Food & Art

When Meals Played Muse

Caroline Goodden, a photographer and dancer who was then Matta-Clark’s girlfriend, said the idea for Food grew partly out of a floating dinner party scene that materialized in many of the cheap lofts inhabited, legally or not, by artists and performers in Lower Manhattan, including a group of Louisiana expatriates who played with Mr. Glass and cooked Cajun feasts for their friends.

At one of her parties, organized around a flower theme — edible flowers were served to guests who came dressed as flowers — Matta-Clark half-jokingly suggested that Ms. Goodden start a restaurant. She took him up on it, sinking substantial sums of her own money into it. Taking over the lease from a failed Puerto Rican restaurant, she, Matta-Clark and another downtown artist named Tina Girouard set about gutting and rebuilding the space in June 1971 with help from other friends, creating one of the few places to eat in the neighborhood at the time, besides Fanelli’s bar.

From the beginning, the idea was to establish not only a kind of perpetual dinner party but also a food-based philanthropy that would employ and support struggling artists, the whole endeavor conceived by Matta-Clark as a living, breathing, steaming, pot-clanging artwork.

“To Gordon, I think everything in life was an art event,” said Ms. Goodden, who now lives in a small town in New Mexico. “He had cooking all through his mind as a way of assembling people, like choreography. And that, in a way, is what Food became.”
“Though we consumed food, Food consumed us,” Ms. Goodden once wrote. “It was a free enterprise which gave food away much too freely.” But, she added, with all the enthusiasm of the times: “The joy is the idea. The idea, as an idea, worked. It was a beautiful, nourishing, vital, stimulating new concept, which was a living, pulsating hub of creative energy — and piles of fresh parsley.”

Beginning in the 1960s, partly for political reasons, food began playing a more prominent role in artists’ work.
Allan Kaprow (the artist who coined the term “happenings”) frequently used food: in 1970 he built a wall of bread, with jelly for mortar, near the Berlin Wall.
In 1971 Matta-Clark cooked a whole pig under the Brooklyn Bridge and served 500 pork sandwiches as part of a performance.
In the 1990s Rirkrit Tiravanija’s performances famously turned New York galleries into kitchens, where the Thai curry was both art and dinner.

And today...
PieLab

PieLab was originally conceived during a 2009 session of Project M in Belfast, Maine. Project M is John Bielenberg’s design-for-good movement, intended to inspire young creatives that their work can have a positive and significant impact on the world. Since 2003, Project M has been bringing young people together in various places all around the globe to develop projects and initiatives that contribute to the greater good at a local level. During this 2-week M session, the group came to understand the importance of healthy and supportive communities. Free Pie was a response to this discovery. On March 14th, (Pi Day) the designers set up a pop-up pie stand on a central corner in downtown Belfast, serving over 200 slices to hungry locals. Each slice was served on a real ceramic plate and eaten with a real fork, encouraging citizens to hang around and interact with their neigh- bors while enjoying their dessert. The message was simple: Sometimes life is bad; free pie isn’t.
The success of this inaugural event encouraged the designers to develop the Free Pie Movement as a way of motivating others to offer the same simple gestures within their own community. Again, the approach was uncomplicated and direct: make a pie, choose a spot, give it away, bring people together. The idea was eventually explored in several cities across the U.S. including Atlanta, Brooklyn, Richmond, Columbus, and Washington DC. What developed not long thereafter is today called PieLab, a multifaceted approach to small business that addresses this need for united and empowered communities in a way that is self-perpetual and fun.