This article is part of a special section of design on how designers can inspire designers to do amazing things.
In 2019, artist Alan Wexler moved from Manhattan Brownstone, where he lived with his wife and collaborator Ellen for 40 years. During packaging, he discovered a black bike in the wreckage of decades of conceptual art and design practices.
At the time, Wexler, now 76, was investigating a new version of the “Futurist Cookbook.” Published in 1932 by futurist Italian poet and theorist Filippo Tomaso Marinetti, this collection of satirical recipes rebelled against traditional Italian cuisine. For example, in pasta, you needed a dead target.
Marinetti's book consisted of manifesto and news articles that tracked the campaigns that he and others revolutionized Italian diet during rapid technological changes.
Among the suggested meals were dinners of sandpaper, red silk, black olives in black velvet, fennel hearts and kumkart. Other sections asked for diets of pills and powders. The proposed location for proper futurist consumption included the cockpit of the Ford Trimotor plane.
During his career, Wexler has often returned to dietary objects and rituals. He connects shirts to tablecloths for the diner, so they can literally hide in their meals and need to design a coffee cup connected with tubes to work to ensure multiple invivars are full. He manipulates artifacts to the absurd points, shaking viewers from their routines and inviting them to consider why they don't think about what they're doing.
For his own “futurist cookbook,” he and his collaborator, Brooklyn designer Michael Yalinski, imagined a sunny dinner party around New York City.
Last October, the man founded his first dinner, “Tea with Strangers,” in 2006, with a permanent installation designed for Hudson River Park. The “two big tables” that work is called, features a large stainless steel table top with cut-out parts that take them away into the structure in which sitters invite interaction with each other.
The second dinner was held in February, with Wexler publicly consuming the meal at the Jane Lombard Gallery in Tribeca. Sitting on his “Light Table” (2021), he lit up the glass dishes with the lightning-embedded tops sunk onto the surface, he helped out with the translucent Vietnamese dishes prepared by chef Phoebe Tran. This performance sheds light on (and mediated) assumptions of normality granted to Western conceptions of diet.
And a black bike?
This was the highlight of the third project in the series, “Picnicking's Bicycle.” It was performed last month in a willow tree grove in Highland Park, on the Brooklyn-Queens border.
On a cloudy Monday afternoon, Wexler stuck 19 black painted plywood boxes onto the bike frame. Each was big enough for a specific component of the picnic, from the corkscrew to the cooler.
Filling the remaining boxes was an interpretation of a vanilla cake made by pastry chef Natasha Pickbitz, layered with sandwiches, cured meat, cured meat, crudite and rhubarb buttercream. .
The team brought in model Aly n'diaye to become a picnicker. Dressed in all black, he walked his bike down the hill into the air.
Cleaning up the mess left behind by the Easter celebrations, workers glanced at N'Diaye as he unleashed the red checkered picnic blankets, tupperware containers, cookware and wine bottles they needed.
“It's incredibly fun, it's the discovery of what's in each box,” Pickwitz said as she watched food and tools appear. “The act of eating must be joyful and exploratory.”
Wexler's idea was to dismantle the picnic, a component of the experience.
“It makes us see more of our everyday phenomena,” the artist said as he adjusted the windshield/table swivel up and down from the handlebar. “It turns everyday life into a theatre.”
When he oversaw the action, Yalinsky said, “These are performances of the way people live, but they are not generally.”
The men compared the “bike for a picnic” to Victorian-era mobile east feasts and spectacular picnics, but were stripped to conform to the do-it-yourself spirit associated with bicycles and plywood boxes. Opposed to automation and speed Marinetti, multiple individual components were intended to encourage picnics to slow down and think about various aspects of casual and often spontaneous diet.
Today, the future that futurists dream of has arrived. In its synthetic food and technology process, Marinetti, an early supporter of fascist Italian leader Benito Mussolini, may not have imagined.
The world economy has developed around complex refrigeration systems, transportation, genetic modifications, and many other technologies. People can walk or eat alone by car.
“Now, it's possible to not think about food for many of us,” said Nicola Twilly, who recently published “Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, The Planet and Ourself.” “And I think that's a mistake because it's the most intimate relationship with our planet and we don't have enough breathing.”
Unlike “The Futurist Cookbook,” Wexler and Yarinsky's project, featuring tyrades against traditionalism and pasta, offers many ways to think about food today. Their alternative vision for the future is unslearning. It is kind, clever and full of artistic intentions.
The pair then plan to stick an acoustic horn on the table, similar to what you'll find on gramophones, so you can see the usual hidden source of sounds that create the atmosphere during your meal.
“It's a new 'futurist cookbook' and an original inversion,” says Wexler of his book. “We're talking about democracy, a humanist future.”
