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The Feast of Trimalchio: Consuming Passions

This is the first scholarly essay about the nine-channel HD video installation The Feast of Trimalchio by the Moscow based art-group AES+F. It was commissioned by AES+F for a book to accompany the exhibition of the video at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow. Drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s cultural study of globalization Modernity at Large (1996), the essay argues that The Feast of Trimachlio can be read as a significant example in art today of an ‘imagined world’ that registers the effects of relations between the forces of mass digital mediation and human migration in contemporary global capitalism’s drive to commodify leisure and pleasure. It explores the group’s use of Trimalchio’s feast, the episode at the centre of Petronius’s Roman novel Satyricon, as an analogue for spectacles of the egregious abuse of wealth by a global network of oligarchs in our own time. The essay argues that quotations from the history of art and architecture in the video are a particular manifestation of AES+F’s formation as artists in the 1970s and 1980s in the Soviet Union and of an education at MARHI and MPI in Moscow. The commission was the outcome of an ongoing research based relationship with AES+F established at the Ormeau Baths Gallery in August 2008 when I delivered a public lecture followed by an ‘in conversation’ with the artists in conjunction with the exhibition of the group’s video Last Riot (2002) in Belfast. A detailed study of The Feast of Trimalchio for the essay was conducted in Venice at the Biennale in 2009 and in email and Skype conversations with AES+F. Research conducted around Allegoria Sacra at the Moscow Biennial in 2011 will support a book project on The Liminal Space Trilogy involving AES+F and Professor Kerstin Mey at the University of the Creative Arts.