Would You Like Chicken ... or Chicken?

It started with four half-naked women solemnly bearing jellied timbales and ended eight hours later with a party reminiscent of a high school dance. In between, there were 23 courses, a shrine to the Virgin Mary adorned with forks, a bit of avant-garde Butoh dance, and, for those guests up on their Buñuel, the fear that they had stepped into a live version of The Exterminating Angel. But mostly there was chicken — lots and lots of it. Because for all the pointed questions it raised about food and art and creativity and chefs, Gelinaz was also a dinner.

The fever dream of Lyon-based writer Andrea Petrini, Gelinaz brought 23 of the world’s top chefs to Ghent, Belgium, on June 30 and had them interpret a recipe created over a hundred years earlier by Belgian food writer Philippe Édouard Cauderlier. Belgian chef Roger Souvereyns started things off with a faithful rendition of the original: a chicken-and-vegetable timbale set in an aspic made from pigs’ trotters. The dishes that followed every 20 minutes for the next eight hours hewed with varying degrees of fidelity to that matrix. Davide Scabin, of Combal.Zero, in the Italian town of Rivoli, created a recognizable tower of jellied bites. Convinced that “the skin is the best part,” René Redzepi, of Copenhagen’s Noma, boiled chicken skins, skimmed off the scum and dried it before serving it on flowers. Petter Nilsson, of Paris’ La Gazzetta, ignored the recipe and instead served bread made from the grains usually fed to poultry. “You’re eating what chickens eat,” he explained.

The point of all this, said Petrini, was to show the collaborative nature of creativity. “A band or an art movement — they’re a fluid bunch, but they share the same references. It’s the end of authorship. Ideas belong to everyone.”

There is precedent for this, of course. Picasso spent a month in 1957 painting increasingly fragmented variations of Velázquez’s 1656 masterwork, Las Meninas, and there’s scarcely a pop star out there who hasn’t had his or her way with Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Gelinaz’s key gambit was that chefs could engage in the same interpretive practice.

For those looking to be outraged, Gelinaz — which embodied most every criticism hurled at today’s hothouse food culture — was an easy target. It was elitist: tickets cost $770 apiece, though they could be shared between buyers. It was sexist: there was only one female chef (Agata Felluga) among the 23, and no seminaked men to share the burden of parading those timbales. It was wasteful, and, in its gluttony, markedly unhealthy. It wasn’t even always good: if all of Iñaki Aizpitarte’s dishes tasted like the chicken-stock-and-champagne Kir Royale he served, his Paris restaurant Le Chateaubriand would be out of business.

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Petrini introduced the event by defining Gelinaz “not as a dinner, but as a performance.” Yet even as performance, it was uneven. Although the chefs had been invited to accompany their dish with music, most of them confined themselves to blaring a recorded rock song. (Frank Zappa was popular.) Mauro Colagreco, of Mirazur on the Côte d’Azur, did not: he had two Butoh dancers writhe about while he presented his dish of chicken heads and feet. The performance was addressed at the horrors of the poultry industry. “I come from a continent where people die of hunger, so why do we throw the heads and feet in the trash?” the Argentine-born Colagreco said. “How did we arrive at the bestial practices of industrial agriculture?” The dancers ended their performance with raw chicken heads dangling from their mouths.

Gelinaz, in other words, was absurd in its excesses. But is that necessarily a bad thing? By embracing extremes, it forced participants on both sides of the pass to think about what food means, in much the same way as the Dadaists forced us to think about the meaning of art. And while the question of whether cooking can be art raises a lot of hackles, it too is worth at least thinking about. Gelinaz created a space for doing so.

Consider Marc Van der Cruyssen and Martine Hesters. Self-professed foodies, they were among the 45 guests who bought seats, spending the evening taking photos of their food and happily deconstructing dishes. But they also talked about what it meant to experiment and take creative risks. It wasn’t hard to imagine them at an art happening 50 years ago, with John Cage reading a lecture from a ladder and Robert Rauschenberg playing Édith Piaf records. “That,” Hesters said as the performance drew to a close, “was exciting.”

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