“Wheaties—The Breakfast of Champions” is the advertising slogan of a breakfast cereal that has been endorsed in the American media by prominent sports stars starting in the 1930s and continuing to the present. The message is clear: “Eat Wheaties, Be a Winner”. Another message was transported along with the first, supporting the oft repeated phrase used to discipline and educate youth over several generations in 20th century America: ‘Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.’ Juggle all the phrases and one could come up with an idea like: “Do something important—Eat breakfast—Win!”
It is highly doubtful that Friedemann Derschmidt, creator of permanent breakfast, was ever exposed to Wheaties advertisements. Born in Salzburg in 1967, Derschmidt moved east as a young man and studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna from 1986-1996. His work shows a primary interest in the tension between so-called “everyday life” and documentary film which has been injected with a dose of artistic sensibility: Derschmidt even summarizes his artistic activities under the rubric Produktion von Wirklichkeiten (Production of Realities). Permanent breakfast is a prototypical example of his work. The breakfast tables set up in a public space provide him with the “film” set. The invited breakfast participants are the “stars”, the passers-by who join in are the “extras”. The whole event is a game, subject to 8 “rules”, which are not necessary to know in order to “play”1 . The event begins at a specific time, but the end is left open. If Fellini or Bunuel orchestrated the delicious surrealism of their films so that everyday events in them took on a strange twist, Derschmidt “produces a reality” so that an ordinary event, breakfast with friends, takes on Felliniesque dimensions, by being held in city squares or on the borders between formerly hostile nations, and including string quartets, passing tourists, street people, police, pigeons and often someone with a film or photo camera.

“Von allem nun, was den Menschen gemeinsam ist, ist das Gemeinsamste, daß sie essen und trinken müssen”2 (Of all the things that people have in common, the thing they have most in common is that they must eat and drink.) This seemingly simple observation by Georg Simmel about the processes involving food in the community is the beginning of a profounder examination by him of the cultic origins and the social character of meals. A culture surrounding nourishing oneself is created first when the physiological needs of the individual are transcended and organized into general or symbolic structures. Simmel mentions, for example, three important components of a “meal”: the socializing function, the acceptance of taboos and the elevated form as an evident expression of human cohabitation determined by orderliness altogether3. These three components of the repast according to Simmel can be found in texts handed down from ancient Athens. The ancient feast was where worldly pleasures could be enjoyed: eating, drinking and sex, the three kinds of bodily satisfaction that, according to Plato, the human being is amenable to from birth onwards4. In Sophists at Dinner by Athenaios of Naukratis, written from the turn of the 1st to the 2nd century AD, the table conversation of learned men is recorded, providing seldom and valuable information about ancient dining culture. The scholars at dinner do not discuss the meaning of life or the nature of love. Instead they talk about the feast itself, about the wine and food, about famous courtesans and cooks, about the dishes and cups5. Having participated in several permanent breakfasts myself, I can say from observation over the years that the conversation is similar in contemporary times. Talk at the breakfast events revolved primarily around the food, the other guests, the possibility of getting other people to join the game (in observation of rule number 4), and everyday topics.

In contemporary Austrian art, Hermann Nitsch is the person who has demonstrated the most interest for the rituals surrounding eating and drinking, in the context of his ‘Orgy Mystery Theater’. Nitsch was identified with the movement known as Wiener Aktionismus, where the central idea was that “material action” took place, i.e. rituals and ceremonies were real, direct and literal events, not pretended events as in traditional drama6. Nitsch’s rituals involve, among other aspects, the slaughtering of animals, the consumption of their blood and flesh, the drinking of great quantities of wine and the nudity of the participants. Public protest against these activities is part of the reason why Nitsch moved his spectacles to the private grounds of his mansion in Prinzendorf in Lower Austria. Derschmidt’s idea for permanent breakfast has some traces of the core idea of Wiener Aktionismus, that what takes place should be “real”, but instead of delivering a radical shock to the bourgeoisie of the 1960s as the artists in the era of Aktionismus were strongly interested in doing, Derschmidt tries to subvert and make visible the subtle (but not, therefore, less confining) social habitudes and practices of Austrian society some forty years later. A key facet of permanent breakfast is its public nature, which rules 1, 2 and 3 underscore: a “breakfast” can only be carried out in a public space, which is not a condition for Nitsch’s actions. The societal context that the two artists matured in, although Austrian, is separated by decades which caused deep changes to be exhibited in that context. Nitsch’s ideas ripened in the Catholic, conservative, post-World War II Austria of the 1950s. Derschmidt’s vision of people “breakfasting” ad infinitum, so that within a calculable amount of time the entire planet could be peacefully “playing” and sitting down at a breakfast table anywhere on the globe, is more influenced by the transnational society of the Information Age in which manifestations such as flash mobs7 are possible.

One encounters food and food rituals in an international art context as well. Daniel Spoerri, creator of Eat Art, served edible works made by himself and artist friends such as Dieter Roth and Niki de Saint-Phalle, consumed at artistically staged banquets. In 1960 Spoerri created his first Tableau Piège (Trap Picture) as a kind of tribute. Inspired by his friendship with Jean Tinguely and an experience with Robert Filliou he glued down the rest of the dinner — plates with dried bits of food, cigarette butts, personal objects left lying around, and mounted the board at a 90° angle.

Likewise, Cindy Sherman’s oeuvre contains images of food and table settings. Her untitled photographs of food, waste and debris from 1986-1987 have been correlated with Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject described in the book Powers of Horror8. The abject is that which represents a threat to the subject’s constitution in a pre-conceived (and often confining) symbolic realm; that which threatens the concept of a “clean and proper” body. “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.”9 Kristeva reads the abject politically as the initial step in the rejection of the symbolic order and the reconstitution of the subject. Thus, one could read Sherman’s photo series as a first step towards political empowerment, the first step towards constituting the self apart from the confining language of femininity and social control. Sherman not only achieves a thematic representation of the abject, she also tries to produce in the spectator a virtual physical response that parallels Kristeva’s image of vomiting as an expulsion of the abject.

Political empowerment is also the central theme of one of the most important works in feminist art history: Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. First shown in San Francisco in 1979 before touring the United States and Europe, The Dinner Party is a massive ceremonial banquet table measuring forty-eight feet on each side, triangular in shape, set for 39 notable women from history and resting on a porcelain floor containing the names of 999 others. By inviting only women to a feast, Chicago elegantly underscores that women have been excluded throughout history from getting their “piece of the pie”.

Although the discourse surrounding societal oppression and feminist theory is useful for examining issues pertaining to permanent breakfast, Friedemann Derschmidt in his work comments on the restrictions society places on individual freedom of both women and men in public spaces. His project is a film that has not yet been made, and at the same time is always being made, at unknown locations and with unknown protagonists. In The Exterminating Angel (1962), Luis Bunuel shows a group of guests mysteriously unable to leave the room after a fancy dinner party. Over the next days all the facades
they’ve built up and their social pretenses disintegrate as they are reduced to living like animals. In a
variation on that theme, Bunuel depicts in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) a group of
privileged French protagonists and a fascist Latin American ambassador finding themselves thwarted in their efforts to finally sit down and have dinner together. Both films are an assault on the ruling class who live in fear of imminent extinction and stubbornly clutch onto empty rituals. Friedemann Derschmidt’s permanent breakfast is also such an assailment on the Austrian bourgeoisie, with a message as clear as a healthy bowl of cereal in the morning: Tomorrow, we will succeed.

Renée Gadsden

Footnotes

1. For the rules, see back cover
2. Georg Simmel, Soziologische Ästhetik. Klaus Lichtblau, ed. (Bodenheim: 1998), p. 183.
3. Ibid, p. 185.
4. James N. Davidson, Kurtisanen und Meeresfrüchte: die verzehrenden Leidenschaften im klassischen Athen. (Berlin: Berliner Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002), p. 12.
5. Ibid, p. 13.
6. John A. Walker, A Glossary of Art, Architecture and Design since 1945. 3rd ed. (London: Library Association Publishing,1992), p. 214.
7. Flash mob: a large group of people who gather in a usually predetermined location, perform some brief action, and then quickly disperse. Source: http://www.wordspy.com/words/flashmob.asp (03/04)
8. See Michael Newman, “Mimesis and Abjection in Recent Photowork,” in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne eds., Thinking Art: Beyond Traditional Aesthetics (London: ICA, 1991).