Tag Archives: food

Menu for Mars: Test-drive cooking on the Red Planet

Posted on by

IMG_5622

It started with a polite invitation (“Join the Menu for Mars Supper Club as we pioneer a menu for the Red Planet”) and a series of tomato-red doors leading into plastic-walled chambers. Pierogi’s project space The Boiler has been transformed into a scientific kitchen until June 21st, during which time visitors and artists will test recipes for life on Mars as an extension of organizers Heidi Neilson and Douglas Paulson’s year-long Menu for Mars Supper Club.

IMG_5644

Joshua Liebowitz’s Untag: Prototype for Nutritional Privacy in Barcode-Ready Agar and LEDs

This Flux Factory educational initiative brings together artists, scientists, musicians, and the public to imagine food on Mars. I visited at the opening of Menu for Mars, where spaces encased in plastic featured a central kitchen surrounded by a greenhouse, a food gallery, a photo booth, and an office. The greenhouse displays Marco Castro’s ideas for an inflatable garden and greenhouse with plants that could survive the long journey and harsh climate. Tattfoo Tan has created NEMREs (“New Earth Meal Ready to Eat”) that are not traditionally appetizing—these dehydrated food packs are apparently made from rescued food waste.

IMG_5625

Tattfoo Tan’s Beet Treet

Social engagement brings this interesting theoretical proposition to life, as the space becomes an invitation to action. An ongoing series of programming involving groups as diverse as The Planetary Society of New York City, yogurt-maker Gil Lopez, and musician Will Owens offers guided ways to interact with the space. Anytime, however, visitors can take advantage of a pantry stocked with Mars-feasible ingredients in a variety of dried, powdered, thermostabilized, and dehydrated forms. Meals, including—I believe—those of visitors, will be documented, sample, sealed, and sent as prototypes to NASA to help with their plans to colonize Mars.

IMG_5635

Cooking ingredients in the kitchen

Tomorrow, June 13, at 3 pm, there is a “Jiminy Mac and Cheese” workshop, for those of you adventurous enough to imagine crickets in your Mars macaroni.

It’s a bold, new world.

IMG_5629

One of Heidi Neilson’s five portholes with views onto Mars entitled Big Sky Out There

 

Eating in MoMA’s Contemporary Galleries

Posted on by
“Untitled” (Placebo), Felix Gonzales-Torres, 2001

I highly recommend it right now. I went to MoMA slightly hungry, battled the crowds and opted to tour the contemporary galleries rather than face the masses in the permanent collection or new Diego Rivera exhibition. I chose well. In the shimmering installation by Felix Gonzales-Torres, visitors are invited to take a piece of candy from the pile which is eventually replenished. It is slowly depleted, to be refilled later, and was created after the artist’s partner died of AIDS-related complications in 1991.

Continuing on, the art gets better in terms of fullness. Not only did I get a piece of silver-wrapped candy, but I was next served green curry.

Curry from Untitled (Free/Still), Rirkrit Tiravanija, 1992

Yes, that’s right. I stood in line for a bowl of very decent green curry in a section of the gallery turned into a room-like space by a plywood frame and temporary walls and furniture. Rirkrit Tiravanija’s piece Untitled (Free/Still) first went up in 1992 at 303 Gallery, and the museum recently acquired it. You can check it out from noon to 3 p.m. most days through February 8.

Food as a medium in an installation or performance is something I feel I’ve seem more of in the past few years. Jennifer Rubell for instance has done some notable performance/installations involving food, like thecheese head at the Brooklyn Museum of Art or the more recent Art Basel Miami breakfast. However her works never seem nearly as appetizing as what’s at MoMA now.

Also check out: Five for Friday: Works that Look Good Enough to… for more of the museum’s edible works.