Only the sharp-eyed might have noticed something amiss recently at the lunch table of 12 in the second-floor cafeteria at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The table itself was a different color from the others in the room, a dinerstyle teal . Weirder, though, was that everyone around it was eating the same thing: a tuna sandwich and a cup of soup or buttermilk, a lunch accompaniment not often seen these days .
The people at the table were mostly strangers to one another: a grad student, a library director, a teacher, a high school senior, a landscape designer. But for about half an hour that afternoon they were also ex-post-facto Fluxus artists, having signed up to be part of a well-documented piece of digestible performance art called “Identical Lunch,” which has been performed frequently around New York and the world since 1968.
That was the year that Alison Knowles, one of the founders of the Fluxus movement - which was really less a movement than a loose affiliation of artists in the ‘60s who had a formidable influence on generations of artists that followed - started eating lunch regularly, and unvaryingly, at Riss diner in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood.
Her friend and studio mate Philip Corner was the first to notice that she never changed her order: tuna on wheat with lettuce and butter, no mayo; and soup or a glass of buttermilk. She decided to keep on ordering the same thing, to invite people to do it along with her, to document all the little nuances and repetitions, and to call it art, though she didn’t really care if anybody agreed. “It was about having an excuse to get to talk to people, to notice everything that happened, to pay attention,” said Ms. Knowles, now 77 .
If the goal of Fluxus was to knock down fences between making art and living life , then the lunch did a pretty good job. Ms. Knowles considered it a performance whether she was doing it with friends at Riss diner, at a museum or all by herself on a trip in some other country.
At the Museum of Modern Art, Ms. Knowles was asked to stage a series of the lunches this month.
At a little after noon Ms. Knowles surveyed her lunch mates, lofted a spoonful of carrot soup and said, “Well, bon appetit.”
She pronounced her sandwich, made by the cafeteria’s executive chef, Lynn Bound, to be “state of the art,” among the best she had had .
Joseph Strong, a high school student who wants to be a performance artist and who conducts his own daily performance by wearing a black top hat, seemed a little dubious about the buttermilk but overjoyed to be at the table with Ms. Knowles.
After some laughter Ms. Knowles rose from the table, went behind the counter at the cafeteria, donned a paper hat and made a blender version of the meal: buttermilk and a sandwich, pureed at high speed. She poured a little bit for everyone in paper espresso cups .
Truth be told, it wasn’t bad. I t actually tasted like something one might pay $30 for somewhere outside Barcelona, creamy with an incongruous whole-grain crunch.
Dave Kim, a writer and teacher at the Pratt Institute in Manhattan , did not seem to feel the same way. He looked a little green. “I’m a vegetarian,” he said. “This is the first meat I’ve eaten in about nine years.”
He added, “Hey, anything for art, right?”
The meal ended with just a few goodbyes and exchanges of cards, a lack of arty-ness in keeping with Fluxus and also with a quotation attributed to Mr. Corner’s dubious aunt, who once observed about the lunches: “What’s there to write about? It’s just a lousy tuna-fish sandwich.”
By RANDY KENNEDY
