play with your FOOD
Jennifer Rubell won’t reveal much about her new Toronto-inspired ‘interactive food performance,’ but you can bet it will be fun
Jennifer Rubell is a selfproclaimed “Toronto junkie.” The New York artist has been visiting the city on and off since last winter, flying to and from Toronto to plan for her upcoming installation at this year’s annual Power Ball fundraiser. For the gala, Rubbel is creating a work titled “So Sorry,” a wink toward Canadians’ world-famous politeness.
“It’s such an intense undertaking and we’ve been working on it for a year,” Rubell says. “Until it actually happens, nothing is fixed. I can talk your ear off about things that won’t happen.”
But if Rubbel is cagey about what exactly the installation will entail — and she is, declining to describe the work in any explicit detail — a look at her past works gives some clues: the artist will use food as a medium and employ her audience as performers, blurring the line between viewer and participant through materials that, Rubell says, people are “already inclined to engage with.”
“I call them food performances but I don’t think that’s completely true,” she says. “They’re interactive food performances. I think all artists have a visceral attraction to the medium that they choose, and I have that feeling toward food. I’m totally excited by it all the time; it’s both completely democratic and has our class structures built within it. It contains the history of civilization. It has a lot of qualities that make it a medium much more difficult than, say, paint. But it’s an incredibly rewarding medium.”
For So Sorry, Rubell has enlisted some of Toronto’s top culinary minds, each of whom will be participating in the work in one way or another (again, Rubell won’t get into detail). Of star chef Grant Van Gameren’s participation she says that “there’s going to be a very exciting octopus element;” coffee house maven Sam James will be doing something with coffee. She alludes to the Tempered Chef owner Betrand Alépée’s involvement by describing “an act of baroque athleticism imposed on eclairs.”
“The piece is constructed around people releasing a lot of their inhibitions towards the art object,” she says. “There are moments of really exhilarating destruction. As much as you’re sorry to certain, let’s say, performers, you’re also sorry for yourself.”
Rubell acknowledges that she has “some idea” of how people will interact with her installations, but admits that there is a significant element of the unknown. She’s put on pieces like “So Sorry” before, though: in 2009, her “Creation” invited viewers to smash chocolate replicas of Jeff Koons’ rabbit sculpture with a hammer; 2013’s “Faith” balanced 1,573 handmade Chinese egg custard tarts on a pedestal which, as audience members ate the tarts, adjusted itself to the changing weight.
“It’s never happened that someone hasn’t engaged,” she says. “I leave open a big part of (my work) for interaction that I don’t anticipate. A big part of the role of the work is to crack open that possibility.”
With “So Sorry,” Rubell says she also wanted to reflect what she sees as a “deep humility” intrinsic to the food scene in Toronto. It’s a vibe that she doesn’t pick up on in New York, and one that, she says, residents of Ontario’s capital are all the better for.
“That humility, to me, creates a possibility of more exciting food being made,” she says. “There’s a kind of openness between chefs, and more positive feeling toward the people eating your food. What I see in these chefs that’s so exciting is that they have that quality, and also aggression in their cooking. That’s rare, to have the ambition coupled with the humility. I think that that’s how great things happen, whether it’s food or art or anything else. You have to be humble in front of history.”
“I wake up in New York City craving a croissant from the Tempered Room in Toronto,” she continues, laughing, “because you actually can’t get a croissant like that in New York City.”
‘I think all artists have a visceral attraction to the medium that they choose’