77 «This is causing real problems for us, today, but also for many other species, organisms that live on this earth. You spoke about the loss of biodiversity for future generations of human beings. We need to speak about it. It's an evolutionary taboo, but we need to speak about it». This is the moment when, raptured by an ardent fervor, I tell him about the infamous policies of our current government, which sets birth rate growth as one of its paramount goals decreed for our hapless country. And here is also when Carsten Höller is neither surprised nor outraged; instead, he prefers to tell me what he has concretely done to unveil this deeply ingrained taboo. «They all do, because they think economy has to grow, and then people have money in their pockets, they maintain their popularity, and everybody’s happy. But it’s not like this. You can maybe make economy grow, but you don’t need to have a certain percentage of increase in the number of children being born. There are other ways to do it». (Ed.’s Note: see Pier Paolo Pasolini and his distinction between progress and blind development; and, in recent times, see Kate Raworth's pioneering scheme of Doughnut Economy, which contrasts prosperity with mere growth) «It cannot be – Carsten Höller proceeds – that you have to increase the number of people being born for the sole reason that they are consumers. If we are talking about reduction of consumption, we also need to speak about reduction of consumers. But almost nobody speaks about it. So, in the early 1990s, my first artworks actually were kind of traps for children. The idea was to introduce this concept in that shocking language of art I told you about, in order to speak about the false necessity of procreation and if this could have been treated from an alternative viewpoint. I know these traps – much like a subsequent film detailing ten distinct methods on how we can catch children (Jenny, 1992) – were very dark humour, but I did it in order to raise this issue. And also to think about it from another perspective, the one of you as a child, when you start to understand that you exist, that you are in the world, and the world is so big and so difficult to understand that you get very dark thoughts too. I’m pretty sure we all went through this». «It’s brutal», some might say. It’s contemporary art, it has the duty to be as such, because «To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric» (Theodor W. Adorno, Critique of Culture and Society, 1949), because the move of contemporary art matches the tug of one who must awaken you, because the work of contemporary art is fearless, brutal, graceless and disgraced, but precisely by virtue of this ungraceful being it contains its constructive reason of being: to make us open our eyes and consciences wide. At the root of the word “brutal” applied to contemporary art lies the Art Brut movement, baptised in 1945 by Jean Dubuffet and enlivened by «works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses – where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere» (Jean Dubuffet, Place à l’incivisme, 1967). The art of individuals who have never been subjected to the constraints of academic indoctrination, born of the fringes, the margins, the convicts in prison, the madmen in asylums, instinctive and fierce, aesthetics devoid of any anaesthetic. From Art Brut will come Brutalism as the architectural movement that made its material the béton brut, Le Corbusier’s exposed concrete. And from Brutalist architecture the Brutalist cuisine will rise, making its material the in-purity products of the soil. Carsten Höller, a man of exquisitely gentle disposition, has made Brutalism one of his artistic features since his first project, Killing Children, conceived to raise awareness about the soil's overconsumption of resources. (Ed.’s Note: Brutal + Concrete: in English, “concrete” means both cement – the material of Brutalist architecture – and practical) Today there is a venue called Brutalisten, located in Stockholm, that Carsten Höller has opened in collaboration with chef Stefan Eriksson just over a year ago, in proximity to the cinema where Ingmar Bergman’s films once premiered. It straddles the line between a restaurant and a work of art: a restaurant, because it fully adheres to the conventions of such locations; a work of art «because it takes you into an unexplored terrain, defined by a set of restrictive rules, which can evoke kind of a primal discomfort, leading then to an intense and specific pleasure, such as I often find in good art». Indeed, in the thirteen-point Brutalist Kitchen Manifesto (available at www.brutalisten.com/manifesto), the first point states that «Brutalist kitchen is a dogma kitchen where certain rules apply»: Brutalisten in fact serves “orthodox brutalist” dishes, made with just one ingredient; “brutalist” dishes, composed of one ingredient along with salt and water; “semi-brutalist” dishes, created with two ingredients. Further reading from the Manifesto: «We are born as Brutalist eaters, as mother’s milk is essentially Brutalist». «Decoration on the plate is avoided». «Brutalist Cuisine is […] a commitment to purity».
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