From studio to dining table: Art with a chef’ hat

In the 1960s, many young artists felt a similar impulse to place everyday places and objects at the center of their work. As an artist, the idea of donning the role of running a restau­rant fitted perfectly into this age of artistic upheaval. In 1969, two restau­rants based on this prin­ciple opened in the United States: Allen Ruppers­berg’s “Al’s Café” in Los Angeles and Les Levine’s “Levine’s Restau­rant” in New York. Al’s Café opened on Thursday evenings and resem­bled a classic Amer­ican diner, although a glance at the menu revealed many a hard-to-digest meal such as “three rocks with a scrunched up piece of paper”, “filet of tree bark” or “cotton with star­dust”, an ironic allu­sion to the Land Art move­ment evolving at the time. After an order was placed, Ruppers­berg then prepared these sculp­tural meals and served them; guests consumed them at their own risk. That said, real beer was on sale and over the three months of its exis­tence the café (part instal­la­tion, part partic­i­pa­tory perfor­mance) in this way soon emerged as a popular meeting point of the local art scene.

What was prob­ably the artist-restau­rant project of that era which ran for longest was “FOOD” (1971–3), opened by Gordon Matta-Clark, Carol Gooden, and Tina Girouard in New York’s SoHo district. It was run entirely by artists and was the only eatery in the district that offered healthy, sustain­able, and afford­able food; within a short space of time, the restau­rant had become highly popular and a central meeting place for the creative scene. Matta-Clark orga­nized regular perfor­mances there, such as his “Bone Dinner”, during which he served oxtail soup, followed by roasted marrow­bone dumplings and frog’s legs. At the end of each evening, each guest was given a neck­lace made from the bones left on the plates. FOOD evidently succeeded effort­lessly in func­tioning as a restau­rant, a social exper­i­ment and a partic­i­pa­tory artwork, whereby the latter term did not really gain sway until over 20 years later.

Well before Tira­vanija opened his Art-Basel pop-up restau­rant, another artist had dedi­cated herself to providing the public at the Swiss art fair with culi­nary and artistic fare: Jennifer Rubell. From 2002 to 2018, each year on the occa­sion of the opening week of Art Basel Miami Bech the US concept artist and daughter of famed collector couple Mera and Don Rubell invited everyone to a monu­mental break­fast in the court­yard of the Rubell Family Collec­tion. Rubell opted for a classic menu: Some­times there were hard-boiled eggs, crois­sants, and bacon; other times porridge with raisins; or yoghurt; or Danish pastries, donuts or bread with butter and salt. The way the food was served was anything but conven­tional. Part instal­la­tion, part inter­ac­tive food perfor­mance, in “Faith”, 1,573 pastries were balanced on a giant seesaw; in “50 Cakes”, the Rubells spoonfed their guests by hand with choco­late, vanilla, and straw­berry cake; at “Just Right”, the public was left completely to its own devices. Borrowing from the fairy­tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, you had to clamber through a hole in the fence into a derelict house, grab a bowl and spoon from two huge heaps, serve your­self porridge from huge, steaming pots, and grab a sachet of sugar, a box of raisins and then get some milk from one of the large fridges.

Rubell, who is also a trained cook, initially rejected the idea of defining her brunch instal­la­tions as art. However, the partic­i­pants in the food perfor­mances constantly enquired after the name of the artist behind the events and in 2009 the influ­en­tial art critic at the “New York Times” Roberta Smith labeled a contri­bu­tion Rubell made to Performa 09 as a “successful melding of instal­la­tion art, happening and perfor­mance”. Only then, and on recog­nizing how closely her ideas were related to Tira­vanija’s concepts and the prin­ci­ples of rela­tional aesthetics did Rubell start to present herself openly as an artist.