The Art of a Good Meal

Claudio La Rocco gets a good meal at Jennifer Rubell’s Performa and writes about it for ArtForum‘s Scene & Herd column:

Performa’s opening celebration, a made-to-be-eaten food installation by Jennifer Rubell (of, yes, those Rubells) called Creation, was all about quantity and consumption: a show of excess in a time of scarcity.

The elevator contained a tremendously stocked “DIY” bar. Guests needed only to pour, after grabbing one of thirty-six hundred drinking glasses—from goblets to jugs—and scooping out some ice from a giant heap slowly melting on its white platform and onto the concrete floor. Think Allan Kaprow’s Fluids. Sort of.

“Welcome to flu season,” choreographer Will Rawls quipped, digging into the ice with a big grin. “The only thing missing is a giant vat of Purell.”

True, though there were wet naps on the next floor, along with two thousand pounds of ribs. And shoulder-high rubber gloves on the floor below that, the better to fish cookies from vats of confectioners’ sugar. “For it to be really cool, it should have been a big mound of cocaine,” the artist and event designer Avi Adler pointed out. (Where’s Rob Pruitt when you need him?) But chef Mario Batali was in heaven.

Food for Thought (Scene & Herd/ArtForum)

All photos: Amber de Vos/Patrick McMullan