“Soup & Tart: Los Angeles” serves up Fluxus redux

FIFTY ARTISTS. Three microphones. Two minutes every.

With a program as unwieldy as a 2023 reprise of Jean Dupuy’s 1974 epic “Soup & Tart,” it’s actually about what you keep in mind, what stands out. Earlier this month at MOCA Geffen, the poet Elaine Kahn confirmed up along with her child in arms. When it was her flip, she requested the viewers for a diaper. Somewhat commotion, folks murmured and squirmed on their cushions, then a diaper was handed up entrance. Kahn squatted down and altered her child, proper there on the ground—all in two minutes. That made an impression.

Dupuy’s occasion, held on the Kitchen’s loft in TriBeCa (on a ground with an precise kitchen), was a cartwheeling, caterwauling, typically poignant night of thirty-odd performances by the likes of (pre-fame) Hannah Wilke and Richard Serra—plus what the New York Instances referred to as “a cheap dinner consisting of soup, bread, wine and apple tarts.” Serra performed a prerecorded story about his father telling him to dig a gap and fill it again in. Wilke stripped right down to a bedsheet and posed like Jesus Christ. One act concerned dancers who’d simply imbibed between zero and ten photographs of tequila, whereas one other required the viewers to maintain a recovering alcoholic from ingesting. Dupuy caught all of it on video, then abridged it to below an hour.

In a approach, it’s fruitless to equate final week’s “Soup & Tart” to its namesake. Totally different eras, totally different coasts, wholly totally different casts. But the occasion, curated by Sarah Cooper and produced by Energetic Cultures (prefer it says in your yogurt), actually begged the comparability. Did they assume the viewers would simply roll with it, that the comparability would maintain up—that an thought as sui generis ’74 as “Soup & Tart” might, not to mention ought to, be reprised in any respect?

Within the cavernous foremost gallery at MOCA Geffen, famously an outdated warehouse for police vehicles, a line of I-beams shaped a pure barrier between two zones—name them the stage and the meals courtroom. On one aspect, performers rotated via their bits, taking turns at one in every of three microphones positioned amongst a crowd seated on skinny cushions with their paper flatware and plastic cups. On the opposite aspect, six lengthy traces for soups and tarts intersected with a seventh for drinks—a canned IPA value $14, a cup of wine $20. (All proceeds to the artists and cooks!) It felt like a competition: paltry parts, overpriced drinks, water laborious to search out, unhealthy acoustics, and nobody fairly positive the place the performances had been taking place or in the event that they’d began. Solely half the room appeared to care.

Alison O’Daniel took the mic and tried to elucidate that she would really like the gang to play a recreation of phone, passing messages (and a packet of Covid masks) throughout the room to her good friend Gabie Sturdy. Each, she stated, are laborious of listening to. However the crowd wouldn’t shut up. They wished their soup and their selfies, and the bit lingered awkwardly because the messages made their inefficient approach.

Two of my favourite performances appeared to parody the buttoned-up bacchanal environment: Ei Arakawa shuffling via the throng, handing out cups of water from a tray whereas an enormous display confirmed an image of a waterfall; Emily Mast and Gregory Barnett, one on the opposite’s shoulders, yelling “Free Wine!,” cracking two bottles, and sloppily topping friends’ up. These had been gestures—gestures towards a simmering lack. An absence of what? Generosity—to the performers principally, all however probably the most operatic of whom struggled to be heard over the murmuring crowd till round two hours in, when the soup and tarts ran out and most of the people had left—I’m guessing to go eat dinner.

Six cooks. Three soups. Three tarts.

At the moment you wouldn’t host an occasion like “Soup & Tart” with out using a squad of videographers, and naturally you possibly can belief the performers, their mates, and everybody else within the viewers so as to add to the reservoir of documentation. Possibly I’m quaint. The emphasis on high-fidelity posterity and digital networking felt unsympathetic to the idea of a easy artists’ meal.

After all, there was nothing easy concerning the meal. This being ’23, the meals was fairly as a hashtagged image and served as a multisensory calling card for the six collaborating cooks and eating places. A vegan hibiscus borscht by Gerardo Gonzalez, cradling a scoop of cashew cream and dusted with dill flowers, was each contemporary and filling. The one roti crouton on Rashida Holmes’s corn chowder was appreciated. As for the tarts—a savory providing from Sera Pisani performed on pintxos, stacking a patch of whipped feta with candied orange, inexperienced olive, and white anchovy. And I stay grateful for the visible and buccal distinction of the salted pecans and pepper blossoms climbing the chocolate cremeaux by Hannah Ziskin. My solely (philistine) grievance right here, actually, is the parts.

Cooper writes within the program notes that she found Dupuy’s “Soup & Tart” a number of years in the past, when the Getty acquired the Kitchen’s archives. I can’t assist however surprise if the archive—or maybe the realm of unrealized beliefs—is the place “Soup & Tart” belongs, alongside Gertrude Stein’s salon and the unique Woodstock. (Or for that matter Station to Station, which I lined for these pages—a a lot mightier Doug Aitken manufacturing equally patterned on a countercultural fest from the acid years that would solely exist in 2013 as an advert for Levi’s.)

Is it artwork? Leisure? Branding? Dinner? The reply is an LA “Sure.” I, too, consider within the synergistic magic of dinner events. That dream lives on in “Soup & Tart” ’23. The MOCA occasion billed itself as a showcase of LA’s intersectional artwork and meals scenes, an opportunity to let free and experiment and see what occurs—and it was. However S&T ’23 was additionally a type of commerce honest, artists and cooks serving bite-size samples of their wares, and this side felt begrudged, secret, virtually shameful. In the meantime, Dupuy’s occasion was unabashedly tied to an exhibition of his work on the Kitchen. Fluxus undiluted has a sure puckishness—channeled by lots of final week’s acts, however unimaginable on the degree of MOCA and Energetic Cultures. The night time ended with Nina Sarnelle main a ceremonial smashing of ceramic plates (and a MacBook). Even so, “Soup & Tart” ’23 appeared to shirk the diploma to which Dupuy’s occasion as a complete, an accelerationist mannequin of bohemia, was prepared to self-destruct.

— Travis Diehl

“Soup & Tart: Los Angeles” occurred at MOCA Geffen on June 8.