An exploration of a relationship between art and power, through the metaphor of the King’s Body and the King’s Feast.

A fictional monarchy represents the height of power, the head of a social body, who prepare a feast laden Table, which is the base, the platform upon which the house is ordered (oikos nomos/ economy) , laying out a menu whereby the dishes, can be seen simultaneously as food/ fuel/ gold/ money/cultural/ intellectual forms upon which the (digestive) system is reliant. It is the digestive system (of the King’s Body, His Constitution, the Social Body) , which propels the forms, the flesh of the world, living substance, into motion, through the system, to generate power for the body, and expel waste.

The Banquet/Bankette is aptly named, and the economy of the flesh passes through to become gold, to become fire and light, that keeps the body alive and in motion. The feast is the fabrication of a phantasmagoria machine, the projector of the king’s image (the IMAGO of the monarch, which we come to see has many iterations). It is the image of a functioning society, a working system, which conceals the operations of the machine, the handiwork, surgery (chirugia) which constitutes both physical and symbolic violence.

The Table might be thought of as a metaphor for Foucault’s Episteme, providing the (illusory) image of a stable base, upon which the forms of the table (the instruments/apparatuses/dispositifs) may be set out, in a schema that works, that allows the (digestive) system to function, and through which power may be generated.

The forms (the dishes) must be fitting to the table they serve, and thus the art work takes the form of a ‘cook book’ of sorts,  to ‘reveal how it’s done’. It is a (fictional) historical account of preparations for the King’s Feast, the making of his Table, to include the technical knowhow of both king and queen (his expenditures*, her receipts*) set forth by their personal curate and physician, the Keeper of the King’s Confidence and the Queen’s Secrets, is here ready to reveal them in a work, part journal of reflections, part manual.

The historical landscape of 18th century England, its monarchy and political climate, its painting and writing, provide inspiration for the fictional historical frame. The world of Charles I, Queen Henrietta Maria, the political upheavals, civil war and revolution, the Cavaliers and the Roundheads, Cromwell and the beheading of the King at the site of the Banqueting House, the Interregnum and Restoration, Charles II, James II. We are also notably on the cusp of the medieval/modern, with the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution, and heading towards to the philosophy of the Enlightenment.

Another significant figure, friend, confidante, physician of Charles I and Queen Henrietta, Sir Kenelm Digby, may be in part a model for our physician….  {QQ?}…., the practitioner who claims to be author and illustrator of the book of handiwork, cookery, hospitality, of physick and surgery, (of cutting fabrick and stitching it) of technical/political mastery, and not least, a book of medicine and poison, though above all, a book of art.

The work also takes from other histories (aspects of medieval, tudor, and also 18th century France, England…their fashions, habits, and foodstuffes) and mingles them other choice cuts, taken, reformed and boiled down to what might be thought of as an historical essence, or a distillation of a particular form of domination, violence, bloodshed, torture, and ongoing destruction, and reconstruction of both outer and inner form.

In its word/image play,  and the way the work is laid out, the book makes its own meal out of the elements it presents. In ‘sampling’ history, it tells a tale of food/fuel, of medicine and poison, as it serves up its own, and its finale is the Jus, the Ius, (the soup/justice) (though only to those who wish to sample it) which dissolves the king, queen, society, alongside the ultimate dissolution of itself, its own form.

Here the work reveals another relation to power, in critiquing forms of dominion, it does not wish to become hypocrite (that is, in dominating the onlooker, the reader with its own vision, its own partiality, its own writing) and thus, in serving up the king as a dish, (exposing the structural horrors of the table) is so too forced to serve up itself. It must reveal its own workings, machinations, manipulations, and the image it constructs as it is constructed. Perception as it is manouvred and coaxed through the work, via the work’s forms and manners. In this way, it might align itself with Agamben’s notion of “inner mannerism” and his “poetics of inoperativity” whereby the work may be said to work in its doing and undoing. A poetics concerned with a relation to power whereby a work undoes its own operations (they remain visible, perceptible, though cannot be believed….) it unperforms its own surgery,  in order to avoid mirroring that which it aims to critique.