Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art
Greeting visitors outside the entrance to the Smart Museum’s exhibition ‘Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art’ the night of the opening was Michael Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen (Food Truck) (2012), for which the artist and his team served up kebabs on paper facsimiles of plates looted from one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces. Walking inside the Smart, one was treated (in close succession) to: Sonja Alhäuser’s Flying Feast (2012), a catering performance made with local university students especially for the opening in the form of party snacks served by waiters meandering between her buttery, Dionysian sculptures that graced long tables in the museum’s lobby; Tom Marioni’s The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art (1970–ongoing), a fully operating bar serving seemingly bottomless supplies of beer; and a performance by Theaster Gates and The Black Monks of the Mississippi – music to feed the soul. ‘Feast’ pressed key questions about the politics of food, but also about the limits of the gallery as a primary site for contemporary art and, by extension, about that elusive province of art-making that often goes by the names of ‘community art’ or ‘social practice.’
The exhibition inside the galleries was a selective history of the practice of artistic feasting. It traced a crooked path that began with the Futurists, whose ritualized meals first inspired the Smart’s chief curator Stephanie Smith to organize this ambitious project. The emphasis fell on conceptual, feminist and Fluxus-inflected works which were grouped in a section titled ‘Performative and Conceptual Feasts’ (key works here included: Alison Knowles’s Identical Lunch, 1969; Daniel Spoerri’s EAT ART, c.1961–ongoing; Suzanne Lacy et al.’s International Dinner Party, 1979–ongoing; and Marina Abramovic´ and Ulay’s Communist Body/Fascist Body, 1979/2012). Another large grouping, ‘Social and Critical Feasts’, reflected a broadening global perspective, but also attended closely to the local dimension of artistic hospitality (works included: Mary Ellen Carroll’s Itinerant Gastronomy, 2012; Lee Mingwei’s The Dining Project, 1998; Mella Jaarsma’s Pribumi Pribumi, 1998, and her newly commissioned I Eat You Eat Me, 2012, which actively links contemporary Chicago to Jakarta). Many of these projects were represented through archival materials, making clear the limitations of the museum as a site for the kind of revelry that is implied by the word ‘feast’.
Standing apart from this were several photographs by Chicago-based Laura Letinsky, which bookended the exhibition. Although Letinsky is reputed to be a wonderful chef, and the exhibited images depict – via haunting, fragmented angles – the by-products of meals she has made, what was most interesting about her contribution was the way in which these photographs helped to create a kind of high-wire tension between the untouchable, melancholy dreamworld of the picture and the messier stuff of meeting, eating, laughing, burping – the unframeable feast.
The exhibition’s most ambitious commissions, by Gates and Rakowitz, took place at opposite ends of Chicago, tracing a politically charged map of the city. Gates’s Soul-Food Starter Kit (2012) comprises a functionalist sculpture of wood and ceramics, which serves as the tip of the iceberg for his Dorchester Project. One of the several properties being renovated and converted into a cultural gathering ground on Dorchester Street has become, among other things, a test kitchen for a planned soul food restaurant. In the dining hall, table-wares made by resident ceramists from Japan and their apprentices from the Midwest add to an atmosphere that could be described as Mississippi Zen. Other treasures here include the entire slide library from the University of Chicago Department of Art History and hundreds of volumes from the Prairie Avenue Bookshop, which recently closed after 50 years in business. If the South Side of Chicago is understood as a key crucible of African-American culture in the US, and if Hyde Park (situated just north of Dorchester) has recently come into international notoriety as Obama’s chosen neighbourhood, what cannot be forgotten is the painful history of discriminatory zoning, city-hall neglect and white flight which has scarred this part of Chicago since the 1950s. ‘Feast’ presented several carefully choreographed dinners, held in the aforementioned dining room, and which gathered together artists, musicians, poets, activist pioneers of the African-American community, donors, as well as members of the public whose names were drawn from a pool. Attending one as a member of the press, I was treated to exquisite hospitality, superb cuisine and much food for thought, served alongside the meal in the form of several semi-improvised sung ‘sermons’ that spoke of the troubles of Stony Island (a thoroughfare not an island) and the struggle to transform not just the look of the lawns in the area but entire mindsets.
In a similar way, Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen (Food Truck) encapsulated a crucial aspect of the artist’s ongoing engagement with his Iraqi-Jewish heritage and the complex intersections of American and Iraqi cultures and economies. The project involves employing as chefs and servers both the Chicago chapter of Iraq Veterans Against The War and members of the city’s association of Iraqi immigrants. The informal epicentre of this community may be found at Milo’s Pita Place in West Rogers Park, where a motley crew gathered one Sunday during the run of the show to break an inaugural bottle of champagne for Rakowitz’s project. Immersed in the fun I thought of how, like Gates and like many artists in the exhibition, Rakowitz was turning the tradition of ‘critical distance’ on its head, enabling instead a kind of ‘ingestion of critique’.
I am convinced that Bertoldt Brecht was wrong to dismiss the uncritical as ‘culinary’. But then, critique is not the only point of feasting. At stake as well, it seems, is both the ingestion and a great expansion of the enterprise of art, both within the body and beyond the walls of the gallery.
