Taste, Performed

Abstract

Taste is often construed as being intensely interior, a performative sensation that defies representation. But what happens when taste itself is put on display through performance? In “Taste, Performed”, Edward Whittall examines an installation at a recent exhibit at the Musée des Arts Contemporains in Montreal, called “Orchestrer la perte/Perpetual Demotion”. A pick and pack robot, nicknamed M. Clavel, has been programmed to feed people in the museum. A patrons steps forward, the robot “sees” them and lifts a spoonful of semi-fermented paste toward their mouths. Thinking through Erika Fischer-Lichte’s transformative aesthetics of performance, the argument is made that, performed, taste is neither purely representational nor solely performative. Instead, it is an intensely theatrical process and is itself transformed into a social phenomenon.