Finger Lickin' Good

At this hip happening, food is king

Tuesday, January 30, 2001
By Michael Y. Parks FOXNews

Purple lightning arced from the lobster's claws. Applause ensued.

Rock lobster: The electric crustacean stole the show.

But though an onlooker might have mistaken the chaos surrounding the shellfish for the set of a Godzilla movie, the gathering Sunday night in a theater in Manhattan's Lower East Side was about so much more than supernatural crustaceans. Like food. And sex. And death.

"Let's call it 2001: A Taste Odyssey!" a silver-pantsed performance artist known as "Gecko" said to the 30 or 40 mainly black-clad gourmands assembled in the black hall that serves as the headquarters of the group of artists called Collective Unconscious. "Is that OK?"

Through mouths stuffed with cheese and olives, the celebrants made it clear through their muffled shouts that they wanted to forget Be Ins and welcome each other to the world of Eat Ins.

Edible Art
For about a year, anywhere from 15 to 60 men and women have been coming together at irregular intervals to the theater to celebrate Gecko's "Sunday Dinner."

"It's the only art performance you can eat," she said with a slinky grin.

And so, in addition to a six-course meal that included gustatory delights from caviar and cheese to pyrotechnic Bananas Foster, Gecko and various other artists put on an edible art event that included video performances, revealing apron fashion shows, poetic diatribes about meat and veganism, film shorts and the aforementioned lighting-shooting lobster, a trick that involves a pre-cooked lobster and a Frankenstein-like static electricity-generating machine called a Tesla coil.

But despite props that bring up questions of food's relationship with art, exhibitionism, religion and science, Gecko, a 30ish Houston native whose real name is Barrie Saccomanno ó who goes by "Gecko" says that at its heart, it's basically a kick-ass dinner party.

"People tend to forget about food in a city," she said as people making last-minute preparations scurried around her with bananas and brie. "They just go to McDonald's or get a slice with their friends and talk about work, while having dinner at home is thought of as a chore. Here, food is the star."

And food was king for the night. As in a video in which performance artist Missy Galore, dolled up in a glam ruby mask and garish silver-and-pink makeup, stood still as milk was poured over her body.

Or in a performance that carried more than a faint taste of S&M, in which a would-be English dominatrix ordered everyone to feed each other chocolate-covered strawberries.

Or in the "Vegan/Kosher Diatribe" as Long Island-born artist Eve Prince discussed in stomach-churning detail her obsession with the cooking and rending of meat and flesh.

Then there were the food-themed aprons in the fashion show by Megan Schlow, a magazine food stylist who had previously shown up at Gecko's Sunday dinners with clothes made of food such as strawberries and bananas. So about the same time Britney Spears and Aerosmith commanded each other to "Walk This Way" during the Super Bowl halftime, half-naked male and female models pranced around in carrot-and-corn aprons showering the audience with silver flakes.

Cooking isn't a drag to these partygoers.

"I think food should be more about the performance of eating rather than just sitting down and digging in," Schlow said. "This is more like a feast in a medieval sense."

A few minutes later, it skipped back even further, to the gorging of Roman times, when filmmaker Lin Gathright inhaled a full dinner and rubbed the dessert over her body in the short film Dream Date.

"The whole thing was very sensual," 31-year-old securities broker Ida Martinac observed afterwards. "I'd like to see something more like that in the next one." But it was the lobster offered up "for your electrocution pleasure" that capped off the night, a lobster with bolts of lightning shooting as far as three feet away.

"I love the smell of ozone in the morning," someone said.