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I have been wanting to eat at wd~50 for a while now, since the chef is a friend of friends and I've been hearing so much about the place. This past Thursday, as a sort of belated birthday present to myself, I went, and wow. The chef, Wylie Dufresne, is celebrated for adventurous and artistic cuisine: I missed his appearance on Iron Chef America but as a sometime watcher of the show I know the culinary experts who get invited don't screw around.
His restaurant, at 50 Clinton Street on the Lower East Side, is spacious and comfortable. I went with a party of six and we did the ten-course tasting menu. The staff brings a succession of very small, elegant dishes to the table, and Wylie's father Dewey drops by to discourse knowledgeably on the different wines you're drinking. The experience is folksy and unpretentious even though the food and drink is so ultra-refined it could be caricatured, say, in a Cohn brothers movie. (For some reason I'm thinking of Maude Lebowsky.)
Just a few examples from the tasting. The first dish out is a fig in a perfect cube shape with a slice of anchovy balancing on top. Awesome to look at and a mind-bending combo of flavors. More geometry came in the form of a smooth cylinder of foie gras (yeah I know, tortured ducks--I don't feel good about it), which breaks open to reveal a liquid center with some kind of oozy beet concoction. The taste resided somewhere between Satori and Nirvana. A bowl of fishy consomme with a hint of chocolate (!) came with a tiny squeeze bottle, complete with orange cap like Elmer's. You squeeze thin ropes of yogurt, thickened with some kind of space age enzymes into the broth. A little weird, and the fish and cocoa combo I found discordant, but a lot of great art is offputting. Many of the dishes come on beds of shavings the waiter described as "soil," as in "pea soil" or "chocolate soil," and the small dabs and smears of sauces on the plates jazz up the views and tastes.
Not a place for starving artists, but every artist should save up some money for a once in a lifetime trip. Simply amazing on every level.
I am in a two-person show in Dallas next month at and/or gallery, along with the artist Saskia Jorda. The gallery'll be showing some of my animated gifs, the Guitar Solo vid, a molecule-tagged product box or two, the nine-drawing "wormy abstraction" series, and additionally, I'm working on a new piece in the "layered" style (possibly two, depending on how long they take). I'll be documenting the latter work on the blog as I make it. Above are a couple of early stages.
"Godhopper" [mp3 removed]
"Looplament" [mp3 removed]
From now on all my song titles are going to be three-syllable neologisms. Nah, it's just a coincidence that these two ended up with the Burgess/Huxley/Womack style newspeak. "Godhopper" is sort of a private joke, I think maybe two people over at FMU and/or some old prog heads will get it. I'm chafing over whether to make it more elaborate and satisfy the lust for nerdy solo-ing it seems to imply or just leave it. "Looplament" is a bit different from what I've been doing: it's slow, meditative and dorky, as opposed to fast, intricate and dorky.
"Suite 6 (E-Piano)" [mp3 removed]
One of the Sid songs rescored for synth and two electric pianos. A Latinate riff makes it fairly buoyant while the Rhodes moves it closer to Soft Machine Six territory. (Did I say I love Soft Machine Six?)
Drawing by Roy Stanfield, from a series based on random picks from Google Images. I think that's the way to go with this otherwise obsolescent skill called "drawing," so much slobbered over by art buyers. Thanks to all those search engine bots we're drowning in each other's image-effluent. Hand-rendering these pictures "personalizes" the sludge-flow while inexorably adding to it. Art is not an act of resistance but participation in a vast system of fascination and voyeurism. Signed, Baudrillard Junior. (Having said all that, I like this drawing--Steve Mumford should look and learn to see how the "courtroom style" can be used effectively.)
The clunky, slowly rotating cams (as in camshaft, not webcams) in Douglas Repetto's just-ended installation at Location One reminded me of this piece by Francis Picabia, consisting of cardboard and string stretched loosely in a picture frame (sorry I don't know the work well enough to tell you what's written on the cardboard). In my copy of Brian Wallis' Art After Modernism, the Picabia serves as an illustration for Benjamin Buchloh's famous essay "Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression."
It's arranged on the page in a before and after demonstration, with a later painting of Picabia's showing the artist posing with two beautiful women. The point supposedly being that Picabia was part of a wave of avant gardists from the 1910s who regressed to classical or conservative painting styles later in the 20th century. I always found it a hoot that Buchloh (or Wallis) thought Picabia's late work reinforced the status quo. What, bigamy? (Yeah, I know, fantasies of male over-empowerment, yadda yadda.) The man was never more out of favor with the art world than when he was painting nudie images out of French erotic magazines--those canvases didn't really become market-viable until relatively recently, after David Salle said "Hey, these are good!" There are inherent problems when a critic with absolutely no sense of humor uses an arch-ironist like Picabia to exemplify anything. Yes, Picabia wrote about the "return to order" in the '20s, but we should be talking about his art, not his spin du jour.