Lucien Smith wearing AZYR Specs for Cultured Mag
At a time when the New York scene is more exclusionary and expensive than ever, the artist Lucien Smith and his partners are building a distinctly non-commercial, communal space for artists (and the people who find them interesting) to hang out.
Fifty years ago, New York was in decay and on the brink of bankruptcy. The stock market crashed, Robert Moses was carving up the Bronx, property values were plummeting, and large swaths of the city were vacant. Artists flocked to cheap live-work lofts in Soho and a prescient group of art dealers opened galleries in the neighborhood. But there were no restaurants and few places to hang out.
In 1971, three pioneers—Gordon Matta-Clark, his then-partner Carol Goodden, and Tina Girouard—opened FOOD. Offering such delicacies as hard-boiled eggs stuffed with live shrimp and recipes improvised on the spot by the artist staff, it was as much an early exercise in relational aesthetics as it was a restaurant.
Today, the problems facing New York are at once entirely different and the same. The city is now home to a wealth of restaurants, but many are prohibitively expensive or part of corporate chains. The housing market is booming, but skyrocketing rents squeeze artists out. The yearning for uncommercialized creative space feels as urgent today as it did 50 years ago.
That’s why the artist Lucien Smith is relaunching FOOD for the 21st century. “I know from living in New York that there's nowhere I can go where, like, something might be fucked up. It's just all so serious,” Smith says.
“There’s this sense that if you're not participating in the commercial art world in some way then you're not a legitimate artist,” Jessamyn Fiore, the co-director of Matta-Clark’s estate, says of the creative landscape today. “The fact is, when you look at how art movements evolve, what's so important are spaces that are not purely capitalist.”
Smith consulted with Goodden (the only living founder of the original FOOD) and Fiore on how to preserve the restaurant’s original spirit while tailoring it to the needs of artists (and diners) today. Goodden showed Smith a photograph of Matta-Clark and his friend, the composer Philip Glass, wearing dust masks while the original FOOD was under construction. Smith wanted to be a part of “carrying that torch” by helping construct his own restaurant. “We just went in there and started doing it—it was built by us,” Smith says.
Smith, along with his handyman Yakov and his business partner Laurence Chandler, the former manager of Kanye West’s Yeezy brand, are in the process of renovating a former Chinatown dumpling spot, where rent is “cheap,” before FOOD's opening this spring. Like Matta-Clark’s “anarchitecture,” in which the artist cut open and sliced up buildings, Smith says the relaunch “revolves around demo design.”
The menu, however, will be a little different. For lunch, Smith will offer salads, sandwiches, and two types of stew or curry, one with meat and one vegetarian. “There will be things in there that are, like, questionably edible, you know, to have some fun,” he adds.
As inspiration, he points to one of Matta-Clark’s specialties: “Matta Bones” involved the staff cleaning just-eaten meat off of the bones and then stringing them into necklaces for diners. “I'm still trying to figure out what the hell Used Car Soup was,” Smith says of another dish.
The original FOOD emerged at a time when many New Yorkers felt betrayed by failed urban planning and policy initiatives. The dominant artistic movement in the years leading up to the opening of FOOD, Minimalism, lost some of its relevance to artists who “started creating works that they wanted to have a direct impact on reality, on everyday life,” Fiore says, “and they started making works that were in and of the material of the city itself.”
Just as the original FOOD was staffed largely by artists, Smith plans to hire a rotating cast of around 80 employees, mostly artists, who can sign up for shifts based on their availability. “If I can provide a space for them that doesn't feel soul-sucking, like a normal job, but also provides them with some resources, I think it can be a sustainable business,” Smith says. “The goals are: Is it a fun experience? Are the people who work here having fun? Do they feel like they can contribute to and change it?”
Smith knows all too well the ways that capitalist forces can corrupt artists’ livelihoods. When he was in his early 20s, collectors began flipping his paintings at auction for increasingly astronomical prices. In 2014, a landscape he painted from Winnie the Pooh as part of his senior thesis at Cooper Union sold for $389,000—over 38 times its price just three years earlier. But before long, the speculators who had manipulated that skyrocketing trajectory decided they were done with the artist—and his record-setting painting became almost impossible to resell.
These days, Smith says, he’s not making much art. Instead, he’s focusing on his nonprofit Serving the People, which hosts discussion groups around the world, and, of course, FOOD. If the restaurant works out, Smith is already looking toward expanding to other cities, like London or Milan. Then he changes his mind about his career. “I am making art,” he says. “It just happens to look and feel like a restaurant.”
