Tom Marioni. The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art; installation view, Smart Museum of Art, 2012.

The list of artists—particularly those working in the 1960s and ’70s—pulled me into the exhibition. With my art-historical roots firmly planted in the West Coast, I was excited to see names like Tom Marioni, Bonnie Ora Sherk, Suzanne Lacy, Barbara T. Smith, and Allen Ruppersberg alongside Gordon Matta-Clark, Daniel Spoerri, Alison Knowles, and Marina Abramovic and Ulay. Marioni, a San Francisco-based artist and the founder of the now defunct Museum of Conceptual Art, presented an installation version of his ongoing work, The Act of Drinking Beer Is the Highest Form of Art, which he performed for the first time in 1970 and continues to practice every week as a social action. In Marioni’s installation, we find a fridge and counter, a small table and chairs, and a wall-mounted case filled graphically with yellow-wrapped bottles of Pacifico. A flat-screen video monitor, hung vertically on the wall, reflects the golden color and effervescence of a cold glass of beer.

Bonnie Ora Sherk. Public Lunch, 1971; performance at the San Francisco Zoo.

Sherk, another Bay area artist, is represented through photographic and film documentation of two projects, Public Lunch (1971) and The Short Order Cook (1973–74). In the film and still images of Public Lunch, we see the artist seated at a table inside a cage in the lion house of the San Francisco Zoo. At feeding time, Sherk consumes her human lunch in front of a crowd of onlookers, while the tigers in the cages on either side of her consume meals of their own. Photographs also stand in for Allen Ruppersberg’s project, Al’s Café (1969), in which Ruppersberg transformed an LA storefront into a temporary diner. For three months, customers could order a variety of vaguely edible sculptures off the glossy menus—favorites include “Simulated burned pine needles à la Johnny Cash served with a live fern” for $3.00, and the “Patti Melt,” a “Patti Page photo (or reasonable facsimile) covered with toasted marshmellows” [sic] available for just $2.00. Ruppersberg’s Café was intended as a gathering place and social hub for the Los Angeles art crowd, the focus obviously not on food itself, but on the social space that food carves out.

Allen Ruppersberg. Al’s Café, 1969; installation, Los Angeles.

In these works from the 1960s and ’70s, as well as those taken from more recent years, the social and political connections posed by food, drink, and conviviality are taken up as radical possibilities. While many of the earlier works propose to radicalize the everyday—turning the act of drinking beer, or perhaps consuming Knowles’ Identical Lunch, with the artist—into actions designated under art’s then-broadening umbrella. For many of the artists, it seems that the radical action may lie not in the sharing of food itself, but in the circulating conversations that come out of these intentional situations. Michael Rakowitz’s project, Enemy Kitchen (A Food Truck) (2012), extends the artist’s interest in using traditional Iraqi foods to begin conversations about international conflict. Placing Iraqi chefs and recent American veterans inside the same space is just one of the ways in which Rakowitz seeks to spur a political discussion built around the cultural specificities of food. For the collective Red76, the meal also becomes a catalyst for a deeper political discussion, with their Revolutionary Table events (begun in 2007) serving as a meeting place to discuss democracy, speech, and collectivity within what was then a conservative political climate in the U.S. Photographs and copies of Red76’s zine-like publications document both the Revolutionary Table projects and the related Occupy Yr. Home (begun in 2012).

Red76. Occupy Yr. Home Dinner, 2012; detail of performance and installation, Chicago.

Feast proposes to chronicle groundbreaking acts of sharing, conviviality, and food, but the exhibition’s very premise is also its biggest challenge: How can a museum represent time-based, interactive artistic practices in fresh and compelling ways? The usual approach—to use photos, videos, and objects to stand in for experiences—is recycled here. The radical actions become, once again, rather banal when seen through this accumulation of documentary materials. The photographs of live events cling dully to flat surfaces, and the videos play silently (headphones available for each) on sleek monitors. Lengthy didactics are stuck to the walls; objects and photographs are encased behind Plexiglas. For an exhibition that invokes “hospitality” and “radicality” as central concepts, the design of the exhibition itself offers little of either. The only moment for interaction lies on the floor beneath the entry wall text: One of Felix Gonzalez Torres’ iconic “candy spill” pieces, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in LA) (1991), offers the only chance to actually partake in a physical way.

Of course, it is difficult to assess an exhibition outside of its native context—in this case, the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art. While the pieces would have been selected, framed, sized, and activated (theoretically) according to the specificities of the Smart’s galleries in the first go-round, exhibitions on tour have to adapt, somewhat like a living organism, to unfamiliar and perhaps imperfect physical parameters. At the Weisman, the documentation of these works appears slightly stale, like the crusty traces of uneaten food and smoked cigarettes encased in Spoerri’s Tableau Piege, 17 Juni 1972 (1972). According to the website and the catalog, the exhibition was much more active—and interactive—at the Smart Museum, yet the Weisman’s activation of works by Marioni, Red76, and others occurred only at their $250-per person gala event that coincided with the exhibition’s opening. Now what remains is a set of documents, some installations and sculptural works, and videos. While it covers a truly fascinating subject matter, Feast is perhaps better served as a book—in the beautiful catalog documenting many under-recognized projects from the past eight decades—than in a gallery setting.

Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art is on view at the Weisman Art Museum of the University of Minnesota through May 10, 2015.

Red76 is a multi-artist collective founded in Portland, Oregon, in 2000. The project they conceived for We have as much time as it takes was executed mainly by two of its members, Sam Gould and Gabriel Saloman. Counter-Culture as Pedagogy: Pop-Up Book Academy is a yearlong series of events that take place in a variety of venues. The latest edition of The Journal of Radical Shimming, available for free in the gallery, includes interviews and a counterculture index created for this exhibition. It will accompany the project’s next iteration at the Walker Art Center this summer. Learn more at www.red76.com.

Courtney Dailey: As practitioners whose work ex­ists primarily in the public realm, how do you create a situation to get the greatest amount of people engaged?

Sam Gould: We’ve developed methodologies over time for our publicly engaged, dialogical practices. There are basically four points: clear frames, horizontal space, generative action, and ephemeral distance. Clear frames develop a space that’s very familiar to people: they act as an entrance point; you’re on a con­struction site, you’re entering a bar, you’re going to a copy shop, or a restaurant. It may be the worst restaurant or the worst business that you’ve ever encountered but you understand what it is. Famil­iarity is key.

Nicole Cromartie: But your project for the Wattis, Counter-Culture as Pedagogy: Pop-Up Book Academy, 2010–1 is, by comparison, an unfamiliar, hybrid structure.

SG: I don’t think so. We talk about it as a traveling bookstore. So people are like, “Oh, it’s a bookstore,” but it’s actually a school. We arrange small classes, small sessions, where people RSVP to an open call that’s publicized through various means: word of mouth, flyers, and email. We control the frame through pub­licity, location, and topic.

Gabriel Saloman: I think it’s worth admitting that there’s a degree of fraud in that.

SG: Oh, yeah, it’s a total fraud. It’s a ruse.

GS: But once people are there, we’re not doing this thing where we told you it was going to be a candy house and now we’re going to put you in the oven. It’s not re­ally important that people get the exact experience that they came for. We invite you to this bookstore or construction site, and while we’re here, let’s talk. And it seems innocuous enough that people immerse themselves in it, because they already feel like it’s familiar. They don’t know that they’re par­ticipating until they already are.

SG: Once people get within this frame, we work to level or flatten our au­thority, and to allow them to make decisions through direct conver­sation. At the end of a project, we shouldn’t be there (though by necessity, we start out directing or facilitating). But through our ac­tions over time, we want to divest ourselves of that role; this is the horizontal space part.

Generative action stems from the feeling that I get in a particular situation, like at band practice or at a political rally. Things might be totally inspiring when you’re there, but the minute you leave that energized space, everything dies. So the idea of generative ac­tion is that the activity acts like a battery—it’s the power station that transforms the energy in a room into media, in the widest defini­tion of what media can be: from the Internet, to newspapers, to direct conversations between you and me, even to rumor or myth or disparaging commentary.

Ephemeral distance suggests that this is not the thing you’re after. We are trying to get people to internalize a situation, then trans­form it into their own thing. This conversation/publication/display is not the conclusion. Those are the four points: pedagogical tools that we use all the time.

GS: We create models for action rather than finished, complete ideas. And the intention is to create a proposi­tion that other people conclude. It’s turning the experience of the art situation into a commons over which we don’t claim owner­ship. That’s not to say we don’t have proprietary rights to certain things, and certainly we have privileges that other people aren’t going to have. A total horizontal­ity really couldn’t happen unless people took off and ran with it, without us.

SG: Unless people just felt direct au­thority, and decided: this is mine now. And if that happened, I’d be psyched.

CD: Many of your projects evolve and develop over the long-term, and in multiple places. How can viewers who might encounter the work just once understand your projects in their entirety?

SG: There is no entirety to the project; the project just keeps going. I talk about it in terms of literature: books don’t die. Just because Proust finally stopped writing Re­membrance of Things Past doesn’t mean that the work is over. The work is there as long as people are talking about it and engaging with it, which is a way that you can define any artwork.

GS: That also explains why we have a blog for every project, and pro­duce as much printed media as we possibly can. There are multiple ways that the work moves through the world and ways that the proj­ect can continue to be relevant. We cherish printed matter. Those objects become totemic devices that give us time travel; they give us an opportunity to exist simul­taneously in the past and in the present. They allow us to see not only the things that have changed, but the things that have cycled around.

NC: Your practice is not typically gallery-based, but for this exhibi­tion, you’ll have ephemera in the gallery. Why did you decide to do that?

SG: Because we’re punks. It’s funny to us: we fought so long to get out of the gallery and now we’ve reached a stage where people are asking us to come and do projects outside of the gallery. So, inevita­bly, in our contrarian way, we want to go in.

GS: The new taboo!

SG: The deeper answer is that it per­tains to the project. We’re focusing on moments that find their way into so-called mass culture. We can shine a light onto those objects that build up to create the domi­nant culture. We want to find a way to extrapolate and physicalize our discursive practices in the gallery and illuminate them. We get to say, “Look at this!”

GS: So often, we experience visual work on the Web. Now the gallery is becoming an analogue device. The gallery has more in common with a record player, a slide show.

CD: How does Red76 make work?

GS: Sam develops these initial projects and they expand, depending on what’s appropriate, who can say yes, and who we feel resonates with the project.

SG: There’s a big difference between someone who happens to be involved with one thing that we’re doing, and a real, holistic engagement. So much of what we do occurs “off-stage,” if you will, when we’re just hanging out. The work is based on the affections between all of these people—even feelings of disenfranchisement. There’s been a lot of disaffection and infighting, as in any collabora­tive project, but it’s always based on friendship.

We have as much time as it takes is on view from May 6 – July 31, 2010 at the CCA Wattis institute for Contemporary Arts. For more information see www.wattis.org.