Food-Art in the Archives
An interview with MoMA archives assistant Molly Lieberman, plus: loads of food-art exhibitions and people who staple bread to trees 🌲🍞🔨
Welcome to the latest issue of Weekly Special, a food-art newsletter by Andrea Gyorody.
Hello and happy new year! I hope you got the break you deserved. With an active preschooler running our household, there wasn’t much sleeping in, but we picked carrots at a farm; introduced him to Ratatouille, which remains one of my favorite animated films of all time (and he loved it); and gorged ourselves, on a rainy day in the Valley, on the best borekas I’ve ever had, which our child enjoyed nearly as much as the pickle he picked up and ate off the ground in front of a line of giggling customers. Not a bad two weeks.
Thanks to all for their sweet notes and emails about the Thiebaud tribute that closed out 2022. There will be more Thiebaud!!! But I’ve got lots of fun content planned before that, including:
a whole issue dedicated to C A K E 🍰 a guest-illustrated issue on food in poetry 🍒 an interview with Daniel Giordano, occasioned by his upcoming show at MASS MoCA (details below) 🍊 a post (or three) on food-art and conservation (it’s a sexier topic than it seems, promise) 🍯 Oldenburg’s cheeseburgers (and pretzels! with a recipe!) 🍔 and a rundown of the best food-art at the upcoming LA art fairs (in the style of this recap I wrote last year, which was too much fun not to repeat) 🥑
In the meantime, here are two “Best of 2022” recommendations to savor before you get totally swept up by the cultural offerings of 2023:
1. Watch The Menu, the dark and delightful spoof of haute cuisine and molecular gastronomy we’ve all been waiting for, now available on HBO; and 2. Read Memorial by Bryan Washington, a novel I finished a few weeks ago that will leave you a bit teary and also craving potato croquettes, among other Japanese home-cooked delights.
Now let’s dig in!
MoMA Archives Assistant Molly Lieberman on Food-Art Ephemera
Just after I visited New York last spring, my dear friend Erica DiBenedetto, a curatorial assistant at MoMA, texted me photos of a display in the museum library titled Dining, Digging In, & Dishing Out. Erica did a little detective work and learned that the display was organized by Archives Fellow Molly Lieberman. Molly and I connected over our shared past at Oberlin College (where I was a curator and Molly was a student) and I asked if I could interview her about her food-focused project for Weekly Special.
First, a tiny bit about Molly: as Archives Fellow, she supported reference services for MoMA Archives by fulfilling Scan on Demand requests and paging materials for in-person visits — in other words, really crucial (and tedious) work to support art historical research. (In the first year, she told me, she “scanned 1,020 folders, which amounts to 73,920 pages of material in total.”) She also helps digitize AV materials and handles reference requests, and, since we struck up our correspondence, was promoted to Archives Assistant as she began her fifth year at MoMA!
Below you’ll find our conversation, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Thank you for agreeing to chat about your work on this display of food-related ephemera from MoMA’s archives! Can you give us an overall sense of the scope and content of your project?
We have a display case in the Library reading room, between the periodicals and reference desk, where we exhibit special collections items. When we reopened to public researchers in March 2022, I thought we could use the case to exhibit items related to food and dining, as a celebration of public gathering. The primary audience for this display is the staff and public researchers who visit our Archives and Library reading rooms. The Archives and Library staff also spends considerable time in this space, so it was also something we could enjoy.
How did this project begin? Was there a particular object that inspired you to put together a display on food and dining?
One way that I try to represent the physical quality of archival materials while scanning documents is by capturing any information on a document’s verso. I was scanning a folder of documents related to the influential exhibition Americans 1963 when I found a note by [Pop artist] James Rosenquist that had been scrawled on the back of a menu. Out of my own personal interest, I started taking note of other folders I came across that contained menus. Then when I had the opportunity to make a display in the Library’s vitrine, I did a wider, more intentional search for such materials in our collections.
Can you describe the process of research that led you to assemble this particular group of objects?
My research process has been greatly influenced by my colleagues in the Archives—they have taught me that good research allows the primary source to shape the historical narrative. While scanning documents for researchers I constantly encounter unique historical documents by chance. As a visual artist myself, I tend to notice the material qualities of the documents I handle, such as their condition, weight, color, and graphic elements. My material-centered approach to archival research led me to broadly consider how menus are traces of social gatherings in the art world: opening dinners, brainstorming sessions in restaurants, artist-cooked meals, and food-inspired projects.
After my initial discovery of the Rosenquist menu, I performed a keyword search on our archival holdings page. Our descriptive finding aids led me to find a sketch of the staged performance of Robert Wilson’s The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin on the back of a menu from the Spring Street Restaurant (also known as the Spring Street Bar, located at 162 Spring St.) in the Calvin Tomkins Papers. By happy accident, while I was searching for documentation on FOOD (the famed artist-run restaurant in SoHo), I also discovered a second menu from the Spring Street Restaurant in the Avalanche Magazine Archive. Finding duplicate menus from the same restaurant was not only a confirmation of the interconnectedness of our collections, but paints a picture of the downtown artist community in the early 1970s. Side by side, they conjure up an image of Calvin Tomkins, Robert Wilson, Willoughby Sharp, and Liza Béar sitting at adjoining tables, grabbing a bite after a show and casually taking notes on the backs of menus.
I know we’re not supposed to have favorites… but are there objects from this project that you especially love?
I love how the first grouping of objects I’ve chosen, those in the Dining category, transport me back to MoMA’s early days. I found these sample menus for a dinner in honor of the exhibition Organic Design in Home Furnishing (1941) in one of the exhibition’s planning files. To paint the picture: sample menu “A” includes “Jubilee Soup, Vol au Vent of Scallops and Mushrooms, Fillet of Beef Jardiniere, Peach Melba Cake, Coffee and Mints.” Sample menu “B” has “Alligator Pear Salad,” “Cold Virginia Ham,” and “Chicken and Sweetbreads Toulouse,” among other dishes. What a joy to learn that they were eating alligator pear (an early term for avocado)! If the dishes themselves don’t feel dated, the prices quoted at $2.50 and $1.85 should definitely give us a sense that this was a different time in New York.
My colleagues also love the menus and accompanying photos of “Function at the Junction,” a country and western dinner dance held as a fundraiser for MoMA’s Junior Council in 1981. According to the program, the fundraiser had a mechanical bull, cowboy dance instruction, and music by a group called The Dixie Doughboys. What we really wish we could track down is the fabulous jackets worn by the attendees, with the MoMA insignia on the back. If we ever find these jackets, I petition to have them be the official uniform of the Archives!
Were there additional objects you would have included if you had had more space?
Oh yes, I had to edit down quite a bit! I wish I could have included the “Trustees' Dinner Menu on the occasion of the opening of the new Museum building” from May 8th, 1939, which famously has “Turtle Soup” on the menu, from the A. Conger Goodyear Scrapbooks. If I had had even more space, I also would have liked to include some documents that fleshed out the projects around food that were happening downtown in the 1970s, such as:
Contact sheets of Vito Acconci’s Rubbing Piece (1970), in which the artist spent one hour at Max’s Kansas City Restaurant “sitting alone at a booth, during the ordinary activity at the restaurant. With the fingers of my right hand, rubbing my left forearm and producing a sore,” a performance also documented in the Avalanche magazine archives at MoMA.
A hand-drawn draft of “FOOD’S Family Fiscal Facts” (1972), a five-page document that includes a preparatory layout sketch and one list each of “financial facts,” “food facts,” miscellaneous facts, and participants. It was originally published in Avalanche 4 (Spring 1972), on the 7th unnumbered page of advertisements preceding the main content of the magazine.
A photocopy of a holographic postcard that George Maciunas sent to Alison Knowles with the score of his version of Alison Knowles’ Identical Lunch (1971), which is part of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives.
Are there any interesting connections between these archival objects and works in MoMA’s permanent collection?
A couple of Daniel Spoerri’s silkscreen tablecloths from his series 31 Variations on Meal are held in the Department of Drawings and Prints, and accompanying photo documentation can be found in our Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives. These photos, which I chose to include in Dining, Digging In, & Dishing Out, not only represent Jon Hendricks’s meticulous documentation of the Fluxus movement, but show how archives can help us contextualize ephemeral art.
When the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection was acquired in 2009, MoMA staff was tasked with dividing certain items in the collection among the curatorial Drawings and Prints department, and the Archives and Library (then two separate departments), depending on various preservation and access needs. We found that there were many ephemeral Fluxus artworks that now exist only as written descriptions, performance scripts, or photographs, bringing into question these divisions between document and artwork.
I find the relationship between the Archive and the curatorial collection to be fascinating in this case, really bringing to light some of the conceptual challenges in acquiring an archive within an institution.
The Snack Pack
A few small bites to close out this issue 🍴👋
🦀 So Many Food-Art Exhibitions, So Little Time
Here are just a few of the dozens of food-art shows up right now around the world:
Things: The History of Still Life, The Louvre, Paris, through January 23
Adam Higgins: My Salad Years, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles, through February 4
by Alison Knowles: A Retrospective, BAMPFA, Berkeley, through February 12
Katie Butler: Pomp and Circumstance, Hesse Flatow, New York, through February 18
Sam Keller: Weird Energy, Patrick Parrish Gallery, New York, through Feb 18
Stephanie Shih: Open Flowers Bear Fruit, USC Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, through March 12
Jumana Manna: Break, Take, Erase, Tally, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, Queens, through April 17
The Legacy of Cacao, La Plaza Cocina, Los Angeles, through April 30
Stephanie H. Shih: My Sweetie Has No Pockmarks 我寶貝沒有麻子, Syracuse University Art Museum, Syracuse, NY, through May 14
The Meal, Dom Museum, Vienna, through August 27
And coming soon!
Daniel Giordano: Love from Vicki Island, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, opening February 4
Potluck, Hashimoto Contemporary, Los Angeles, opening February 18
Nic Dyer: Breadcrumb, Hashimoto Contemporary, New York, opening February 18
All Consuming: Art and the Essence of Food, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, opening April 14
🥐 A Reddit Where People Staple Bread to Trees
Why is this a thing?! I don’t know, but I’m grateful to Bon Appetit for reminding me about this delightful Reddit community, which is now 317k strong. I’m very tempted to buy a loaf and get to it, especially around Malibu, where someone stapling bread to trees probably wouldn’t be the weirdest sight on a Tuesday afternoon. The hardest part would be deciding what kind of loaf to use—or whether to employ, say, a cracker or a tortilla, if only to foment intense debate on the ontological bounds of “bread.”
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Go enjoy some art and food IRL, and see you again soon!