Celebrating Ten Years of Gastronomica!

Photographs by Jan Meissner.
Courtesy of Esso Gallery, New York.

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An Interview with Richard Nonas

Conducted by Sara Unzila Ahmed, March 2009

The sculptor Richard Nonas served as both curator and dishwasher at Gordon Matta-Clark's restaurant FOOD, which was featured in the August 2008 issue of Gastronomica (Lori Waxman, "The Banquet Years: FOOD, A SoHo Restaurant"). He was also cofounder Carol Goodden's boyfriend. Here he speaks with Sara Unzila Ahmed about the story behind FOOD.

SUA: Could you tell me a little bit about the background to FOOD?

RN: The Gastronomica article was the best I've ever seen about FOOD. It captured its essence perfectly. The early seventies was a time of openness for this group of young artists. We felt completely unconstrained and although we didn't realize why at the time, it was because there was no money and this freed everything. No one expected to become a rock star the way that people expected to in almost every other profession by the time they were thirty. It was a culture in which one could easily become a celebrity if you were intelligent. We all were, but none of us ever expected or courted fame.

It was a time when we were making and finding spaces to use as studios in which to show our work. At the time, there were a lot of empty places in New York and you could just talk yourself into them. We did things in the most direct way, so if we needed something, we did it ourselves. There were no boundaries, rules, or distinctions, and this fit with our art, too.

The money that was available for FOOD came to Carol [Goodden] by accident. Her grandmother was in charge of the money, and the only way Carol could inherit anything was if her mother were to die before her grandmother. This did occur, so suddenly Carol had this fair amount of money and she wanted to open a restaurant. Some people encouraged her and some tried to dissuade her. Gordon encouraged her even though he knew it wasn't going to work. Carol did end up losing her entire inheritance, but her dream was realized, at least for a few years.

SUA: What was your specific role in the creation of FOOD?

RN: I was living with Carol at the time, although we split up soon after, and Gordon was our closest friend. I helped in construction of the restaurant but I was not interested in the details. For a short time I was actually the dishwasher! I agreed to it on the condition that if any dish were really disgustingly dirty I could break it, and since there wasn't a station, everyone could hear it break! In a way, it became part of the art at the opening. However, it wasn't a performance as such, because at FOOD, the audience and participants were the same.

The cooking at FOOD was done in the middle of room. It was very unusual to see customers that we didn't know and we'd look at them quite disdainfully! But soon everyone became part of the group--even the UPS delivery people. People were always wandering in and out, because everyone lived in the neighborhood, and everyone who had helped to make FOOD happen felt free to make themselves a sandwich. But as they were the only customers, this wasn't great for business. Actually, that's how I became the curator--once, when I was making myself a sandwich, Carol said that I really had to have a job!

SUA: What did your work as art curator for FOOD entail, and how was the art displayed in the restaurant?

RN: In fact, it was not a "real, regularly scheduled job as such. The art was displayed occasionally on only one section of a wall with two sets of windows. The names of the artists didn't even appear, as the core group of customers, family, and friends knew them all anyway--they were each others' audience outside of the restaurant. FOOD was really a group of friends that kept growing into a core group of customers: family, friends, friends of friends. We all knew each other's work. It really was a much smaller art world in Manhattan at that point.

SUA: What sort of criteria did you use?

RN: None!

SUA: Can you comment on Gordon Matta-Clark as an artist and as a restaurateur? Did his art inform his cuisine? Can any parallels be drawn?

RN: [Gallery owner] Leo Castelli made a statement about Gordon Matta-Clark's work in which he said that "this whole thing is part of the art we're making and will be remembered." Gordon was a very strong personality and artist, and the fact that everything was destroyed mythologized him after his early death. Gordon's work was always about ambiguity, which served him well after his death, as what he left could be read in very different ways.

He didn't really use food that much in his work. The restaurant was a place in which he could work. He could cut up materials, like he did with buildings--he was completely impractical! He actually studied architecture as an undergraduate, although not very seriously, but because of this he liked to refer to his "background in architecture." He wasn't a very good engineer and had to make believe that he knew what he was doing a lot of the time, but it was all of part of his charm.

SUA: Do you have a favorite memory of any particular mishap?

RN: Yes, when we were pouring a new concrete floor. We had arranged for a concrete truck to be hooked into the window so the concrete would come from the truck straight into the restaurant. Gordon figured out how much we needed, but in fact ordered more than twice that amount. Once a truck starts pouring concrete, it can't stop, so it had to keep going and we were up to our calves in concrete and trying frantically to push it over to the side. We ended up with six or seven inches of concrete instead of one. It was actually a good metaphor for the way that FOOD, and everything, ran for us. We had no real understanding of the ramifications of what we were doing. There was just an immense amount of freedom.

SUA: Do you think the gentrification of SoHo has detracted a lot from its original spirit? (No real "starving artists" can afford to live there anymore!) Is there anything you miss in particular?

RN: We were the gentrification! It's our fault and our glory. All the changes were predicated on the artists creating situations that brought people to SoHo. Viewers came, stores came, restaurants came, rich people, Wall St. people, lawyers, people involved in publishing all came. This meant that prices went up at each point in the cycle. By time the second round of artists arrived the rent prices had increased, and the gentrification kept spiraling.

SUA: I was quite surprised to see that FOOD served sushi! This seems way ahead of its time. Where did the idea come from? And do you remember where you got your fresh fish in those days?

RN: We had one Japanese-born chef, and when he made his meals at home and in the restaurant, he did sushi. He was very involved in the elegance of process, so he brought that to the restaurant on the days that he came in. Carol went to the fish market every day at 4 a.m. Gordon occasionally went with her, especially when he was filming.

Robert Frank was involved in the show [is this the 1972 video "Food"?] too, but only because he was around and happened to be in FOOD at the time so Gordon handed him the camera! We were all just playing together! The camera belonged to Barbara Rauschenberg. There really was access to everything we needed, even though almost no one had money, because the people that did [have money] became the patrons of everything, or at least the patrons of those of us whose work they were interested in.

SUA: FOOD seems to have been very ahead of its time with its seasonal menus and emphasis on local ingredients. Do you smile when you see chefs today emphasizing such things, when it all just seemed natural to you? Were you consciously trying to make the menu postmodern?

RN: FOOD was certainly ahead of its time for restaurants, although it was also quite impractical for the times, because people cooked the same way that they would cook in their own homes. This was because no one was paying for the food except for Carol, and she bought the best ingredients because that's what she did at home. No one worried about Carol's losing money because it was an accident that she had it in the first place! As I said, nobody really had anything at that time. We all had temporary off-the-book jobs and just shared what we had with each other.

FOOD wasn't an art piece, but it was a big chunk of the lives of the people whose lives were the material of their art. So, just as we used every aspect of our art that was appropriate to whatever art we were making, we lived our lives in the same way that we made our art. The line was very blurred. People used FOOD as part of their lives and in most of their work. Gordon did this most directly, because he thought of the restaurant as something that he could overlay an art piece on. But FOOD was never an art piece in itself, in the sense of a performance or a sellable, isolated object.

To address the question of postmodernism, this actually came in the generation of the art world that followed us. We weren't talking about it; it was the artists who were five or six years younger than us who talked about that. The people who were talking about postmodernism at our time were the philosophers and social theorists. We didn't define ourselves as intellectuals, although we were a group of very intelligent people. We simply treated life as material and didn't separate different analyses out from one another. The best art of the time didn't stand or fall on the smartness of ideas. Instead, it was based on the fact that it was possible to make something interesting happen using trivial ideas. With the ambiguity of the restaurant and club we made something exciting and charged and quite ambiguous happen. There were three or four overlapping meanings, as in everything else we were doing, and that's what was interesting. It was a very special moment that lasted a lot less time than we thought it would.

SUA: Did you conceive of FOOD as a temporary space, or did you hope it would go on forever? Do you think that a restaurant like FOOD is by its very nature short term, as everyone has to "grow up" eventually?

RN: Most of us thought of everything as temporary! We were full enough of ourselves to think of everything temporary as existing primarily as material for us to make things out of. Everything was there for us to change and discard. None of us took it seriously as an ongoing thing except Carol. Although she had never had any interest in being a businesswoman before receiving her inheritance, she had the soul of one, because she enjoyed the complexities that it involved. But what made things most interesting was that she was just as likely to screw up as the rest of us! The rest of us thought of FOOD as a party in which everyone who was involved, including the customers, were as much a part of it as the organizers, because FOOD was organized without organization.

The problem that Carol faced with FOOD was that no one really believed her when she said that she was in charge--no one paid any more attention to her than they did to anyone else. Things were organized by whoever chose to organize on that day! That level of short-term energy, when everyone thought that they were in charge of what they were doing until it began to collapse, actually meant that everything was being done in the least efficient way. This in turn meant that Carol was losing a lot of money. For example, we inadvertently had the tables arranged so that we could seat the least number people possible. But no one realized that--we had just arranged the tables so that they looked nice instead of cramping them together to make the most money.

All of these things have a lifespan, just as any way of living does, because there is a set of ideas that change over time. What we were doing then was about beginnings. Gertrude Stein has some very interesting things to say about this in her book The Making of Americans, in which she divides people into those good at "beginnings", those good at "middles," and those good at "ends." We were all people who were good at beginnings but who would walk away when we began to feel like we understood them and they got to be too ordinary and predictable. As soon as money became an issue with FOOD, the freedom we had disappeared, so everyone simply walked away. Now, many of us are actually quite content with middles, as well, although some of us remain beginners.

Food Fight

(A response by Gwendolyn Owens, Consulting Curator, Canadian Centre for Architecture)

March 2011

The 1970s artist-run café Food in New York's SoHo has obtained mythic status, not because of its fine cuisine, but because of its role as a gathering place for artists and a site of artists' activities. Beyond the basic facts about Food—its address and founders and when it came into being—everything else is subject to discussion and dispute. Who cooked, who ate there and how often, what was served, is now the stuff of legend.

Among the numerous retellings of the story of Food, one of the best was definitely Lori Waxman's article "The Banquet Years: Food, a Soho Restaurant" in the Fall 2008 issue of Gastronomica. For her carefully researched article, she used the existing literature, spoke to numerous Food partners and participants, and used the archives of artist/architect Gordon Matta-Clark, a Food founder, now at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Gastronomica, following standard scholarly practice, had the article reviewed, and the author incorporated corrections suggested by scholars familiar with Food.

But as we like second helpings, there was interest in more Food, and so for its tenth anniversary Gastronomica published online an interview with artist Richard Nonas, a close friend of Matta-Clark. While not a Food founder, Nonas, who remains an active artist, was involved in the 1970s restaurant. In the interview, he gave more color to the existing stories and added details from his perspective as a dishwasher and, reportedly, as the curator of Food.

The problem was, for other Food participants, particularly cofounder Carol Goodden, a photographer and a member of Trisha Brown's contemporary dance troupe in the 1970s, Nonas did not recall things accurately at all. Not even close. Goodden says that she was not living with Nonas when Food was founded; that Matta-Clark was blameless in the "too much concrete incident," as she had ordered the cement; and that she had no recollection of ever appointing Nonas as the curator of Food. It was hurtful to her that he was claiming things that she felt were untrue.

For me, as a scholar who writes on Matta-Clark, I could also identify some questionable statements. Nonas describes Matta-Clark as someone who studied architecture "although not very seriously." I know from reading Matta-Clark's transcript that he was an extremely serious student in architecture at Cornell who got an A+ in his final architectural design course, a spectacular achievement in the pre-grade-inflation era of the 1960s. But I also know the most likely source for the error: Matta-Clark himself. At times, as I have learned from multiple sources, he gave the impression that he had barely made it through architecture school. Various well-researched scholarly publications have included statements about Matta-Clark's lack of seriousness in his study of architecture, so the mistaken impression is widespread.

Brain science tells us that unless someone is reading from his or her diary, he or she will not accurately remember every detail of an event, especially, in this case, incidents that happened almost forty years ago. We cannot therefore really be surprised that Richard Nonas does not have total recall of incidents at Food. The late Garnett McCoy of the Archives of American Art, which has an extensive collection of oral histories, considered interviews incredibly important but wrote that "The benefits of oral history are somewhat offset by their limitations. There are patterns of faulty memory and lack of objectivity." 1 In essence, the strength of an interview and its importance are not that the interview is a source of facts, but that it is a source of spice in our dry stories of what art was produced, where and when and by whom.

What has changed now is that oral histories, once kept in archives and generally used by serious scholars who were reading them along with many other sources, are now often online and readily available. When they are online, they can be read not only by scholars who have made a trek to a library to read a specific oral history, but by a larger audience, who may or may not know something about the subject. Depending on whether the Web site is seen as a trusted source—and certainly Gastronomica is—online interviews can be interpreted as having the authority of a published article.

Is this fair? Should an online interview now be treated as a publication, not a transcription of a conversation, as it was in the past? Should it be subject to careful fact checking? Recent articles in Vanity Fair and The New Yorker about 112 Greene Street: The Early Years (1970-1974), an exhibition at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York that centered on an artist-run space where many of the artists involved in Food exhibited—including Nonas and Matta-Clark—were subject to detailed fact-checking before they were published. These were print articles, however. Should we have expected Gastronomica to do the same thing for this online interview?

My answer is both yes and no. I would suggest that in the changing world of scholarly resources, we have to rethink oral histories if they are to be online. For me, the statements in the interview that seem questionable are a distraction. Where there is a question of fact, rather than opinion, or something that involves other people, an effort to get confirmation from a second source is a good idea. The other option would have been to include a disclaimer—the way every film DVD now has a statement saying that the interviews do not represent the opinion of the studio or distributor—that warns the reader that not everything that is said has been fact-checked.

The best parts of the Nonas interview are, in my view, his more general comments about the artists in the Food crowd and how they felt:

"We didn't define ourselves as intellectuals, although we were a group of very intelligent people. We simply treated life as material and didn't separate different analyses out from one another. The best art of the time didn't stand or fall on the smartness of ideas. Instead, it was based on the fact that it was possible to make something interesting happen using trivial ideas."

Nonas's Blocks of Wood (Light to Dark, Dark to Light), shown in the recent show at David Zwirner, in which the grain pattern echoes across the pieces placed in a line like dominos, is deceptively simple in conception—small blocks just spaced evenly apart—but fascinating visually, as one focuses on the subtle differences in the color of the wood and the pattern of the grain. To me, this work from 1970 is perhaps the type of work of art that Nonas had in mind when he made this statement.

I just wish, however, that Richard Nonas had not said "we." Would Gordon Matta-Clark, Carol Goodden, Tina Girouard, another cofounder, or the other artists involved in Food agree that the ideas behind their art were trivial? I think we have to let the others speak for themselves. In the case of Matta-Clark, that means we have to rely on his writings and interviews; for the other Food artists, they likely have much to say.

Many of us still want to hear more. This group of artistic pioneers brought back a neighborhood from the brink of destruction by reinhabiting the buildings, showed that down-home cooperative cooking could happen in a city restaurant, and made art that used the everyday and the leftover, often making us see the fabric of the city in new ways. Tina Girouard, in Lie-No, also shown recently in the David Zwirner exhibition, used four sheets of cheery patterned floor linoleum that looks to be from the 1940s to create a colorful 144 by 144 inch square. I am not sure that I ever really looked closely at patterned linoleum before seeing it in a gallery space where it looked not dowdy or drab, but lively and fun. Whether or not the ideas behind the art were serious or trivial, what these artists did was make us—or at least some of us--see art, food, and living in New York differently. That seems to be why we are still fascinated by this group of SoHo pioneers: so much has been affected by what they did. I am looking forward to reading even more of their ideas, even if I don't trust their memories for the facts.

Notes
1. Garnett McCoy and Richard J. Wattenmaker, "Reading Records: A Researcher's Guide to the Archives of American Art," Archives of American Art Journal, vol. 35, no. 1: 53.

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