Javier Tapia
"CAZUELA CULTURAL"

CEVICHE

Ingredients:

-500 grs. of fish (salmon, tuna, reineta, corvina, etc.). The fish selected is a decision of the chef.
-The juice of 6 to 8 lemons.
-1 onion
-A hand full of peresille
-Red pepper
-Olive oil
-Salt
-Pepper

How to cook:
After chopping the raw fish, the onions (in small cubes), the red peppers (in small cubes) and the peresille, all is put together in a bowl and is mixed with the lemon juice, a little bit of olive oil, salt and pepper. It is good to wait around 20 min. before is served. The waiting time is variable, ideally when possible, the longer the time the more marinated the fish will be, and the more the flavors will mix together.
A good idea is to serve the Ceviche as a starter, in small portions, but it also could be used as main course.

 

Towards a Vegetarian Cannibalism

Even if vegetarian cannibalism is practically impossible, it might be possible to practise cannibalism in accordance with the ethical norms of vegetarianism.

Some claim that the original South American Indian cannibals were vegetarians, meaning that they only ate human flesh and only for ritualistic purposes. Vegetarianism is often motivated by an ethical imperative not to eat others insofar as one does not want to get eaten oneself. However, the original cannibal would eat human flesh not to satisfy her or his own needs or desires but to preserve and sustain the qualities and essence of the other. The original cannibal would eat the Other, so that the Other would live on in themselves.

The question of vegetarian cannibalism points to the ambiguity of the nature of eating as a way of relating to things. Eating can be the ultimate objectification of another substance, being or human being, reducing it, her or him to carbohydrates. Or, it can be the ultimate material union. The answer is one on a practical level another on a principal level. Being eaten on a concrete physical level is devastating, whereas the concept of becoming one with the Other is most desirable in love, art, politics and most matters that come in between.

In 1970 Allan Kaprow built a wall of loafs of bread glued together with jam next to the real wall in Berlin. In the context of the divided city, the work lends itself to an uncomplicated interpretation. But on the whole there is something democratic about bread: in the humanitarian sense of signifying a basic need of food and right to existence, and in the vegetarian sense of eating without killing anybody. To add to these symbolic and political implications there is something wonderfully equal about bread, along with potatoes, corn, rice and pasta. They are the base structure of the Marxist politics of food, the proletariat so to speak.

But what then of Yves Klein’s 1958 Le Vide [French: The Void] at the gallery Iris Clert in Paris? A gallery  space, the walls painted ever so faint bluish white, windows bright blue, gendarmes guarding the door, to let waiting Parisians in to an empty bluish gallery, where they would be served a blue drink.

The singer of an English rock band once said that one man’s cheese is another man’s meat, knowing very well that to most people his band would  definitely be cheese. Not withstanding the role of dairy in this discussion, what the singer really said was that: One, in the Marxist politics of food the strict division of base and superstructure has been outmoded by the evolution of capitalism. Now-a-days these things are relative, feelings can be the subject of equalitarian struggle, desires the object of material exploration. And two, nobody wants to be a potato anymore.

In 1970 Daniel Spoerri presented Claude and Francois Lalanne’s Le Dîner Cannibale at his EAT ART gallery in Düsseldorf, an art-meal of - among other things - the head of the artist baked in bread with a vividly illusionistic content: eyes made of eggs, mushrooms and truffles, gorge made of Frankfurter sausages, a calf’s brain for brains and an ox’s tail for backbone. For desert a chocolate penis filled with prunes, cherries and bananas in liquor. Originally trained as a ballet dancer Spoerri had started working in art in the 1950s and first worked with food for art in the context of an exhibition in Copenhagen in 1961. This took place at Addi Köpcke’s Galerie Köpcke and was announced as L’épicerie [French: the Grocery]. The exhibition showed groceries bought at a nearby supermarket stamped “Daniel Spoerri: Attention œuvre d’Art” [French: Daniel Spoerri: Attention work of art]. The catalogue, titled Katalog Tabu, was loafs of bread, into which was baked rubbish, old nails and glass-splinters.

If the Katalog Tabu points back to the aggressive unwillingness of Situationist leader Guy Debord’s Memoires (1958) that came in a coarse sandpaper dust-cover, designed to ruin the neighboring books on the shelf. And Le Dîner Cannibale points forward to the vulgar, late 70s combination of cannibalism, violence and pornography in films like Gore Vidal’s Caligula and Mountain of the Cannibal God with Ursula Andress. Then the plain groceries of L‘épicerie are definitely pointing to the nothingness of Klein’s Le Vide, as parallel Duchampi’an gestures. An aggressive nothingness that was only later turned political in what Lucy R. Lippard called ‘escape attempts’, namely conceptual art’s subversive strategy of dematerialisation, which failed instantly as the market readily adjusted to dematerialized works of art.

On the poster for Le Dîner Cannibale there is a snake eating its own tail to form a circle. One can only wonder what this circle means: is it the auto-destructiveness of anarchist revolution, a zen-like circle of life or the hermeneutic circle of an alternative argumentation of truth. That is: the revolutionism of Guy Debord’s Situationism, the zen-inspiration for John Cage’s aesthetic  anarchism or the take of burgeoning conceptual art on the politics of knowledge.

Klein talked about cannibalism in the context of his monochromes, about wanting to cannibalise painting, in effect cannibalise the inheritance of his parents, both renowned painters. The transgressions of your parents is certainly something that you will never quite understand, but just have to meet somehow. Your inexplicable pre-condition. Like in Caligula, where the young man, Caligula, must murder his grandfather, the Caesar of Rome, and take his throne, in order not to get murdered by his fellow heirs. Although saving Caligula at first, it also means that he will eventually be murdered himself by the next guy. It is inevitable, he knows it and so do we. As such the plot is resolved within minutes; the remainder of the film’s orgiastic display only goes to describe how Caligula searches for some kind of gesture that will save him.

Cannibalism cannot really be understood. When the cannibal eats someone, who is to tell whether that someone is doing okay inside the cannibal; only the cannibal could. To the cannibalised it is an inexplicable event. Not unlike vegetarianism, which makes perfect sense from an ethical or ecological point of view, whereas in the Marxist semiotics of food exercised in this text, it is the negation, the cannibalisation, of all meaning. If there is nothing but a proletariat of food, proletariet seizes to be proletariat. Like monochrome painting and alternative argumentations of truth. As such ‘vegetarian cannibalism’ is an impossibility because it is a tautology. And among the models we can look to, is the abovementioned Caligula testing one symbolic action after the other, trying to find an understanding. [NH]

PS: In 1964 in New York city, Daniel Spoerri made the work Hahns Abendmal for the collector Wolfgang Hahn. A square, 2 by 2 meter table laid for 16 guests. Dinner was eaten and the next day Spoerri glued all remains to the table top, which was hung on the wall as a painting.

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