Food, the Senses, and Art History

Holly: Let’s begin with a seemingly simple question, which is how has food offered each of us new ways to think about art-historical material?

Sussan: What really interests me is that people have studied food in all fields of European arts, from the Greeks and Romans, to the medieval table, the Renaissance table, feasts, through to contemporary practices and issues such as food waste. I work on the arts of Iran and Islam, but many aspects of art history have perhaps been the purview of European arts, so that practitioners assume if you use a certain term, you mean the same as in a European context. But that’s a problem, a bit like thinking that oil painting was the invention of artists in Europe – and that if anyone else adopts oil on canvas, they are derivative and followers. Just because human beings have feasted and gathered together, it doesn’t mean only one method or set of questions can be articulated.

Holly: That makes me think about a type of Safavid ceramic platter with exquisite calligraphy and prayer written around the edges that you explore in your work, which encourages one to think visually, materially, and with concepts of ephemerality. There is the ceramic form and glaze, the written blessing that acts on the food put in the dish, and then of course the food itself, which can bring its own colour palette, say, from golden saffron, green herbs, and pomegranate red.

What you said also makes me think about the European term “still life”. If you take, for example, paintings from eighteenth-century India of foods, gardens, or platters of delicacies, “still life” isn’t the correct term. First, because the foods are often within a context of cultivation, sale, and entertainment and pleasure rather than being the sole focus of an image. Or if they are the sole focus, they are often depictions of natural history rather than a collection of foodstuffs and goods. Second, because they are working within a different symbolic or moral context.

Sussan: What’s interesting about that is that still life, like a great many genres of European painting, is tied up with methods of iconographic studies. And I find, as you know well, that scholarship on Persian and Indian painting, for instance, has been bound by iconographic approaches: who does what in these pictures? What’s happening? What’s the story? Why are the figures wearing those colours?

But there are other things involved, which have to do with the particularity of materials, technologies, how you hold the object in your hand. For example, paintings are often in bound volumes and part of a poetic or historic narrative.

A field like ours has to grapple with the objecthood of the objects that are the primary material of our research. You mentioned a platter earlier; I was trained as an art historian when platters and pots were the decorative arts, wondrous things to decorate a palace. Whereas it has colours, texture, a certain weight when full of rice, and evokes smell and taste, perhaps even making somebody’s mouth water at the sight of it.

Holly: I agree, one has to peel back some of that training and return to an objectcentred analysis. One can ignore previous hierarchies and follow the works themselves. That’s a really interesting tension in the study of ephemeral things. On the one hand, there’s an impulse to understand what an experience was like in an historical moment that has passed. And to ask, does the painting or object bring you closer to that experience or give access to the past? But, on the other hand, the image or object has its own history, and as a representation is working within its own aesthetic framework. It seems to me that many representations are selfreflexive about ephemerality; they do really anticipate that time will pass, and that the original moment will be gone, and they aestheticise it.

There’s an eighteenth-century Mughal depiction of a mango, which you could see both as a natural history illustration of a mango plant or as an evocation of the taste and smell of the mango in season. What I like about this particular manuscript, which was collected by Sir John Soane, is that it also has mango-shaped decorative designs above and below the mango, with patterns in the mango’s colour palette, which acknowledges the aestheticisation of the whole page: the mango as a fruit, as a design, as a pigment. Across all of the ephemeral arts, we’re looking at these aestheticising moments in their representation.

I think that’s why I’ve tended to study representations alongside other objects, narratives, and stories, to build up material from different vantage points, almost like a prism, as a collective method or assemblage for accessing ephemeral arts.

Sussan: Absolutely, your object is part of an assembly of things, memories, poems, sounds, smells, performances, all of which, by the time you get to representation, are past and no longer accessible or tangible. As an art historian, you can attempt perhaps not at confident knowing, but more at an insinuation of knowing the past. That uncertainty runs awkwardly against the urge for us to capture and publish our research for posterity, as if the subject has been firmly uncovered and is now known.

Holly: Increasingly, rather than trying to access an actual experience, I aim to understand a certain degree of potential around experience. Working on albums has helped me to think through this, because any given album page may contain multiple images, say a painting juxtaposed with poems, prints, or drawings. It is up to the viewer to draw connections between them and to see what thoughts or additions they might spark. That open-endedness has so much in common with how one might approach ephemeral arts.

Sussan: Yes, and because of this, audiences are important – a lot depends on who has an album. Whether it starts with a Mughal emperor, then goes to another emperor’s library and collection, if he looks at it alongside his courtiers and women in the household, and so on. In each case, the experience of the object must be different.

In Islamic arts, there is also tremendous creativity, but innovation comes not so much from having changed the style, as having changed the way you encounter an object, story, painting, textile, dish, whatever the case may be –to intimate meanings in a new context.

Holly: Do you think generosity is a part of the approach to ephemerality?

Sussan: I like that, and of course generosity is part of the food metaphor. When I think about stories, or access to them, changing over time, the recipe is an interesting model. The recipe also calls to mind how the particularities of place – such as agricultural outputs and methods or cooking techniques –alter the experience of an object, for example, a French baguette.

Generosity, the pleasure of memory, and imagination are all entwined. If I’m looking at a feast in a Persian miniature painting, perhaps nobody is putting food in their mouths, but there is still an evocation of taste. The artist can give you hints: for instance, is the rice bowl depicted shallow or deep? I’m looking for intimation rather than confirmation. It’s not ekphrastic, and whereas art history in the European tradition has always been logocentric in its practice, the Persian or Indian painting asks us to bring in the collective of evidence: the sound of the poetic recitation, the smell of the flowers, the evocation of taste of the fruits, and the like.

The only painting in the Persian manuscript tradition that I’ve found where somebody is actually tasting food is in a sixteenth-century anthology of poetry. It’s part of a scene across two paintings that depicts food preparation: a man carries a basket of melons on his head, birds grill on a rotisserie, empty platters are stacked for serving, large pots of food cook as wood is brought for the fire. We can look at these paintings to describe what we see and enjoy a magnificent sense of recognition. But, how do I go beyond that? And see these images not so much in terms of stylistic elements like a lack of naturalism and perspective – their flatness – all of which go against thinking there is life in them, and instead think about movement, taste, smell, and sound?

Holly: I’m also wary of using paintings as illustrations – of natural history, or a story, or manners and customs. I like how you’re thinking about how to draw out movement, taste, smell, and sound from paintings and objects. For natural history paintings, it has helped me to think about them as one piece of a sequence and ask, what happened when cultivated plants were sold in the market by greengrocers? How were they displayed? How did their images participate in storytelling? Seeing them in a less singular way, as one among a data set or as part of a collection or assemblage of plants, gardens, markets, feasts, or famines, can pull them out of arthistorical categories and typologies and allow images to speak to each other, and in that way spark other ways of thinking and knowing.

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Detail of Unknown artist, ‘Kunjra’, an occupational group represented by a greengrocer, in Tashrih al-aqvam, an account of origins and occupations of some of the sects, castes and tribes of India, 1825, written at Hansi Cantonment, Hissar District, for Colonel James Skinner. Collection of The British Library (Add. 27255, f.234v.). Image courtesy of British Library Images (all rights reserved).

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Safavid dynasty, Kerman, platter, 1677–1678, underglaze painted stonepaste, 22 cm base diameter × 40.5 cm rim diameter × 9 cm height. Collection of the British Museum (G.308). Image courtesy of The Trustees of the British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

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Detail of Unknown artist, A mango depicted against a white background, labelled anbeh (mango) in Persian characters, Mughal, Murshidabad, circa 1760, 8.9 × 11.6 cm in Sir John Soane’s Album: Indian miniatures. Collection of Sir John Soane’s Museum (Vol 145 f36b) ©Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. Photo by Ardon Bar-Hama.

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Detail of Alī al-Kātib Sulṭānī (scribe), ‘Aṭṭār, Farīd al-Dīn (author), Intikhāb-i Ḥadīqah, fol.5a, 1500–1600, decorative manuscript, 31.75 × 17.78 cm. Collection of Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (MS. Canonici Or. 122). Image courtesy of Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (CC-BYNC 4.0).

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Detail of Alī al-Kātib Sulṭānī (scribe), ‘Aṭṭār, Farīd al-Dīn (author), Intikhāb-i Ḥadīqah, fol.4b, 1500–1600, decorative manuscript, 31.75 × 17.78 cm. Collection of Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (MS. Canonici Or. 122). Image courtesy of Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (CC-BYNC 4.0).