An early performance of Infinite Foundue circa 1970. That's all we know.
Infinite Fondue
In 1969, the Schweizerische Käseunion (Swiss Cheese Union) found itself in the midst of a marketing crisis. Attempting to modernize the image of the national dish and move it away from the "rustic lodge" stereotype, they commissioned an avant-garde art installation that remains one of the most bafflingly beautiful relics of the Fluxus era: Unendliches Fondue (Infinite Fondue). To this day the author of the piece remains unknown.
The piece consists of a minimum of twenty men—traditionally dressed in black casual wear—standing in a rigid, unwavering line. Each man holds a long-handled fondue fork tipped with a cube of slightly stale sourdough. The spectacle, however, lies in the "connective tissue." A continuous, shimmering thread of melted Gruyere (or, in lighter iterations, Emmenthal) is draped from fork to fork, creating a singular, lacteal umbilical cord that unites the performers in a state of suspended consumption.
The installation is accompanied by Oszillationen, a composition by German avant-garde pioneer Gerhard Benno (1932–1998). For Benno, the commission was a sharp aesthetic pivot. Having spent the early 60s working with acoustic silence and found objects, he suddenly embraced early Moog synthesizers and oscillators. The result is a seven-hour sonic drone that purportedly mimics the molecular breakdown of milk fats.
No recording of Gerhard Benno's Oszillationen is known to have survived but Benno did leave notes on the contruction of the piece. Speedboat Labs have taken a rumour of what these notes contain to "reproduce" a brief two minute sample of what we imagine the piece to have sounded like, possibly. Click the link below.
Critics at the time were polarized. Writing in a 1970 issue of Artforum, Julian Sterling described the experience as “a harrowing exercise in stasis, where the tension of the drying cheese becomes a metaphor for the brittle state of European diplomacy.” Meanwhile, the French journal L’Art Vivant was less kind, calling it “a viscous nightmare of late-capitalist gluttony that smells, quite literally, of feet.”
The logistical demands of Infinite Fondue are immense. The cheese must be maintained at a precise temperature to ensure the "bridge" does not snap, requiring a team of "pourers" to patrol the line with copper carafes. The performers must possess the stamina of statues; the piece officially lasts seven hours, though it can be looped indefinitely. During the 1974 performance at the Kunsthalle Basel, the line reportedly held for forty-two hours, ending only when a performer succumbed to a sneezing fit.
While the Swiss Cheese Union was dissolved in 1999, Infinite Fondue survived its patrons. It is now viewed as a seminal work of "Bureaucratic Surrealism."
As Benno himself noted in a 1992 interview with The Wire: "The cheese is the only thing holding us together, and the cheese is cooling. We are all just bread waiting for the snap."
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