The posts so far:
Fair Enough: Traveling Incognita? Fair Enough: All Over But the Posting
Fair Enough: Art or Trash?
Fair Enough: Prologue to the Report
Fair Enough: ABMB, Part 1
Fair Enough: ABMB, Part 2
Fair Enough: Aqua Art
Fair Enough: Pulse
Fair Enough: Seven
Fair Enough: Scope
Fair Enough: NADA
Fair Enough: Ink
Fair Enough: A Peek at Art Miami
Fair Enough: Doubletake at Art Miami
Fair Enough: Art Miami
What does this healthy bowl of oatmeal, below, have in common with the Dumpster below that?
Image stolen shamelessly from the C-Monster blog, in which Carolina Miranda tells essentially the same story I'm going to do here, except that she did it three weeks ago--and, to her credit, far more concisely
You may recall this image from Art or Trash, one of my earlier posts about the fairs. Art? Trash? Either way you would have been right. The Dumpster was on the grass outside the casita where Jennifer Rubell's Just Right was installed. “It’s not part of the installation," explained the voice at the other of the line when I called to inquire, "but Jennifer wanted you to see what came out of the house.” So then it is part of the installation? “Well is it and it isn’t.”
Mera and Don Rubell and their family have a great exhibition space in Wynwood. It's a former DEA warehouse which they have turned into a private museum. Lucky are the scions of this family. Jason, the son, started collecting when he was a teenager. He must have had quite an allowance, because his collection, Time Capsule, on display in the main building, is full of blue-chip work from the 1980s, which he amassed between the ages of 13 and 21. (He exhibited the collection for his senior thesis at Duke.)
But in this post we're going to focus on Jennifer Rubell, who specializes in culinary installations. Her Just Right, an interactive event--i.e. edible food available to enthusiastic visitors--was installed in a gutted casita within the family compound. With the museum to our back, we're about to squeeze our way through the hole in the wall below to visit Jennifer Rubell's installation.
The hole in the wall
The casita, which had been gutted and was filled with eating utensils
In the first room was a platform full of bowls
In the second room, one of spoons
It was skeevy to see a toilet sandwiched between the bowl room and the spoon room but, hey, we endure for art
In a little room off to one side, a raised box was heaped with packets of raw sugar
In another, some 40 or so crockpots containing oatmeal were set in a grid on a large table. I think you can see where this is going: A serve-yourself porridge fest. Just Right, get it, Goldie?
Since you can't get a good sense of where the crockpots were in my photograph, I decided to go right to the source, the Rubell Family Collection website, and lift this image, where there are additional pictures, including one of the artist. The Miami Herald provides more background info about the work
Raisins (I confess: I took a box for snacking later, since I hate them on my oatmeal)
And milk (I wonder how many times this fridge was opened for someone to take a picture of it, as I did here)
This is the view into the yard (note the Dumpster beyond the tree) from what had been the kitchen
How do I know it was the kitchen?
I don't suppose it was lost on most of the visitors that the casita had once been a home, probably to a family, just as the neighboring little houses appear to be still, and that our lavishly simple breakfast could have provided sustenance for a family of five for, oh, a month. But walking back through the hole into the family museum, most of us went from being art slummers to museum guests whose material means don't come anywhere near our hosts'. Everything's relative.
The oatmeal, I must tell you, was good.
A guide helps everyone back through the hole
