Fuller, Rodia, Matta-Clark, Not Vital

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9 – 31 auost 2014

front page

Gordon Matta-Clark, Hair Play, New York City (1972), Photograph: Carol Goodden

grazia a impressum artists curatur organisatura dall’exposiziun grafica ediziun

Harold Berg, Ignacio Murua, Matías Cordone i Annina Hahn 2014, fundaziun@notvital.com Buckminster Fuller, Simon Rodia i Gordon Matta-Clark Not Vital Rukhsana Jahangir Süsskind SGD 750

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Courtesy of Harold Berg, Barcelona, Spain

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BUCKMINSTER FULLER SIMON RODIA GORDON MATTA-CLARK

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Buckminster Fuller -

Simon Rodia Watts Towers Los Angeles, U.S.A. (1921 – 1954) -

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mo porca che gust ch’eu n’ha da far quist’exposiziun aint illa fundaziun ad Ardez.

Cur ch’eu d’era amo teenager, n’haja gnü la pussibilit», fond auto stop tras l’America dal nord, da verer ün geodesic dome da Buckminster Fuller. Pella prüma jada vezzeva üna da sias construcziuns, usche grondas pero usche ligeras. Ün inscunter tot nov in mia vita juvna mo er ün mond chi’m pareva nö da quist mond. Daspö l» n’haja adüna gnü grond interess, admiraziun i respet per el i si’ovra ha moss» da nö tmair da realisar progets cha tü esch persvas er scha tü at saintasch tot sulet. Buckminster Fuller or “Bucky” sco ch’el gniva nomn» ha dat ün important impuls a blers architects, ingeniers id oters, er sch’el in fat nun ha realis» quella pruna.

I lura Simon Rodia, homin pac plü grond sco 1 meter i mez, pero cun üna visiun straminabla, chi gniva dad ün löet dasper Napoli id es emigr» cun 15 ons dal 1895 in America. El ha realis» tuors sur 30 meters otas aint il süd da Los Angeles a Watts. Cur ch’ün di til hana dumand» perche ch’el fetscha quistas tuors chi tendschan otezzas vers il tschel, ha’l respus ch’er el vöglia far alch grond. El ha lavur» aint in ses temp liber i nots interas vi da quist sömmi, ramassond materials sco fier, cement i ceramica ch’el chatteva sün via i süllas construcziuns ingio ch’el lavureva sco manual. Ses mond sumeglieva ün pa a quel da Gaudi i cur ch’el ha vis fotografias da las construcziuns dal grond architect catalan ha’l dumand» scha Gaudi haja ajüd o sch’el lavura tot sulet sco el vi da ses progets. Ün di dal 1955 Simon Rodia es scapp» sainza mai plü tournar a Watts.

I lura il fegher chilen chi’d es pero stat pac in Chile Gordon Matta Clark, figl dal pitur Matta. El veva stübgia architect mo si’ovra veva plü da far cun desdrüer o rumper fanestras aint il Bronx o tagliar foras aint in chasas disabitadas in America mo er in Europa. Splitting House ha nom üna da sias lavurs grondiusas ingio ch’el ha simplamaing tut davent ün per craps da la fundamainta da mincha vart d’üna chasa a New Jersey fin cha la chasa es sfessa i fuorm» aint in mez ün tagl.

Cun quai cha a Soho dal cumanzamaint dals ons 70 nu’s saveva ingio ir a mangiar ha’l rivi cun amis id imustüt cun sia amia Carol Goodden chi’d es gnüda a far la visita ad Ardez, ün restaurant cun nom FOOD. Er quai ün ovra d’art.

NV als prüms auost 2014

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This exhibition of Buckminster Fuller, Simon Rodia and Gordon Matta-Clark has a deep resonance with the direction that Not Vital’s practice is taking. That is to say, his ar­ chitectural projects around the world, which blur the boundaries between sculpture and architecture. In this text I will explore Vital’s relationship with the ideas that MattaClark, Fuller and Rodia were expressing.

The American philosopher, architect and inventor Buck­ minster Fuller pays homage to Simon Rodia’s mythical Watts Towers in the moving and insightful documentary I Build the Tower. The Watts Towers were single-handedly built in Los Angeles between 1921 – 1954 in Rodia’s spare time (he was a construction worker). They consist of 17 interconnected structures, two of which reach heights of over 30 metres. There are five fundamental points that Fuller returns to several times throughout: 1. Individual initiative 2. Freedom of spirit 3. Inside-ness and outside-ness 4. A structure made of tension and compression 5. Economical ways of building It is uncanny that these are at the heart of Vital’s buildings too. Individual initiative is demonstrated by his extra­ ordinary capacity to travel to far-flung parts of the world, alone and without anyone’s prompting. When he decides to build a house – as he has done first in Niger and then in Brazil, Chile, China and Indonesia, (not to mention the Engadin) – he somehow always manages to make what most of us would consider an impossible project happen, even in adverse situations. For example, in Niger the

workers could not understand Vital’s architectural drawings, so he traced the outlines of the foundations directly into the sand. On NotOna, Vital’s island in Patagonia, he was told by an esteemed explosives expert that a tunnel could not be excavated through the rock, but still Vital found another way. The quick and flexible approach in the first anecdote, combined with the uncompromising-ness of the second, is often what makes Vital’s buildings possible.

In Vital’s work, the word initiative also implies a social dimension. While he would never call himself a philanthropist or missionary, his buildings in Agadez have a social function: School, Mosque and Houses that anyone from the village could use – such as House to Watch the Sunset, House to Watch the Moon, or House against Heat and Sandstorms. Vital sees this initiative as an exchange where everyone is benefitting, rather than him just giving. That is to say, he has the opportunity to build in a way that in the West would be financially and logistically unattainable, and the children have the opportunity to go to school. In Fuller’s analysis of Rodia, initiative and freedom go hand-in-hand.

Vital’s incredible creativity, when married with his choice of being an outsider (or ‘on the fringes’, as he calls it), is a powerful manifestation of his unique freedom of spirit.

If we move on to considering the structural concerns that Fuller outlines with regards to Rodia, we can equate the notion of inside-ness and outside-ness as perhaps the defining feature of Vital’s scarch works, a work he uses to describe the duality of his architectural sculpture. In the House to Watch Three Volcanoes in Flores, we see the stairs running, mirrored, along the inside and outside of the building. The intention is that when the house is closed,

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people from the village can still access the stairs and the amazing view. The stairs of the House to Watch the Sunset have a similarly public function. This is only made possible by the fact that the stairs are outside. As Vital writes, “The inside and the outside of the buildings emerge, like in Peter Handke's novel Die Innenwelt, der Aussenwelt der Innenwelt. Its use can be compared to a coat that can be worn on both sides.”

Stairs recur as a functional, structural element also in Makaranta (the school), where the stairs act as the children’s seats, and as a roof to cover a sheltered classroom.

In short, the ziggurat form of the stairs defines the building, both aesthetically and in terms of function and structure.

Structurally, stairs are also performing as the buttresses of the buildings. If we look at House to Watch the Sunset, we understand that we are actually looking at a tower that is being supported on three sides by the staircases. Without the staircases it simply would not stand up. House to Watch the Sunset therefore combines three of Fuller’s points on engineering: inside-ness and outside-ness, tension and compression, and the importance of the triangle as the strongest architectural shape.

The relationship between tension and compression is both an important physical element in Vital’s work, and a conceptual one. Indeed, Fuller also discussed this notion through both lenses. Tension is a concept that recurs in Vital’s sculptural practice in particular. This is manifested in forms that seem unstable or in flux, and in combinations of forms or materials that disturb our everyday associations and can appear surreal.

Fuller’s fifth point addresses economical ways of building.

Fuller is referring to this as both a financial limitation and visual style. We can see that Rodia’s towers consist of the minimum of structure: a skeleton made from what is essentially very thin, re-enforced concrete. It is important to note that he was a pioneer of this technique, using it long before it was commonplace. Rodia also spent very little on the building of his towers, which are made from cheap concrete and discarded metal, and decorated with found objects. Of course Vital’s buildings cost more, yet by going to remote (and poor) places such as Niger and Flores he can, as Fuller says ‘do more with less’. Furthermore, Vital also uses only local building materials – such as mud in Niger, wood in Brazil, and bricks in China. Economy can also be identified in Vital’s Minimalist building style, where lines are sparse and function (even if it might be an unconventional one) prevails.

Visiting the Watts Towers for the first time in Los Angeles in April 2014 was something of a pilgrimage for Vital. It was a very important moment, and watching the film I Build the Tower enhanced his passion for, in Fuller’s words, ‘reaching for the sky’ with his ambitious and dreamlike manifestations of scarch. Vital is constantly doing, in other words, acting on his initiative, and this marks the difference that Fuller alludes to between representing and articulating freedom. The way that Vital is articulating freedom reveals a whole new level of what freedom can be. It is this that links his spirit so fundamentally to that of Fuller and Rodia.

Alma Zevi, 2014

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Gordon Matta-Clark Splitting (1974) -

Gordon Matta-Clark Intraform Italy (1973) Courtesy of Harold Berg, Barcelona, Spain

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Gordon Matta-Clark Bronx Floors New York City (1972 – 1973) Courtesy of Harold Berg, Barcelona, Spain

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Gordon Matta-Clark Jacob’s Ladder Kassel, Germany (1977) Courtesy of Harold Berg, Barcelona, Spain

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Gordon Matta-Clark Caribean Orange/Circus Artist Book, Chicago (1978) Courtesy of Harold Berg, Barcelona, Spain

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Gordon Matta-Clark Office Baroque Courtesy of Harold Berg, Barcelona, Spain

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CARVING THEIR OWN BOUNDARIES Innovation and creation in the work of Buckminster Fuller, Simon Rodia and Gordon Matta-Clark The 2014 summer exhibition at the fundaziun Not Vital presents the work of three pioneering creatives who through remarkable practices have had significant effects in both architectural and artistic canons.

Buckminster Fuller (1895 – 1983) was a pioneering theorist who became renowned for the prolific number of inventions he developed in his lifetime. Interestingly, Fuller was twice enrolled at Harvard University, and twice expelled for lack of due attention to his studies. However, following experience in the milling and construction industries, as well as the US Navy, Fuller developed and maintained a keen interest in engineering and machinery, with a particular emphasis on improving existing designs. In his late twenties, following the failure of a company he was involved in, Fuller experienced a bout of depression, during which he stood on the brink of suicide. However, in a moment of clarity, he realized that in order to fully realize the extent of his abilities, he needed to cast aside all thought of achieving for himself and instead do it for the sake of others. Thus, following his so-called Egocide, Fuller went on to recognise an extraordinary number of achievements in his lifetime.

Lack of efficient and affordable social housing was a key concern of Fuller’s, and the Dymaxion TM House that he created in 1927 was his solution to this. Inexpensive to manufacture, the Houses could be mass-produced and easily transported. Fuller went on to invent various other elements to accompany this, such as the Dymaxion TM Car,

amongst others. However, despite these and other similar projects, it was one in particular that Fuller is especially renowned for. In 1951, Fuller applied for a patent on the Geodesic Dome, a building structure that distributes weight evenly without undue stress, has excellent structural longevity and is very durable. The Geodesic Dome become extremely popular and its structure can be seen today in many buildings around the world.

Throughout his life, he pursued a remarkable and diverse number of design and inventing projects, the cast majority of which had social benefit as their driving aim. In the scope of his vision, Fuller was a modern-day Renaissance man; across fields as diverse as mathematics, philosophy, architecture, design, engineering, and art, amongst many others.

The legacy of Simon Rodia (1879 – 1965) was the astonishing Watts Towers of Los Angeles, U.S.A. An immigrant worker from Italy, Rodia moved to the United States and proceeded to work in quarrying and construction projects over different parts of the West Coast. In 1917, he settled in Long Beach, California and in 1921 bought a section of land just south of downtown Los Angeles. It was here that Rodia went on to build his spectacular Towers, working alone over the course of 33 years. The seventeen structures are built from scrap steel with concrete and decorated with found materials such as broken bottles and tiles. Rodia named his creation Nuestro Pueblo, meaning in Spanish, Our Town. Thus, in common with Fuller and Matta-Clark, community and social interaction is a keystone of his work. Indeed, at the age of 75 Rodia simply gave over ownership of the Towers to a neighbour, and moved away from California for the remainder of his life.

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When asked about the original motivation for his constructions, Rodia modestly and simply stated that “ [he] had in mind to do something big and [he] did it.” Later generations have given far greater credit to his feat of construction; Buckminster Fuller gave Rodia the accolade of “ [ranking] with the sculptors of all history”.

Although a trained architect, the legacy of Gordon MattaClark (1943 – 1978) is also known as that of a pioneering artist. Born the son of the renowned Chilean painter Roberto Matta, Gordon Matta-Clark received his formal architecture education at Cornell University, just as his father had done.

However, as he embarked upon his career, it became clear that his work could not simply be categorized as that of an architect. Formally, his practice could be said to encompass both art and architecture, expressed in innovative interplays of sculpture and performance, amongst other forms.

Working primarily in New York in the 1970s, some of Matta-Clark’s most famed works were a series of interventions struck into everyday buildings. The most well-known of these was Splitting (1974), for which Matta-Clark sliced through an ordinary residential house in New Jersey and removed layers of bricks from the bottom of the walls, forcing the house to ‘split’. Liberating the space from its prior sole utilitarian designation, and re-defining its form and function, in many ways this work embodies Matta-Clark’s radical re-envisioning of art and architecture.

For Matta-Clark, the process behind such works was paramount. The act of cutting, removing and then finally, walking through the fractured space, lay at the heart of these works.

The New York creative scene that Matta-Clark inhabited was a melting pot of practitioners from different creative disciplines that socialised, co-habited and worked in close contact with each other. Such interactions occurred in places such as the exhibition/performance space of 112 Greene St, SoHo, an open forum for experimental interdisciplinary collaboration. Naturally outgoing in nature, Matta-Clark was at the heart of this creative scene, and in fact went on to co-found one of the most significant cultural hubs of New York in that period. In 1971 Matta-Clark started the restaurant project FOOD, along with his partner Carol Goodden, and the artist Tina Girouard. In keeping with Matta-Clark’s gregarious and social character, FOOD (situated in Lower Manhattan, New York) was conceived as a restaurant run and staffed by artists to provide a low-cost meeting space for other creatives. FOOD quickly established its own idiosyncratic position, as ideas such as artist guest chefs given ‘carte blanche’ ensured that it was always an exciting, popular and ever-changing place to visit. Matta-Clark viewed the restaurant as a performative space that operated as a form of living sculpture.

All three of these remarkable creatives defy neat categorisation. Working across different fields, they fluidly, organically and very simply brought to life the creations that they envisioned. Whether posthumously or otherwise, their remarkable projects and creations have cast deep shadows for successive generations to follow.

Rukhsana Jahangir, 2014

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Gordon Matta-Clark FOOD New York City (1971) Photograph: Dick Landry Courtesy of Harold Berg, Barcelona, Spain

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FOOD An excerpt from the memoir, A Prickly Pear

by Carol Goodden (Caroline Ames McCoy), all rights reserved.

One of Gordon’s major art pieces was our restaurant, FOOD. One of the more powerful stamps I have placed upon the world was our restaurant, FOOD. The idea of FOOD started at my “flower party” the spring of 1971. Guests came dressed as flowers, food was decorated with flowers and there were edible flowers. Gordon suggested I start a restaurant. I said OK. By June, I had obtained a lease on the NW corner space of Spring and Wooster. It was a failing Hispanic eatery known simply as Comidas Criollas. They were happy to leave. The landlords, fresh to Soho, were thrilled to get rid of them. We re-negotiated time and money and set to work.

I thought this should be “our” effort, a community venture in keeping with the co-operative times. After all, 112 was a socialist system; there were food co-ops, living co-ops, the Grand Union Dance Company was a cooperative improvisational dance company comprised of the top choreographers. Many of us seemed to do everything together. As I was trying to live “carefully” on my inheritance, I thought having equal financial help would be wise. I asked Suzi Harris and Rachel Lew to be a part. They both had money. Suzi Campbell Harris was rumored to be a Campbell Soup heir. She was married to Paul Harris, the arranger for the music group Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. I think it was Rachel’s money that Jeffrey Lew was co-operatively living on. Jeffrey nixed Rachel on the project so I then asked Tina Girouard. I wanted her Cajun influence and said that I would front her portion of the monies. My broker said I had plenty and that he was doing well for me. Suzi did not come up with any money nor, after the initial planning phase, did she produce much work. So the restaurant ended up being all about me and my money, and certainly my work; about Gordon, his work and his charismatic draw; and Tina – her phenomenal amount of work and her Cajun cooking influence.

Tina’s husband, Cajun jazz musician, Dickie Landry, was a photographer. The first day we unlocked the doors of Comidas Criollas to take down the sign and begin to strip it of every Hispanic vestige, Dickie took the photograph of the three of us – FOOD’s founders-cum-workerscum-hewers of wood and drawers of water – Tina, Gordon and me. It is a photograph that keeps appearing in magazines, books and museum shows. I am holding the keys, Gordon is folding back the metal security gate and Tina, in proper work attire, is pointing to the sign we were about to take down. The cast iron column on the corner was encased in shiny metal paneling. We took that off. The doors and windows were strangled in metal scissor gates. We took those off. The windows were large. We soaped them up with white shoe polish. Tina had come up with the name FOOD and it stuck. Tina scrubbed out the letters F-O-O-D in the dried white shoe polish. For a long while, even the first weeks of being open, that was our sign.

During our planning phase, Suzi and Rachel contributed a lot to menu planning, healthy food.

On the day that we opened they both sat and peeled hundreds and hundreds of garlic cloves for my Spanish recipe for garlic soup. I obtained the cooperation of Balducci’s on Christopher Street to deliver our produce and the Florence Meat Market on Jones Street to deliver our meat, two of the best shops in Greenwich Village. Gordon designed the tables, work spaces, open kitchen, low stove, giant cooking kettles – the general ambiance of the place. It was lovely but all wrong for a restaurant. But what did we know? We were tackling it like everything else in life – we had no idea where we were going, we were just going, and having the time of our lives doing it.

Our tables were square ash tops with a central metal base. I wanted the light look of the wood that I had remembered in English country kitchens. We scrubbed those twelve tables nightly with bleach, sawdust and a very stiff brush, working up the grain of the wood. Work spaces were thick maple slabs running as much as twenty feet. The cabinet doors were all natural wood, a nightmare to clean. The floor was terracotta tile, a mellow surface color and a disappointing echo chamber. In the center of the railroad-car space was our kitchen, a big double-oven Garland stove against the wall and in front of it a low grill structure with two massive gas burners that Gordon had someone in Chinatown make for us. The narrow alley between the two stoves allowed the cook to easily work both stoves. The low stove was to have enormous copper pots which we found on the Bowery and had tinned. Those pots were our soup and stew pots. Soups were my forte. People came back again and again for my soups, Gordon’s charm, and Tina’s Cajun dinners.

They came back for that and for our bread. There was a group of artists who had tired of the New York rat race and relocated themselves at a commune called Madbrook Farm in northern Vermont, 1970. Their winters were heavy and they still needed an occasional sip of the energy of New York. We struck a deal: We would find somewhere for them to stay for a month and they would come down and bake at nights for FOOD. It was perfect. Each month a different couple came down from Vermont and played in the city for the month. As the restaurant was empty at nights, they could have their child with them, if they had a child, while they baked in the evenings.

We got the most delicious bread ever produced in any New York restaurant and it changed every month as the baker changed.

We did many innovative things which other restaurants began to copy. Having our kitchen out in front in the open for all to watch us cook was something not seen before. We had piles of chopped parsley in huge bowls that people could just take as they wished to garnish soup or salad. We had bowls of fresh butter and baskets of our ‘homemade’ bread. The people could walk past our three bubbling soup pots to smell, see and choose one. We changed the menu and the chefs every day. We had few choices, but different choices, daily. We squeezed fresh orange juice or carrot juice upon demand. What a disaster that was! It was labor intensive and very messy, but very popular.

I need to back up here to the construction phase. We weren’t sure what to do for chairs. We certainly weren’t going to make them though we did think of having Richard Nonas make some of his Brancusi-type chairs. They would have been beautiful aesthetically but heavy to move and not comfortable. He didn’t think furniture should be comfortable. It was an interesting Puritan concept for a Jew. We did not want to have an entire set of matching restaurant chairs that we could have picked up at auction. Gordon and I headed out for some Connecticut wrecking barns in my pickup truck. My huge dog, Glaza, was folded up in the front seat with us as it was raining.

The wrecking houses had just what we needed – fifty chairs of every conceivable shape, style and color. They were the decoration in the sea of terracotta tile and repetition of white ash tables.

There was a high-backed, carved wood, country kitchen chair painted light blue; a simple wood chair painted yellow; green chairs, white chairs, brown chairs. They were like a sprinkling of colored confetti, strewn helter skelter. They suited both of us. Milton Glaser, a frequent cover illustrator for the New Yorker magazine, drew a wonderful rendition of those chairs for an article that the New Yorker did on FOOD. My truck was a boon to FOOD. It hauled tons of construction debris to the west-side dumps; it hauled the chairs back from Connecticut; it hauled the giant copper pots from the tinning factory, etc. Other trucks brought the stove, lumber and sheetrock, the concrete mix. The day of the concrete pour for the base of the tile floor was a scene. We had little idea of what we were doing and the Italian driver caught on to that quickly. Gordon had got some friends to help him with the pour, and luckily others stopped by to watch. It was raining which helped not at all. Gordon had on rubber boots to wade in the concrete. The front window of FOOD was a large, wide, doublehung so we could slide the bottom sash up. The concrete truck stuck its delivery sleeve through that window and started pumping – much too fast. Gordon and Ted Greenwald and Manfred Hecht couldn’t move the heavy sludge fast enough. Soon Richard Nonas, Keith Sonnier, Barry Sonnier, Jed Bark and other artists took their shoes and socks off, rolled up their pants and joined in shoveling, moving the concrete from the front to the back. We had also ordered too much concrete so, as the floor got covered, they were shoveling concrete out the back door onto the street. I kept running out in the rain up to the driver. He was reluctant to roll his window down. “Slower”, I would yell above the roar and the splattering rain. Or, finally, in tears, “Stop, stop!”. Of course he wouldn’t, said he couldn’t leave it in the truck. I, knowing nothing, thought this was terribly mean.

Another event which was part of our do-whatever-we-wanted attitude was our smoker. One of the Cajun cooks, Randall Arabie, made excellent smoked sausage and smoked pig stomach. It was a superb dish. The roasted, smoked pig stomach turned a fresh golden-brown and was stuffed with tasty pork and a yam or a banana run through the center so that when it was sliced, you had a round bit of sweet color in the center. I am sure the dish would have been quite popular if we had thought to name it something other than ‘smoked pig stomach’, but we had not yet got to that level. Anyway, Randall brought his own smoker from his loft which he set out on the city sidewalk to work. The smoker luckily was unnoticed, or unremarked upon, for long enough that Randall was able to get the pork sausage smoked. Then suddenly, sirens were heard on Houston Street. New York always has sirens screaming up and down Houston Street but when the fire engines turned onto Wooster Street at FOOD, we had to pay attention. No, there was not a fire at FOOD, we just had our smoker going. They let us continue, despite the fact that we were a business, but we did not try it again.

Our first year was our most “co-operative” year. One of my efforts was that the capital I was using to build FOOD should be self-generating and then support the entire art community as it needed. And that it did. For three years FOOD produced delicious healthy inexpensive meals – lunch and dinner – provided a relaxing place for artists to meet, plan events, be stared at by business-types who could go home and say they saw Rauschenberg or Rothenberg, Nonas or Noguchi. For three years FOOD earned enough money to pay its bills, feed Gordon and me, some friends, our workers, and some bums who came to the back door. For three years FOOD employed, over that time, roughly sixty artists so that they could afford to live in New York while they struggled with their art career. Dancer Barbara Lloyd made salads to order (paintings) at the salad bar; Cajun jazz musician Richard Peck washed the dishes, the sounds of which he perceived as music and recorded; Cajun saxophonist Robert Prado was our lunch chef, making superb gumbos and showing people how to eat softshelled crab which we piled upon the newspaper-covered tables; painter and performance artist Bob Kushner started out as a desert chef and ended up helping me run the whole place when Tina had to return to Dickie to give some

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of her life back to him; sculptor Ned Smythe was a chef; dancer Nancy Green waited tables and of course there was my friend, Kitty Duane, with her German Shepherd. Even Glaza was in the restaurant a lot. After all, he knew everybody. He was table height so he would rest his big sled-head on the edge of the table and roll his mascara eyes at the eater. Sometimes he was successful, sometimes not. Nobody seemed to mind.

FOOD was famous because of its very good food and casual atmosphere; because it was where all the artists congregated then; because it was the first restaurant in SoHo; and for its “Guest Chef Days”. Gordon’s idea was that the whole restaurant was an art-piece, a living sculpture.

It was his idea to invite artists to cook a meal on Sundays. The rules were: 1) Do anything you want; 2) We will provide the groceries you request, the waiters and the dishwasher. Sculptor Mark di Suvero had just received a large Guggenheim grant and with it he purchased a crane to help his elevator-crushed body manipulate his massive sculptures. Mark was going to serve dinners with his crane through the double-hung window in the front of FOOD. He was sequestered off to Venice before he could do this but his idea lived on. Hisachika Takahashi, with his beautifully-sensitive palette for interestingly juxtaposed patterns and the clear light colors often employed in his sculpture/paintings, produced paintings as his dinner dishes: butterflied shrimp, pink and white; deep purple spiced cabbage; curled raw carrot and slivers of ginger; deep green lengths of string bean. There were many guest chefs. The dinners I heard about years later from as far away as Europe, were Gordon’s. The serving of these dinners and the public reaction to them, Gordon saw as performances.

In one dinner performance which he called Alive, he served, as an appetizer, live brine shrimp swimming in broth in the center of a halved, hollowed hard-cooked egg white. Some non-artist customers were furious and claimed there should be a law against us. We told them Guest Chef Days were no-holds-barred days and they could leave if they wished. So they did. Some of the artists, Liza Bear, stared transfixed at the little swimming creatures and some, Jackie Winsor, chugged them right down. In another dinner performance, known as Bones, Gordon went to the meat district on the lower west side and loaded the truck with oxtails and other beef bones cut into wrist-sized circles. He got frogs legs and chicken legs from the markets. We boiled up some of the bones and used the natural gelatin to make a tomato aspic salad. Then we served a delicious oxtail soup. The entrée was a platter of bones of all sizes and their attendant meat – frog, chicken, and beef. The beef bones were stuffed with wild rice and mushrooms. I served 125 dinners that night – heavy bones on heavy plates – fun, but exhausting. When the customers were through eating their dinner, the bones went to musician Richard Peck who scrubbed them up, then went to sculptor/jeweler Hisachika Takahashi who drilled holes in them and strung them on a rope. Along with the check stub, the waitresses gave the bone necklaces back to the customers so they could wear their dinner home.

Another Guest Chef artist, Lee Jaffe, Gordon tried to get to be part of his “food performance.”

It was discovered in a letter he had written to Lee that Gordon referred to the cannibalistic impulses repressed with Christianity. He wrote, “I am writing because I feel you are the chosen one, the perfect subject for culinary communion as the modern world has long forgotten.”

Suggesting that Lee should make the ultimate sacrifice, he chided, “just imagine what a fabulous treat you would make.”

Working at FOOD was much more than we had bargained for. I was up at 4 a.m. buying fish at the Fulton Fish Market, now a seaport museum; sometimes the janitor would not show up and Gordon was mopping floors at midnight. We started out serving Sunday brunches but gave that up after the first year as we did not have a fast food set-up and we needed some rest. We did not charge enough money the first year so the busier we were, the more money we lost. I had the ridiculous idea of serving a glass of milk for 5 cents for pure nostalgic reasons. One day a little toad-like woman, ugly as any gnome and very funny, came and asked me if I knew what I was doing. I had seen her many times eating at FOOD. I looked at her quizzically so she went on to say that she noticed I charged too little for some things and too much for others, and that she presumed I didn’t know how to price things out. As she was absolutely correct, I hired her on the spot to be the bookkeeper. Tina had been doing payrolls and needed to have her life back so this seemed just fine. This little toad taught me the restaurant business. In fact, she might have taught me about business, period. But, as always, comes the bitter with the sweet. Our little restaurant was annually running a quarter of a million dollars through its little twelve-table hands and she thought she would help herself to some of it. Had she not been so drunk one night, the bank deposit she hid in the bean barrel might not have been found by the morning chef. This raised suspicions. Then she was found drunk in the gutter in front of FOOD and this was not good for our reputation. The books were getting more and more sloppy and she was getting more and more beligerant.

called The Kitchen, in SoHo. There he made clothing out of food – string bean necklaces that looked like green bear-claw necklaces; pita bread chaps, celery fringe headdresses, and then said, “Oh Jennie, I see I made a mistake. Let me cash out your check and give you the right amount.” Of course the toad would keep the overage. My greatest aid was Bob Kushner, a California artist recently arrived. He was very interested in the whole process of cooking – the colors, the smells and textures. He had had a food show at a gallery carrot curl earrings, and on and on. He was imaginative, reliable, sensitive and together. He freed up my evenings so that I could play with Gordon. We were enormously grateful to him.

Once I began to pull away from FOOD, I realized it had to end. We explored the idea of selling it.

Gordon went to Leo Castelli, the most courageous, innovative gallery owner on West Broadway.

Castelli used the earnings of established artists to fund the younger up-and-coming artists and would get involved in all kinds of art projects. Gordon thought Leo would be interested in buying FOOD as an art piece. I do believe Leo thought about it, but the practicalities seemed impossible.

We then tried just plain marketing. Artist types recognized that when Gordon and I left – what would they have? They would have possibly an economically dangerous situation. Would our clientele stay with them? They thought it better to start their own restaurant with their own idea.

The Greeks who came to look, couldn’t understand – not the layout, not the menu, not the artist employees. Reality came to bear and I realized that we did not have something saleable. Then Ruby arrived. Ruby was an attractive, very clever girl who worked her way quickly from waitress to assistant chef to assistant manager. We liked her and she was an orphan. I have always felt like an orphan so my heart went out to her. We essentially gave her the restaurant, thinking that was what she wanted. Apparently she wanted a dress shop in England, so she stole the money and ran.

That was the end of FOOD, 1974. It was the end of the physical site that bore the name of FOOD. But FOOD, as Gordon, lives on. It still appears in books and magazines as a phenomenon of that period in SoHo. There was even a documentary traveling show created by Catherine Morris that aired in New York, Chicago, London and Germany. In Pamela Lee’s book she states, “Food ... (was) representative (of) the deeply social, communitarian ethos of the young community of SoHo. There was more to the business of Food than the mere act of cooking and eating ... for the restaurant served as a backdrop for art-related events, catalyzing SoHo’s social horizon.”

When Ruby caused the padlocking and re-possession of FOOD by her calloused and secretive defaults, she ended a piece of history. Aside from the economical damage to me, it was OK. Gordon and I had left FOOD and so had all those who came to eat, for Ruby was incapable of carrying on the power of the social mood that Gordon captivated or the quality and look of the meals that I created. We had provided for our community socially and economically. We had nourished it. We had put a stamp on the history of SoHo. We were done.

(1) T he Grand Union Dance Company: Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, David Gordon, Barbara Lloyd, Nancy Green, Douglas Dunn.

(2) T he dancer, Debra Hay, and her then companion, David Bradshaw were two of the Madbrook Farm commune members. They had a child together, Savannah. Debra was last known to be teaching dance at a college in Austin, Texas. David was last known to be the companion of Tina Girouard in Cecelia, Louisiana. The only thing I had remaining from FOOD was one of the carving knives. David made knives. I recently asked him to repair the handle on the knife.

When he shipped it back, repaired, it had carved in the handle, “FOOD 1971 Carol Goodden David Bradshaw”. Madbrook was known for its communal rule of communication through body language and acts rather than words.

(4) T he Spring Street Bar actually got their doors open a week earlier than FOOD, but that was a more formal place, a bar, and not the daily restaurant, the family place, that was FOOD. (5) English Liza Bear, the mastermind behind the art magazine Avalanche, could not manage the brine shrimp which Gordon produced for one of his Guest Chef dinners. Jackie Winsor, Keith Sonnier’s wife, could manage. She would have swallowed all of Gordon, if given the chance.

(6) From Object to be Destroyed, the work of Gordon Matta-Clark by Pamela M. Lee, MIT, 2000, page 71.

(7) C atherine Morris researched this period putting together a well-acclaimed show for New York, Chicago, London and Germany.

“You fire her,” I told Gordon. He tried but they ended up joking.

(8) Ibid note (6)

“You fire her,” he told me. I managed but it made me sick. I think I gave the little thief a month’s severance. After she left, workers told me that she frequently paid them with large checks space

The end of the seventies, was the end of the Avante Garde. What we were doing was a mission.

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Gordon Matta-Clark Carmen’s Fan #3 New York City (1971) Courtesy of Harold Berg, Barcelona, Spain

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