Between popular art and high art, Christian Langlois’ The Dirty Dining Room combines discourses on art and gastronomic rituals in diegetic form. The video noisily mimics our daily activities, copying its exuberant and ear-splitting beat from commercial video clips, from which its composition borrows various ticks, from fragmentation to unbridled zapping. In its depiction of our society, which swallows more and more earthly nourishment and less and less spiritual nourishment, the video demonstrates the mechanism of a work of art (which is haute cuisine) and makes it circulate like a common consumer good of the day. Improvised sounds, hatched phrases, quotations, syncopated babbling images where, at the summit of the pyramid, there reigns a serious theorist of art, and in which there thrash about below in the vignettes restaurant clients, chefs, assistant chefs and gourmand and gourmet kitchen help... Christian Langlois invites us to an initiation ritual of the hierarchy of genres, like social classes, setting his consoles at the same high heat as his ovens”.

CRON, Marie-Michèle. "Circonvolutions : écritures vidéographiques, paroles nomadiques", Opera, Montreal, (1995).