Weird Wednesdays: Flux Gourmet

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

In the 1939 essay that would establish him as the Modernist art critic du jure, “Avant Garde and Kitsch,” Clement Greenberg describes the emergence of the avant garde as a reaction against the emergent bourgeois, yet one that requires “an umbilical cord of gold,” an income source that traditionally belonged to the “ruling classes,” in other words, the wealthy. We can think of ‘avant garde’ art in this context as high art, what you might expect to encounter in a museum or other lofty institution–though the phrase ‘avant garde’ has taken on something of a life of itself, associated with the contemporary, the cutting edge. Greenberg identified the issue of the avant-garde in the ‘30s: to make cutting edge art, you require money. The money for this comes not from the masses, to whom avant garde culturally does not belong, but to the supposed elite, flanked by institutional power. Arguably this is not entirely true today, depending on how you define ‘avant-garde’; technologies for creation are more accessible than ever, though the ruling classes continue to own time. After all, if you must constantly work for your survival, how do you find time to create for creation’s sake?

I don’t know that Flux Gourmet cares about any of this per se, but I want to situate my review in that tension between Art and Capital. Flux Gourmet is a mapping of institutional power: the power of the ivory tower over artists, the power of artists over culture, the power of journalism as a witness to power, etc. Class haunts Flux Gourmet. We see the Artists’ Residency through the lens of a working-class writer, his own artistic dreams deferred by the need to eat; his monologue is marked by difference, as it’s presented to us in his native Greek, the only non-English dialogue consistent in the film. But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

Nestled inconspicuously among the late-June releases in 2022, Peter Strickland’s Flux Gourmet had one day in U.S. theaters before being somewhat quietly relegated to streaming. Like the artists the film focuses on, the film is itself avant-garde: abstract soundscapes make up a significant portion of Flux Gourmet, which is about “sonic catering,” a form of musical performance wherein artists use food and cooking as the basis for experimental electronic noise art. In the world of Flux Gourmet, this form of performance is the most highly successful, desirable vehicle for art, and the three-week residency the film follows is a highly competitive, successful venture for would-be sonic caterers trying to advance their careers. Strickland almost takes a documentary approach to his subjects: we move in chronological order through each week, guided by Stones (Makis Papadimitriou), who works for the nameless institute as a self-described “hack,” who’s job is to document each residency for the institute under the control of the Director, Jan (Gwendoline Christie, wonderfully mysterious and equally annoying as any good institutional director should be.) Each week is bookended by interviews with the members of the collective, and the fictional story of the residency is interwoven with extended sonic catering performances.

What works in Flux Gourmet is Strickland’s ability to both treat his subjects seriously while leaning into the absurdity. The whole flick is an absolute sendup of the Institution of Art, and thank god for that, but it’s never mean nor petty. Sonic catering might not be a real performance genre, yet, but we’re given a sound internal logic for it–the performances would absolutely read in a real-world setting, which is kind of why they’re so silly. To wit (and to return us to class): Throughout the film are a series of institute-dictated performances that Jan refers to as “going to the store.” In these sequences, our three artists, Elle, Lamina, and Billy pantomime the mundane ritual of grocery shopping, directed through the scene by Jan’s instructions, which grow increasingly absurd but firmly connected to the embodied experience of shopping. Less “now you’re on a spaceship,” more “Lamina has cut in front of you in line, and you are so overcome by rage you fling yourself to the ground.” If we were going to write an artist’s statement, we might say that these performances subvert the mundanity of grocery shopping, forcing us to re-examine the petty power dynamics of the store. As an audience, we could also say that within the film, they work as miniature studies of the power dynamics that infuse the whole artist’s residency: Jan ultimately holding the power, the artists’ working to maintain their own perception/interpretation, and Stones to the side, uncomfortably documenting.

Pleasantly, it’s not so simple as artist vs. authority in Flux Gourmet. Strickland gives me my absolute favorite thing, a menagerie of women who suck. It’s easy to pin Jan as the authority figure, but testing her is the collective’s “leader,” Elle, a self-styled artist-celebrity who exploits her collective-members’ actual skill to present herself as the face of the group. Elle, like Jan, seems removed from the realities of being a working artist, but she takes care to present herself as coming from a difficult (and assumedly, poor) background. This becomes clear in the film’s contrast between Elle and Lamina in particular. Though Lamina is the group’s true talent, she believes herself to be dependent on Elle, and the resources Elle wields. Elle fashions herself as a model of the feminist avant-garde, relying on Lamina’s authenticity without allowing Lamina to be empowered by it, or even participate as an equal–a running bit throughout the film is Elle’s inability to decide on a name for the collective, with each suggestion a variation on “Elle and [those other guys]”—reducing her collaborators to nameless props. In order to position herself as an oppressed artist, she extracts the oppressions of others and flattens them into something she can use, marketing to the wealthy institutions they all find themselves dependent on, ultimately. Which brings us to the fart joke.

Throughout the film, in his narration, Stones’ poetically details his struggles with gastrointestinal distress. Juxtaposed against the catering part of sonic catering, his bodily ailment becomes an obsession for Elle, who coerces him into becoming the subject of her performances–she rolls around on stage, eating his shit from his stool sample (though we learn she could not commit: it was chocolate frosting all along); she convinces him to make his actual colonoscopy the centerpiece of her performance. His journalistic distance is slowly stripped down as he becomes an object alongside the food they use, his intestines working as another kind of caterer. This is probably the most seriously I will ever write about a dude who is struggling with diarrhea! But it works is the thing! It’s about the consumption! Including, as another infusion of power and consuming, sex, from the post-performance ritual orgies, to the sexual relationship that blossoms between Jan and Billy, though who ultimately holds the power in that relationship gets blurry.

Like a complex dish with a microphone dragged through it, Flux Gourmet is many layered. The overlapping power struggles, the layers of economic and artistic coercion, do not neatly resolve (though there is a certain Velvet Goldmine quality to the conclusion)--the residency ends. Which isn’t to say Strickland leaves us entirely without closure. We do, after all, find out what’s causing Stones’ gastronomic distress, though pointedly, there is no cure, no return to his life before this particular residency. All he can do is adapt his diet.