Table Top showcases works that challenge and expand conventional notions of eating, food presentation, and the rituals that surround dining. Artists present objects that could redefine our interaction with food and the table. Contemporary creators explore and evaluate urgent concerns of our time—among many others—fostering an awareness of food systems, inventing new rituals for consumption, finding new forms of interpersonal connection, and elevating the act of dining into an intellectual, spiritual, and narrative experience.  

 

Table Top is part of A New Futurist Cookbook, an upcoming publication by Allan Wexler and Michael Yarinsky as a direct response to the 1932 Futurist Cookbook, a manifesto of culinary innovation by F. T. Marinetti. The project seeks to harness the provocative energy, the emphasis on innovation, and the multi-sensory focus that characterized historical Futurism, but works to redirect these potent methods towards contemporary aims: broader awareness, inclusivity, and a thoughtful re-evaluation of our relationship with food. Simultaneously visual, informative and absurd, this document will take the form of a series of performative dinner party events meant to stimulate the reader to reevaluate the unchallenged habitual ways we use and source food.