Salad for a Crowd
Alison Knowles's "Proposition No. 1, Make a Salad,” 1962
Welcome to the first issue of Weekly Special, a food-art newsletter by Andrea Gyorody.
If you’re getting this inaugural missive, you probably already know me, but for posterity’s sake: I’m a curator, art historian, writer, and editor. Among other interests (catalogued over on my website), I’m passionate about the places where art and food intersect to create something beautiful and weird and magical.
For years now, I’ve been obsessively collecting—mentally, on Instagram, in my Notes app, and now on a very unwieldy spreadsheet—works of art that are entangled with food, cooking, and eating. Some of these works use traditional mediums (painting, sculpture, printmaking) to represent food, while many others use food itself as a medium, as a raw material to be looked at, smelled, manipulated, and sometimes consumed.
It’s a worn-out cliché, but it’s true: everybody’s gotta eat. Food is sustenance. It’s also symbolism; politics; economics; culture; memory; sociability; and racial, labor, and environmental history. Food is infinitely complex and contextually specific, not to mention sensual and visceral. Food is the stuff of some fabulous art because it’s capable of resonating in so many different ways. As motif, medium, and material, food is, as far as I can tell, inexhaustible.
That’s why I’ve started Weekly Special—as a vehicle for eating my way through art history one artwork at a time, and sharing what I’m excited about.
This journey won’t be chronological, nor will it be limited to modern and contemporary art, though that’s my bread-and-butter. (Did I mention there would be puns?) I’m starting with a work I particularly love from 1962, but I’ll be bouncing backward in time to talk about Baroque still life paintings of exotic fruit, and fast-forwarding to 21st-century Caesar’s salad chandeliers, bodegas filled with felted foodstuffs, artist-crafted beer, and much, much more.
If you have tips or suggestions, send them on over! Just hit reply on this email.
And if you know someone who might enjoy this newsletter, please forward it! You can also follow along on Instagram @weekly_special, where I’ll regularly share food-art news and other fun tidbits.
Now let’s dig in!
This Week’s Special
Alison Knowles
(American, b. 1933)
Proposition No. 1, Make a Salad
Event score
First performed October 1962
Back in the fall of 2018, I convened a group of Oberlin College students to help me make a salad. At the time, I was curator of modern and contemporary art at Oberlin’s art museum; the students, all of them eager and delightfully awkward, were in a first-year seminar titled “Foodways and Foodscapes,” which framed food and eating as forms of cultural knowledge.
We had met once before, at the museum, to look at prints, drawings, photographs, and small objects that depicted foodstuffs, but I wanted our second session together to take a more conceptual turn: rather than look at food-as-art, we would enact it.
In a cramped dorm kitchen, we would perform Alison Knowles’s iconic event score Proposition #1, Make a Salad, first staged in 1962 at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art. The score is an extreme no-recipe recipe; the only instruction is in the title itself, which directs you to make a salad, with whatever you so desire.
On the appointed day, the 12 students in the course arrived carrying fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, oils, and vinegars. After washing and prepping the produce, we dumped everything into a giant plastic bucket I had bought (and furiously scrubbed) for the occasion, then tossed the salad with fresh parsley and mint, lemony dressing, and prodigious amounts of salt, before doling it out on paper plates.
In the end, the salad was… unremarkable. More specifically: one-dimensional and a bit confused. I had suppressed my very strong natural desire to direct the whole operation by assigning specific foods to the students, and instead set up a spreadsheet so they could see what other people we’re planning to bring, and encouraged them to think about contributing stuff that would, you know, taste good with the other stuff.
It turns out that most college first-years don’t have a great sense of flavor profiles, or know what it means to compose a cohesive dish. So the salad was an assembly of random ingredients, loosely joined by an improvised dressing. Edible, certainly, just not especially exciting.
Alas, the salad itself, in my view, wasn’t the primary objective of realizing Knowles’s score. Crowded around a long dining table, the students and I talked between bites about the experience of coming together to make and eat a salad. They all felt a certain kind of warmth, a combination of camaraderie and being cared for. I imagine that feeling is especially common among the Oberlin students who live in co-ops and cook for each other all the time—a practice that points straight back to the experiments in communal living that dominated the early ‘60s, right when Knowles debuted her score.
A few students joked that a bowl of salad would never quite look the same, and though they said it with a tinge of sarcasm, I yelped, yes! That’s the point! The real gift of Knowles’s work isn’t a free plate of salad, but the realization that art, in the form of attention to what we usually ignore, has transformative power to make the everyday strange and wonderful.
That emphasis on all things quotidian is what has always drawn me to Fluxus, a loosely organized group of international artists working in the ‘60s and ‘70s, best known for their performances and interactive multiples (including one by Knowles that features dried beans in a tin shaker).
Where Duchamp’s readymades had posited everyday objects as artworks, Fluxus extended that provocation further, turning daily activities—drinking water, urinating, brushing your teeth, reading a book—into fodder for event scores that could be performed by anyone, anywhere.
In her excellent new book Fluxus Forms: Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network, Natilee Harren writes that the paradigmatic Fluxus event score, pioneered by artist George Brecht, was “a condensation of text designed to open out meaning to the widest range of interpretations.” That radical embrace of indeterminacy (also discussed in Julia Robinson’s earlier essay on Knowles) derived in part from the work of composer John Cage, who taught Brecht at the New School in the late 1950s, and also taught and befriended many other Fluxus artists, including Knowles.
In true Fluxus fashion, Proposition #1, Make a Salad is wildly vague, allowing for variations in scale, ingredients, publicness, etc. The infinite number of possible iterations keep the work dynamic and alive: after its inaugural performance in 1962, Make a Salad has been staged again and again at various fairs and museums, always to different effect. (In recent years, Knowles has miked her vegetable-chopping to emphasize the musicality of the score, adding a dimension that ties the work to her earlier bean compositions.)
The endurance of Make a Salad owes something to the variability of the Fluxus score, to be sure, but I think it remains compelling for other reasons, too. In an interview from 2016, Knowles remarked that the impetus for the score was her experience as “a married woman with two children. [Salad] was something that I loved and understood how to cook…It was something that I knew I could do on a stage that maybe a man couldn’t do as well.”
Grounded in humble, all-too-often-devalued “women’s work,” Make a Salad was, in 1962, about domesticity, hospitality, generosity, and care. It still is. The score turns the museum or gallery into a space of literal nourishment, and, like a doting mother, it doesn’t ask very much of you. Participating in Knowles’s score doesn’t require you to be vulnerable or get weird or embrace absurdity or chance outcomes. Unless you’re the one making the food, all you have to do is stretch out your hands and accept a lovingly made bowl of salad.
For Further Eating
In each issue of Weekly Special, I'll share a recipe inspired by the artwork of the week. This edition clearly demands a salad recipe, but how to choose?! I've had so many memorable salads, especially during the years I lived in LA, where salads are Serious Business. (Not the case for the years I spent in Germany, where I kept ordering things called Salat, expecting bowls of greens but always getting veggies swimming in mayo or cream or something else that mitigated their nutritional value. I ate it anyway, and developed a special fondness for Fleischsalat, which I am too embarrassed to translate or explain.)
In the spirit of Alison Knowles’s score, I’m sharing my go-to no-recipe recipe for a simple salad my Greek step-grandfather made on the regular when I was a kid. Crunchy, salty, and redolent of dill, the salad was a reliable sidekick for pastitsio or lamb cooked in tomato sauce and macaroni, a specialty my Papou prepared every Easter. But it could just as easily grace your weeknight table, holding its own against lasagne, baked feta TikTok pasta (yes I’m a fan, don’t @ me), or even a steak and baked potato. I’ve never used this salad as a base for a main, but I’m sure it would enjoy being paired with roast chicken or salmon, and could also withstand the addition of cucumber, feta, and/or Kalamata olives for the full Greek experience.
Dilly Greek Salad (aka Maroulosalata)
Serves 4 as a side
1 large head romaine lettuce, washed and thoroughly dried (I like washing the leaves ahead of time, then rolling them in a tea towel and sticking them in the fridge, where they’ll be cold and crisp when needed)
1 bunch fresh dill, stems removed, finely chopped
3 scallions (more if you love them, or if they’re skinny), roots removed, thinly sliced
a few splashes good quality extra virgin olive oil
a few splashes unseasoned rice wine vinegar
salt and pepper to taste
On a large cutting board, stack your romaine leaves on top of one another and cut cross-wise into 1/2-inch wide ribbons. Add the lettuce to a large serving bowl. Toss in the scallions and dill. If you’re not going to serve this for a while, stop here and stick the serving bowl in the fridge. When you’re close to serving time, sprinkle the lettuce, scallions, and dill with some olive oil and rice wine vinegar, then add salt and pepper (go easy at first). Toss with your hands (or tongs if you must) until the leaves are evenly coated—not heavily dressed, just lightly kissed with oil and vinegar—and the dill looks more or less evenly distributed. Splash with more oil and vinegar as needed. Taste and then add more salt and pepper if desired. Serve right away.
After I wrote up this recipe, which I've been wanting to do for ages, I was flipping through Mina Stone's Cooking for Artists and realized “my” recipe basically already exists there! It turns out that my now-distant memory of my favorite childhood salad matches Stone's version almost to the letter, which gave me a deep sense of validation.
If you’ve made it this far, BLESS YOU. If you have any feedback at all, please let me know! You can just hit reply on this email, or click the “Leave a comment” button below to comment publicly.
See you again in a week!
I really enjoyed reading this! Thanks, friend!!!