LEWD FOOD FLUXUS BANQUET
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Most Fluxus eat-ins, if you will, had simple themes, such as a color or a specific dish. John Lennon and Yoko Ono, a seminal Fluxus artist, once had a banquet in which every dish included grapefruit. On another occasion the artists might have produced a banquet of only green foods, or the now-famous “Ten Flavors of Mashed Potatoes” (reprised, after the more traditional dessert, at the Arts Club) featuring mashed potatoes flavored with cinnamon or mint as well as the more common varieties with gravy or melted butter. The idea was that the everyday has value–not, as a Dadaist might suggest, a wonderful absurdity–but inherent value for its own sake. The Fluxists wanted to rethink mashed potatoes: Hey, mashed potatoes and hot fudge! Why not? There’s a playful, childlike awe to this approach. What happens happens. And if nothing happens, that’s OK too.
But the Arts Club banqueters, well-intentioned as they were, seemed to miss the point. Unlike the Fluxus originals, they were dying for something to happen. But other than an impromptu, halfhearted oral copulation out in the hall between a banana and Geoff Hendricks, one of the original Fluxus artists brought in for the event, nothing much did. Moreover, the event seemed intended not to offend the Arts Club patrons–just titillate them a bit rather than create an authentic experience.
Part of the meal was “a course of bricks,” a play on words and a reprise of a Hendricks stunt from the 1960s. The bricks came midway through and were delicately laid in front of each diner by one of the ubiquitous tuxedoed waiters. This may have provided the most Fluxus-like moment of the evening: somehow those bricks, which were genuine masonry, took on an edible look in that context. Suddenly they seemed gelatinous, or maybe like meat loaf. Most people couldn’t believe it was a real brick. Once they got used to the idea, though, they resorted to little jokes: “You can’t have the next course until you clean your plate!” “This was a bit heavy, don’t you think?”
