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.