist with that attitude is "My whole life is a yearning for the recognition of others".

[(Anonymous)]

And you don't think that's true? I doubt there are many artists who frankly don't care if anyone experiences their art or not.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think we talk a lot about the quality of artworks, but not enough about the quality of audiences. There's a bit of a taboo on the latter, it makes you sound snobby or didactic. It's also not very capitalistic, because everybody's dollar is as good as everybody else's. As a result we only measure audiences by quantity, not quality. But every artist knows the quality of his/her audience, because it's internalised in the kind of voice you can adopt. To have an audience which runs pretty much on the same cultural stuff and at the same speed as you do yourself is very exhilarating, and I believe I'm lucky enough to have such an audience. I think this blog shows that. Now, would I like there to be more people in the world who could contribute on this level? In some ways I would, but a) it would become unmanageable and less personal (like Click Opera does when it goes to 500 comments instead of just 50), and b) wishing won't make everybody suddenly think like I do, even should such uniformity be desirable.

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, you're always insisting you live in the best possible of all worlds, I sometimes wonder if you don't insist too much. No, I don't imagine you'd want to be mainstream famous, although you probably did 20 years ago. But I bet you'd love to be art-hipster famous - you'd love to be a David Byrne, hanging out with Caetano Veloso, solicited here there and everywhere, and yet somehow hanging on to your cool cachet. Come on Momus, admit it!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Tell you what, I'd love to be that Momus, with his art shows in New York and his columns in art and music mags from Vienna to Madrid! Had him in the back of my cab once, I did! Lousy tipper.

[(Anonymous)]

Isn't he already? And still way more whatever than fellow Scotsman Byrne...

[(Anonymous)]

Beat me to the punch yet again, Momus.

[(Anonymous)]

And this leads me to the question of why we write at all. Is it enough just to write for ourselves if nobody else is going to read it? As Ivy Compton-Burnett said in a conversation with her friend Margaret Jourdain, "Most of the pleasure of making a book would go if it held nothing to be shared by other people. I would write for a dozen people ... but I would not write for no one." This is what I feel myself--it is those dozen people that spur me on, even when it seems that I'm writing for myself alone. So I try to write what pleases and amuses me in the hope that a few others will like it, too.

Barbara Pym, "Finding a Voice," 1978

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I would write for a dozen people ... but I would not write for no one.

That sounds fair enough, but I think you could argue away the concept of "no one" the same way Cage argued away the possibility of silence. I used to keep paper diaries which were for my eyes only, very literary ones with lots of writing in them. But even when the readership is one (oneself), that's not "no one". Is it "no one else"? That depends on whether you believe in God, the beloved, and posterity (or whether someone's sneaking a look when you're out). Most writers do believe in at least one of those "no ones". And the process of writing for "one" (whether it's oneself or the one true omniscient God or the ideal reader or the special one, the beloved, or the "ones who come later") isn't so different from the process of writing for "every one".

In writing, there is no zero. A language and a writer is already a multitude. And this sentence, even before I hit "post", already has me and Derrida in it, for a start!

[(Anonymous)]

Excellent response--any would-be artist with "no" audience would probably agree. Perhaps the operative word here is "seems," as in "even when it seems that I'm writing for myself alone." (Your questioning of who your diaries were really for is exactly why I can never keep one for more than a few days myself, as I'm always feeling I'm either deluding my "other" self or posturing for an audience which has yet to come into existence, and can't choose which tickets to honor.)

Both of these fine ladies must have always felt phantom presences peering over their shoulders, even at their most alienated, and that is why they were successful artists; they didn't really believe in "no one."

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

The extent to which an artist is driven to express himself for the admiration of others is dependent on the personality of the artist. You're assuming too much when you say it's the goal of every artist.

In Tibetan Buddhism, they make art out of sand. Once it's completed they destroy their work. This is an example of art where the purpose of the art is merely the process of making it. It's not kept to show and amaze people, it's destroyed and forgotten as a gesture of their beliefs.

[(Anonymous)]

i was kind of disappointed in tokyo that there wasn't more street food. i came away with the impression that eating and drinking on the sidewalk was kind of taboo. there was a great takoyaki vendor near shinjuku east but he was the only one i saw in that area. and i had to sort of discreetly stand in an alcove to eat it.

one of the few pleasant aspects to the gentrification of new york in the past 10 years is the increasing diversity of the food carts. you can't get an affordable 1br in harlem but you can get a pretty good dosa in washington square park! the times, they are a-changin'...

[funazushi.livejournal.com]

I'm envious. Although Toronto has one of the most diverse populations on the planet and a great variety of restaurants; it is almost monocultural in its street food. Street meat would be more accurate, as only hotdog and sausage vendors are licensed. This coupled with Ontario's draconian drinking laws make the streets of Japan seem like paradise.

[kementari2.livejournal.com]

I can think of three reasons why people enjoy expensive places designed to look like cheap places:

1. As you allude to, people appreciate the aesthetics of certain things regardless of whether they actually cost money or not. So it's to be expected that that includes aspects of cheap or even homeless living.

2. With the uncertainty of our current economic trends comes a new enjoyment, and even anticipation, in imagining what it would be like to live very cheaply.

3. I think it's a sign of the ease with which people can relate to diverse living situations and experiences without class boundaries preventing them from doing so. I find this encouraging and a remarkable break from, say, 150+ years ago.

Way off topic, but . . .

[endoftheseason.livejournal.com]

This just seemed to demand attention. Note the final paragraph and the headmistress' (?) name: Tridgell. You can see the yoof now: "That bitch Tridgell!" "Ol' Tridgell, what a . . . . !"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/feb/06/truancy-weather

[(Anonymous)]

http://genovesestudios.com/public.php?id=1

Hong Kong hawker

[farblust.livejournal.com]

This ad is a classic of how the Hong Kong government tries to de-glamourise(/demonise) the hawkers. Our government has been really good at uprooting folk culture and try to portray us as a ultra-modern international city by inviting Foster and many other Western architects to build exoskeletal hitech buildings, while taking down vernacular buildings and ignoring talented local architects.

To glamorise the poor, I think it's ok. Wabi sabi is also about glamorising the poor(to use rustic tea cups instead of expensive porcelain ones from China). It worked really well so why not use it again?

[(Anonymous)]

that movie was a pastiche, right?

also, i can't see any connection with the look of paper planes.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

B-but Paper Planes has MIA selling subs out of an aluminum street catering truck, which is exactly the scenario in the Man Push Cart film! (Which was a pastiche of... what, exactly?)