The Sweet Spot: Peter Nadin's Bootleg Buying Club

Peter Nadin, The Bo'sun's Chair, 2011. Fifty-seven hemlock logs, terracotta, wood, string, nutria fur, wax, fabric, indigo pigment, bronze and galvanized nails ranging from 60 to 122 inches high, in Peter Nadin, "First Mark," at Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York, through July 30, 2011.


Peter Nadin, Raft, 2011. Honey, terracotta, wood, twine, bank run, wax and ham, 288 x 288 x 9 1/2 in.


Eggs, honey, and maple syrup are just part of the bounty, from the Old Field Farm, in Cornwallville, New York, which is available at GBE and poorly photographed here.

After a brief break, necessitated by its food-free Nate Lowman exhibition "Trash Landing," Gavin Brown's enterprise once again has a commissary. In the gallery's rear kitchen, in which Rirkrit Tiravanija operated a soup kitchen back in March, artist Peter Nadin has set up what he terms a "Bootleg Buying Club," a miniature market that sells goods from his 150-acre Old Field Farm, in Cornwallville, New York. A soup kitchen it is not. Instead it's artisanal and luxurious and just slightly tinged with nostalgia: contemporary Brooklyn as captured by the New York Times Dining section, which has already taken note. (As Paddy Johnson points out, Nadin is a press magnet.)

Nadin's gourmet heaven stocks pork rillettes and eggs, fine herbs and maple syrup, as well as jars of bright amber-colored honey, which seem likely to be popular with visitors given that three tons of that relatively pungent ingredient are sitting in the adjoining room, serving as a foundation of sorts for his Raft (2011) sculpture. (Interestingly, Nadin did not use Old Field Farm honey for the piece, though he did use local honey, purchased from a nearby county.) I couldn't resist buying a small jar on opening night, moved, in part, by the idea that I would go home and make John Cage cookies using Peter Nadin honey. (Wild, I know.) Of course, I stupidly forgot one of the cornerstone principles of Cage's macrobiotic regime: "Honey is sugar; don't use it." Regardless, it's great when slathered on English muffins or melted into tea.

Tiravanija's installation-heavy show manages to look somewhat restrained when compared with Nadin's offerings, which include not only 6,000 pounds of honey but also a forest of 57 towering hemlock trees and a suite of huge paintings rubbed with materials like wax, honey, and black walnut — bombastic updates, perhaps, on Ed Ruscha's Stains (1969). Witnessing all of this, it's hard not to wonder how smaller, quieter, more intimate shows will feel in Brown's year-old space.

Food's Fiscal Facts, Marinetti, and the "Art of Eating"

Food's Fiscal Facts from Avalanche 4, 1972. Shown at "From the Archives: 40 Years / 40 Projects," at White Columns, New York. Photo: 16 Miles [more]

Gordon Matta-Clark's Food restaurant ran the advertisement above at the end of 1972, the first year of the restaurant's operation. Favorite parts: 1,111 lbs of baked duck, 5,568 loaves of bread, 3,082 free dinners given, 1,083 glasses broken. They were paying $6,000 for a year's worth of rent at the corner of Prince and Wooster in SoHo. (Lucky Jeans has the space today.)

On a related noted, I wrote a piece about art, food, and a few upcoming events in New York that combine the two. Here's the opening, about Marinetti's Futurist war on pasta:

“Pasta, however grateful to the palate, is an obsolete food,” Futurist leader Filippo Marinetti declared in 1931. “Its nutritive qualities are deceptive; it induces skepticism, sloth, and pessimism.” Despite generating considerable debate at the time, Marinetti, of course, lost his war against the Italian staple he claimed to despite photographic evidence that suggested his real feelings about the food were a bit more conflicted.

— "The Art of Eating" at Artinfo

Cage in the Kitchen: John Cage's Cookie Recipe

"When you're with friends, you can have a potato."

Matta-Clark, Hirst, Tiravanija, Sarabia: quite a few contemporary artists have played a part in culinary, contemporary art experiments. Now, posthumously, we can add John Cage, who, we learn from the video above, discovered alternative diets from John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

The John Cage Trust has transformed the Dia:Beacon cafe, always the site of delicious food, into a macrobiotic eatery from February 20 through 23. (Catch a train up to Beacon tomorrow to enjoy it.) I was up there for the Merce Cunningham performance today (around the Flavin section and wonderful) and enjoyed the cookies made from Cage's recipe.

Generally, I like my desserts filled with sugar, chocolate, or cream, preferably all three.  Cage rejected all three of those sweet mainstays but still managed to concoct a delicious cookie. Here's the recipe from the informative pamphlet that accompanied the installation, performance, restaurant transformation:

• 1 cup wheat flour
• 1 cup ground oats
• 1 cup almonds, ground into flour
• 1 tablespoon cinnamon
• Pinch of salt
• 1/2 cup maple syrup
• 1/2 cup almond (or hazelnut) oil
• 1 tablespoon vanilla
• 1 jar of unsweetened fruit spread of choice

Blend together all dry ingredients.  Mix together all wet and add to the dry ingredients.  Roll into small rounds and place on a greased cookie sheet.  Press the center of each with your thumb.  Put 1/2 teaspoon of unsweetened jam into the thumbprint of each, and bake in a 350 degree oven for about 14 minutes, reversing the cookie pans once during baking for even distribution of heat.  Cookies should be browned on the edges, but not throughout.

The complete list of recipes is available through Dia.

Eduardo Sarabia's Bar Aleman at the Whitney Biennial

Photographs by Lauren K.

With Nicolas Bourriaud's notion of "relational aesthetics" now being embraced by curators at major museums thirteen years after its formulation, it was perhaps inevitable that visitors to the 2008 Whitney Biennial would be greeted with quite a few social events presented as art: among them, an interactive music performance (Lucky Dragons), an artist-curated dinner party (Rita Ackermann & Agathe Snow), a slumber party (DJ Olive), and a series of dance marathons (Agathe Snow, again).


Among these, though, none was probably more warmly received - and rightfully so - than Eduardo Sarabia's drinking establishment Bar Aleman. For a series of three nights Sarbaia served his homemade tequilas (available in three varieties) atop his ceramic and rosewood bar at the Park Avenue Armory. The night I was there (March 14, the final evening), my friends and I were served the delicious, smooth tequila by his friends, while he provided jams from a set of turntables. People were (pleasantly) packed into one of the main floor rooms, dancing as gigantic stuffed moose and oil portraits of long-passed general stared down on us.

There's not necessarily anything radically new here; contemporary artists have, of course, been playing the role of restauranteur and club promoter for some time now. Three examples: Gordon Matta-Clark running the pioneering SoHo establishment Food in the early 70's, Damien Hirst providing the decor and conceptual underpinnings for London's Pharmacy in the late 90's, Rirkrit Tiravanija opening a Thai food stand in New York's 303 Gallery in 1996. Matta-Clark and Hirst were establishing legitimate businesses (even if it's doubtful that Food ever pulled much of a profit), while Tiravanija was aiming for the opening of some sort of utopian framework for interaction within the gallery.


Sarabia's twist on the game is a lot more fun: three nights, some extra money via the Art Production Fund for full liquor licenses, and a massive sound system. It might be an allegory for the post-millennial art market (Though Sarabia claims his pure tequila leaves no hangover! No comment on that.) or a commentary on first-third world relations filtered through a meditation on agave production (as the Whitney's curators would somewhat bizarrely prefer you have it), but at its core it seems like an attempt to subvert the museum's standard operation, if only for a few moments. In place of the institution's bourgeois obsession with conservation, one experiences unrestrained expenditure, a give away (destruction) not unlike the potlatch ritual.

Art costs money, and Sarabia - to everyone's obvious delight - chooses to burn both in the service of a party. In one sense, it's an immense celebration of a change in status (a common occasion for the potlatch): he's made it into the Biennial. But Georges Bataille has noted that the potlatch is not purely celebratory: it also contains an inherent provocation, "... constituted by a considerable gift of riches, offered openly and with the goal of humiliating, defying, and obligating a rival." In other words, Bar Aleman, proffering endless glasses of tequila and blasting dance music, positions itself apart from Tiravanija's (and the Whitney's) purported desire for democratic discourse. In its place, it posits two things better-aligned with the moment: pure revelry and a bold challenge.