Come, ye hungry college students

On Saturday, May 5, the Smart Museum of Art hosted a symposium related to the topic of their current exhibit, “Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art.” This symposium, aptly (if not blandly) named “Symposium: of Hospitality,” consisted of several panels: a performance piece called The Identical Lunch Symphony, performed by Alison Knowles and a group of musicians, and a food truck presentation, which included culinary artists from Enemy Kitchen (Food Truck) and E-Dogz Mobile Culinary Community Center.

Upon arriving at the symposium, visitors were served “Slatko,” a sweet strawberry preserve that is served to guests in Serbia as a traditional gesture of welcome. So one might have “sweet” thoughts and discussions.

All of these discussions partnered beautifully with the exhibition. The Identical Lunch and Enemy Kitchen both had displays in the show, which brought another interactive element. A majority of the performance pieces documented in the show are also performed at the Smart on a regular basis to encourage an air of community, which inspires the concept of hospitality. According to Amy Mooney, a professor at Columbia College, these performance collaborations are shifting the moods of Chicagoans, “That’s what social change actually is – it’s the duration of a public arts project,” said Mooney in a panel on the Radical Domestic.

According to a student docent at the show, Feast has been one of the Smart Museum’s most popular shows of late. It could be argued that the strong performing elements and the un-traditional style of the exhibit is bringing in more patrons. For example, Alison Knowles’ performance of the Identical Lunch Symphony was done during the May 5th symposium. Knowles, in conjunction with a group of musicians, combined the ingredients required to make her identical lunch in a variety of blenders. Knowles conducted the musicians as she would a symphony in their blending of the lunch, which was then served to the audience.

The performance, which has no clear origin other than a start date of 1969, is also formally portrayed in the show by six silkscreen panels of Knowles’ friends enjoying the lunch and a small covered reproduction of the Identical Lunch: a tuna fish sandwich and a large glass of buttermilk.

This display of the Identical Lunch in the gallery is replaced every few days by a curatorial assistant.

The concept behind this piece is that no object, even an identical lunch, is truly the same since the human experience is constantly changing. According to Knowles, the project did not originally occur to her as art, it was simply her routine to attend the same Chelsea diner for lunch. Although soon, one of her friends Philip Corner, a composer, suggested the lunch could be a performance and soon Knowles began documenting the lunch. The opportunity to see the piece performed live, however, added an interactive element to the physical display.

The score for the performance states, “The Identical Lunch: a tuna fish sandwich on wheat toast with lettuce and butter, no mayo, and a large glass of buttermilk or a cup of soup was and is eaten many days of each week at the same place and at about the same time.” In order to stay true to the score, the Smart Museum also stocks the lunch materials for purchase so every single museum patron can experience the piece.

After a few moments of blending, Alison Knowles went around to all the actors and checked her concoctions before saying, “We’re going to have one more round before we serve.” The “soup” was then served to the audience.

Another popular performance piece in Feast is Tom Marioni’s “The Act of Drinking Beer With Friends Is the Highest Form of Art.” Marioni invites a crowd of people who bring their guests and they simply enjoy each others’ company, listening to jazz and Marioni’s stand up routine, while enjoying the relaxed atmosphere and dim yellow lighting.

The performing pieces in the show are interspersed by photography, video, sculpture and mixed media works following a timeline, which reaches back to the 1930s to an analysis of the Manifesto of Futurist Cooking. This timeline, which incorporates one of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ well-known “Untitled” candy sculptures, ends with a display of Michael Rakowitz’s “Enemy Kitchen” and “Flying Feast” gives a thorough, multicultural analysis of the radical hospitality exhibited by humans and all of the social, and at times political, ramifications of sharing a meal.

The only work that the curatorial team chose to display at several different locations throughout the show is a series of photographs by Laura Letinsky. Letinsky photographs collaged still lifes of images bothered from housekeeping, fashion, and food magazines to create sights of slightly desolate tables, which usually appear to be post-meal. These semi-melancholic pieces broke up the show beautifully while leaving the viewer to question what exactly happens when the hosting and hospitality is over.

Feast turns everyday moments of simple nutrition and socialization into more than art, but a celebration of everyday life. The artists in this show use meals as a synecdochic expression of society. In the end, we all have to eat- but only Feast invites you to consume artist-organized meals.

Feast closes on June 10, 2012.

This piece, “Untitled,” is from Letinsky’s series “Hardly More than Ever” and is featured in the final wing of the exhibit.

Photos by Jane Janeczko

If you haven’t gone to see this movie, turn off your computer and go watch it right now, then come home and read this. Even if you are someone who swears up and down that you don’t like comic book movies, I guarantee that you will enjoy this movie. Sure, there are a few naysayers, and it may be full of high-adrenaline fight scenes, but you shouldn’t go in to any action movie expecting any less.

Fans of Joss Whedon will recognize his trademark motifs in the writing—witty one-liners, shining moments of extreme character depth, and, of course, an earth-shattering character death that gives the new team the motivation to live up to its name. In addition to an amazing script, we’re faced with amazing performances from an extremely talented cast, supremely beautiful special effects, and incredible fight choreography. The score of this movie alone will send so many shivers down your spine that you’ll think you’ve been frozen for the last seventy years.

However, you shouldn’t go in to this movie hoping for something paralleling the Christopher Nolan Dark Knight trilogy. While Nolan tends to shirk off comic book conventions in favor of turning the costumed hero into something artistic, deep, and gritty, Whedon embraces the beloved bright colors and quippy dialogue typical of the Silver Age comics of the 1970s and 80s. If you’re looking for something artistic, then The Avengers is not the right movie for you. If you’re looking for a movie that will have you laughing one minute, crying the next, and sitting on the edge of your seat the entire time, then definitely go see it.

While not extremely necessary, I would recommend seeing at least Thor and Iron Man 2 before going to see Avengers. Obviously, seeing all of the films would help set up a more complete picture of each character’s back story, but Thor provides the most pertinent information about the source of the conflict between Loki and the planet Earth as a whole, and Iron Man 2 touches on some fairly important plot points about the lack of infinite, sustainable energy on Earth (thus the turn to research the extraterrestrial Tesseract cube, which is the driving force through most of the film as it is the key in opening a portal for an alien army to attack Earth—again, explained more in depth in Thor). However, Avengers manages to stand on its own: it provides enough information in the exposition that seeing the other movies is not compulsory, and you’ll be able to follow the plot regardless of how many you’ve seen.

The Avengers experience is nothing short of sexual, and not just because of the extremely attractive cast. When you go in to it the first time, you’re not really sure what to expect—sure, you’ve heard your friends talk about it, maybe even seen pictures or read about it, but you’re still not one hundred percent sure what to expect. And as it’s happening, suddenly you’re not sure if you can handle all of the feelings you’re having. You weren’t sure what this was going to be, but you didn’t expect it to be anywhere near this, you weren’t quite equipped to handle something of this level of greatness. The second time, you think you know what you’re getting in to, but you really just have a general idea of what’s going to happen, you know how it ends, but you catch on to subtleties and have a whole new range of emotions and are enjoying the little things so much. And it can only get better each time it happens.

Photo by marvelousRoland