Screening: Gordon Matta-Clark’s ‘Food,’ (1972) and Martha Rosler’s ‘A Budding Gourmet’ (1974)

Join us for a screening of Gordon Matta-Clark’s ‘FOOD’ (1972) and Martha Rosler’s ‘A Budding Gourmet’ (1974) with an introduction from art historian Andrea Gyorody. Matta-Clark’s ‘FOOD’ documents a day in the life of the legendary SoHo restaurant and artists’ cooperative, which opened in 1971. Owned and operated by Matta-Clark, Carol Goodden, and Tina Girouard, FOOD functioned as a neighborhood diner and as a space for experimental performance. As a social space, meeting ground and ongoing art project for the emerging downtown artists’ community, FOOD continues to reverberate in the pop-up restaurants, bars, and dinners that have marked the development of social practice art and relational aesthetics over the last several decades. Rosler, who has long used the theater of the kitchen as a setting and theme in her work, filmed ‘A Budding Gourmet’ the year before ‘Semiotics of the Kitchen,’ which has become a landmark of feminist video. In ‘A Budding Gourmet,’ a deadpan narrator explains her preoccupation with world cuisines, becoming a caricature of the Western (wo)man who masters exotic cultures through cooking. With tongue-in-cheek humor, the film manifests Rosler’s proposition that food is often “a system of production for self-recognition, othering, and class.” Andrea Gyorody is curator of ‘In the Artist’s Kitchen,’ an exhibition of avant-garde food art projects from the 1960s and 1970s, currently on view in the Book & Printed Matter Lab. From Pop art to Fluxus, Happenings, and Conceptualism, artists in Europe and the United States transformed otherwise banal, everyday sustenance into images, objects, performances, and communal experiences – which are, by turns, tantalizing and grotesque, self-serious and playful. The exhibition brings together books, magazines, photographs, ephemera, and facsimiles, illustrating what we might now recognize as the rich pre-history of the countless contemporary projects that feed our gastronomic obsessions. ‘Food,’ by Gordon Matta-Clark 1972, 43 min, 16 mm film on video Camera and Sound: Robert Frank, Suzanne Harris, Gordon Matta-Clark, Danny Seymour. Editing: Roger Welch ‘A Budding Gourmet,’ by Martha Rosler 1974, 17 min, video This event is free but reservations are required. Click here to reserve a place.