Please Pass the Art

I went in search of the meaning of art Saturday and found it in a Santa Monica gallery. Art is a mound of rotting cantaloupes on the floor. Art is a machine you blow into that lights up and belches. Art is a collage of blobs painted with chocolate.

I know I once said that art was a hundred used tires piled in the entryway of L.A.’s Convention Center by a famous Japanese artist. But that was yesterday’s definition. This season, art is related to food and, like food, is transitory in nature. You can’t have your art and eat it too.

This was manifested in a place called the New Gallery at the 18th Street Arts Complex in an exhibit titled “The Rite to Eat.” It consists of the work of 11 artists whose subject, medium or context is something you might serve to good friends, or possibly to the family dog.

This was not an easy exhibit to stage, according to its curator, Barbara Smith. Neighbors complained because the canvas painted with chocolate drew flies, the cantaloupes rotted and smelled up the place, and mounds of wheat grass caused allergies.

“We got rid of the cantaloupes and some of the wheat grass,” she said. “Then we bug-bombed the place and ended up with hundreds of flies on the floor. It was a mess.”

They missed an opportunity. I’d have swept the dead flies into a pile, sprayed them with a glazing solution, labeled the creation “Flies After a Feast” and sold it to a Beverly Hills collector for $3,600.

*

After the show, we adjourned to the Electronic Cafe, a kind of New Age coffeehouse across from the gallery, and met with some of the, well, artists, I guess you’d call them.

As we entered, my wife, Cinelli, whispered, “When you write about them, and I know you will, be kind,” as though that was even a remote possibility in the company of those who see the creation of life in a bowl of noodles.

I mean, I have eaten a lot of noodles in a lot of places from elegant joints like Gaetano’s in Calabasas to celebrity hangouts like Chin Chin’s on Sunset, but never, not once, have I seen human life swirling about in the sauce. Laurel Paley does.

She is a self-described nice Jewish girl from Racine, Wis., who has grown up with the ability to visualize procreation in a plate of linguine. Paley’s contribution to the show was a canvas painted partly with coffee called “Original Ramen.”

It was not far from the machine that lit up and belched. That was called, appropriately, “Pardon Me.” Thank God it was limited to belching.

The title “Original Ramen,” describing a mass of swirling pasta, is from original sin, Paley explained. “If you look closely you can see a woman’s entry point. That winding thing is a man.”

“I don’t remember seeing that,” I said.

“That’s a surprise,” Cinelli said.

“The painting is a metaphor for humanity,” Paley explained. “Noodles are moist and clingy, the way people are. They flop around and stick to each other. They’re funny that way.”

“I’ve always found them amusing,” I said.

Cinelli sighed. “We’ve come a long way from Botticelli,” she said.

*

As we discussed art, a woman next to us, later identified as Pauline Oliveros, spent the time waving her hands on either side of another woman’s head in a slow and rhythmical manner.

As Smith explained how true art, such as a piece of bread and some red feathers in a fishbowl, must pour from an artist’s soul, Oliveros withdrew something invisible from her patient’s head and dashed it on the floor.

This was repeated several times until I asked what she was doing. She explained it was an ancient Chinese healing technique based on meditation and an understanding of the body’s energy flow.

The “patient” was suffering pain in her mandible, which Oliveros was relieving by withdrawing the, well, evil vapors and discarding them on the floor. Think of Bernadette and the miracle at Lourdes and the picture will clarify itself.

Oliveros offered to cure a cold that had been clinging for a week, but I thanked her and said I would stay with Tylenol. She might have mistakenly withdrawn evil vapors I needed for writing and destroyed my career.

“This is performance art,” Smith was explaining about the show. “It’s where you have an intense experience around an event, and then it’s gone.”

She paused as Oliveros resumed her rhythmical hand-waving around her patient’s mandible. “Our next show is about death,” Smith said.

Who knows? A cemetery created in a steaming plate of spaghetti puttanesca, pouring like marinara from its creator’s soul, may be the ultimate art form. Hold the Parmesan.