Arts & Entertainment

Tate modern serves a super-salad

By team ⋅ March 29, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

The Sunday Times, 16 March

Many chefs regard their dishes as a work of art. Now the concept is to be turned on its head by an artist who plans to prepare a giant salad, dress it, mix it, and dish it up for 300 people in an event at the Tate Modern.

Alison Knowles, an American experimental artist, will coordinate the chopping, mixing, and serving, set to the music of Mozart, in a performance designed to blur the line between the aesthetic and the everyday.

Knowles, born in 1933, was an early member of the Fluxus movement in the 1960s with Yoko Ono, John Cage, and Joseph Beuys. The avant-garde group, which was at its height from 1962-1964, specialised in staging simply event combining different art forms and media. Her art is preoccupied with meditating on the everyday.

The premiere of Make a Salad took place in 1962, and there have been occasional performances in America in the past decade. This event will take place on the spring holiday weekend on May 24 as part of a Fluxus extravaganza.

This time Knowles will buy her ingredients – hundreds of lettuces, cucumbers, carrots, and tomatoes – at a supermarket. She will act as the ‘head chef’, but will be assisted by five members of the Tate’s catering department, chosen for their cutting skills. A large trestle table will be laid out, crossing 25ft above the turbine hall. A cellist playing a Mozart concerto will signal the start of the event, and once the music is over, the chopping will begin. The sound, amplified by speakers, will be relayed around the gallery for 15 minutes. The ingredients are then thrown, in order, down into a plastic-lined vessel below. Knowles and her assistants then move downstairs to begin mixing.Knowles has stipulated that olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and herbs such as rosemary and fennel should be added to the final miz, before it is served to the 300 strong audience.

‘It’s a participatory event in every sense’, said Kathy Noble, the event’s curator, ‘the work of the chefs, the observation of the audience and then the chance to eat what they have seen put together.’