1. Meals as Art at MoMa; David Altmejd at Peter Brant’s Gallery By carol vogel Published: October 27, 2011

COOKING IS BOILED DOWN

TO AN ART FORM AT MOMA с

Warning: The second-floor galleries at the Museum of Modern Art may soon smell like curry. It won’t be wafting from the cafe down the hall. This will be from one of MoMA’s latest acquisitions, and it’s all in the name of art.

In the tradition of Gordon Matta-Clark’s restaurant project “Food” in SoHo in the 1970s, the Argentine artist Rirkrit Tiravanija began creating meals as exhibitions 20 years later. At 303 Gallery in SoHo in 1992 he presented “Untitled (Free),” moving the gallery’s back office to the display space in front ,so the public could see how a dealer works. He then furnished the emptied office with a temporary kitchen — a refrigerator, cooking utensils, tables and chairs — and cooked Thai curry, giving it free to anyone who wanted it. He recreated the installation in 2007 at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea using the original elements and renaming the work “Untitled (Free/Still).”

MoMA acquired the installation this year, but its first showing will be Nov. 17 through Feb. 8. Museum visitors can get a free vegetarian curry lunch every day from noon to 3 (except Fridays, when it will be served from 4 to 7). And because fire regulations prohibit cooking in the galleries, the curry, with the artist’s blessing, will be made in one of the museum’s kitchens and taken to the galleries.

“It’s part of what has been called ‘relational aesthetics,’ ” said Ann Temkin, chief curator in MoMA’s department of painting and sculpture. “Joseph Beuys created social sculpture; it’s the act of doing things together, where you, the viewer, can be part of the experience.”

The installation coincides with a new era on MoMA’s second floor. Rather than presenting works as a united exhibition that stays on view for about a year, curators from all seven departments plan to install what they hope will be a more fluid, though chronological, look at contemporary art. Rather than take the 1960s as a starting point, they will be telling their stories from the 1980s to the present and will continually add and change galleries without having to close the entire floor for a huge redo.

Reinstallations will take place in stages, a few galleries at a time. “Before the space was imagined as an exhibition; now it is a suite of galleries,” Ms. Temkin said. “We want it to reflect the thinking of all departments.” The curators also want to make sure visitors keep coming back to see what is new and what has changed.

Showing new acquisitions is part of the plan. Besides Mr. Tiravanija’s curry lunch there will be a 1982 friezelike mural by Keith Haring, another addition to the museum’s holdings. There will also be four galleries of monograph installations, which will include rooms of work devoted to Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Steve McQueen, Doris Salcedo and Andrea Zittel.

Issues like authorship and the connection between painting and photography will be addressed too. A self-portrait by the German artist Martin Kippenberger, for instance, is set in downtown New York. It’s a painting but not painted by him, rather by a commercial artist he hired.