To most people, a cookbook is more like a museum than a gallery.
Take Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” Beneath the
red jacket is enough information to stew over for hours and hours, just
as you could spend days studying the American Painting wing at the Met.
But apparently a cookbook can be art, too. Until Sept. 27, the Collective Gallery
in Edinburgh, Scotland, is exhibiting “The How Not to Cookbook: Lessons
Learned the Hard Way.” The gallery’s white-walled rooms now house row
after row of identical black-bound books — a comforting sight in the
post-encyclopedia age.
The rooms are only a fraction of the Polish-born artist Aleksandra
Mir’s intended work. The book is the artwork, a social project open to
anyone who wanted to give it meaning. In “The How Not to Cookbook,”
Mir, whose fake postcards of Venice were a big hit at the recent
Biennale (scroll down to the bottom of the page here
to see them on The Moment), compiled words of wisdom from 1,000 people
— lessons they’ve learned through their own mishaps in the kitchen —
and arranged them in chapters like Bread, Eggs, Erotica and Mexico.
Some of the advice is serious; some is odd. Several are obvious; others
yield surprising discoveries. (“Do not boil avocado. Tastes like
soap.”) This nontraditional exhibit expresses Mir’s style, which
combines her interests in anthropology and interactive art.
Read the rest...Source: NY Times: The Moment