Remains of the Day
Or, Looking For Kurt Schwitters' Porridge
“The city rat invites the country rat onto the Persian rug. They gnaw and chew leftover bits of ortolan. Scraps, bits and pieces, leftovers: their royal feast is only a meal after a meal among the dirty dishes of a table that has not been cleared. The city rat has produced nothing and his dinner invitation has cost him almost nothing.”[1]
Michel Serres, exploring the figure of the parasite – etymologically, ‘the one who eats alongside’ – through the example of Aesop’s rats, complicates the immediate reading that excess is a question of scale, position, proximity. It is all these things, too, but we should be wary of swallowing this aphorism whole. The idea that surplus trickles down, naturally, to the deserving poor is as much a neoliberal fable as it is Aesop’s, or La Fontaine’s. How many food banks end up stocked not with the incidental surplus of the home, but goods purpose-bought on the grocery run as a form of redistribution whose responsibility is placed on the individual? As the pejorative image of the ‘parasite’ is deployed more and more openly in political discourse as a means of disenfranchising the marginal and the transient, Serres’ reminder that the precondition of parasitism is excess seems a particularly timely one.
Kurt Schwitters’ last escape from Nazi persecution saw him arrive at the Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man in 1940. By the time he reached Douglas, the contents of his pockets consisted only of a small birch carving-in-progress, and two white mice that were refused entry to British soil. Hospitality, evidently, has its limits, but the high proportion of artists and intellectuals among the internees enjoyed considerable freedom, if limited means, to pursue their interests. The prisoner of war camp then, came to resemble by turns a barbed-wire agora, or an artist’s workshop of a decidedly pre-modern bent. Coals were ground with cooking oil for paint, and soup bones were re-boiled to make a sort of glue with which to seal newsprint and toilet paper with, in the absence of more durable substrates. In the convoluted history of disappearances that entwines Schwitters’ work, subject to bombings, seizure and burning, general neglect and the inherent frailty of many of the materials that attracted his hand, Hutchinson would play host to one of the most infamous.
That we know of the porridge sculptures at all speaks to the unpalatable spectacle of their display. The purpose of Schwitters’ mysterious daily rounds with a bucket, collecting the scraps of the breakfast table before secreting them back to his attic was eventually made clear when the assembled hoard of gruel, clods and oat-coagulate began seeping through the floorboards to the bunks below. Can we even call the constituents of this mass ‘leftovers’? Few foodstuffs would seem to take as unkindly to the passage of time until the next meal, the next day. When Fred Uhlman called porridge a “material more impermanent than any other known to mankind” one wonders how often he had been called upon to dislodge its set remains from a saucepan. Leftovers, certainly, are not always just a cheeseplate-but-diminished, they are not simply more. Second portions are not leftovers, nor does batch cooking produce them. Their defining feature would seem to be the ragged edge that means they cannot be made convincingly whole again. The too-much transfigured to not-enough overnight, the rich treat burdensome on the second day. The law of diminishing returns is not confined solely to quantity; leftovers represent the impoverishment of excess.
Written accounts of this grotto, a far cry from Schwitters’ previous, crystalline conceptions - Merzbau constructed in Norway and Germany - describe it in terms of “several hundred-weight of rotting porridge” “studded with pebbles, bits of wood and rusty nails”, which “emitted a faint but sickly smell and was the colour of cheese: a ripe Danish blue or Roquefort.”[2] Diary entries, disbelieving correspondence, and one particularly unflattering portrayal in a roman à clef are all the documentation left to posterity of the porridge otherwise conspicuously absent from the photographic record of camp life produced by its commanding officer and the art historian Klaus Hinrichsen. Its enigmatic, visceral non-entity conjures, in its place, Antoine Vollon’s Mound of Butter.
Itself a break with earlier, more symbolic arrangements of the culinary still life, the sumptuously rendered surface of Mound initially entices, eggs trembling at the table’s edge in sight of its monumentality, before slight hue shifts in the edifice begin to speak to the disquieting reality of keeping such a quantity of dairy uncovered for any length of time in a world waiting for the advent of refrigeration. “Bad butter will only ever give you bad things.”[3] wrote the nineteenth-century pâtissier Joules Gouffé, summing up the prevalent contemporary anxiety of rancidity at the heart of French cuisine. Where the conceit of the still life had been to include a single spoiled grape or mouldering pheasant as a bashful foil to the outward statement of ownership and prestige, Vollon’s trick was to build decay into the core of his subject, gleaned slowly through inference until the effect was total. In his Mound, the image of ruination finally superseded the picturesque ruin, the common quality of the tableau vivant, wild romantic landscape, and architectural folly.
But Schwitters, in his notorious grotto, sockless and barking out of his window like a dog one moment, painting deft if workmanlike portraits of the staff officers the next, is no ornamental hermit. In his ambivalence; to material over materiality, to what a thing was over what it could do, his leftovers fulfilled the promise of impermanence that even Vollon’s Mound, spoiling more rapidly than it could be depicted, could not. Schwitters’ mounds, thickly impastoed in all the colours of the camp’s lively bacterial imprint, point to the artificial position of ‘food’ in the hierarchy of its constituent parts. Relinquishing that nominal category, tactlessly suspended beyond the grasp of symbolism and tilting back toward a greater nature; they could never be noble ruins, but only rubble to be cleared away.
Reproduced with the kind permission of Fortified Journal
[1] Boursault, Fables d’Esope, quoted in Serres, Michel, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R Schehr, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007)
[2] Epistolary quotes from Fred Uhlman and Klaus Hinrichsen quoted in Luke, Megan R., Kurt Schwitters: Space, Image, Exile, pp.163-64 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014
[3] Quoted in Kessler, Marni, Discomfort Food: The Culinary Imagination in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, p.58 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021)
