Exhibition Testimony #5: Bitter Lucky Dinner Party - Claire Makhlouf Carter

This review has been gathering dust on my desktop for months for some reason. It’s basically useless as the show is long gone. I’m publishing this because the neglect is becoming too much to bear…

All day I had been drawing attention to myself because of an incessant clattering that sounded from my backpack each time I moved. You could hear my approach from round a street corner without seeing me first, and in that moment you’d think I was some vagrant merchant, lugging his cheap and noisy wares in a bindle around town. Every curious look I got over the clattering issuing from my backpack, although answered with the same awkward chuckle, each got a different and incorrect answer. Broken vase, shattered fishbowl, cracked cake dome… I told all manner of lies about the contents of my bag – without any good reason.

Why I lied to cover up the fact I was carrying a grey bowl and spoon loosely in my bag requires its own autopsy. But I don’t have the time nor space to get into all of that, so instead I’ll tell you why I was carrying a bowl and spoon in my bag.

The good folks at WIP Space surprisingly didn’t want to sever contact with me after my escapade there last time. Birgitte, one of the resident artists who I befriended during my maiden visit, told me about a show at the studio I should attend. It was called the Bitter Lucky Dinner Party by Claire Makhlouf Carter. The RSVP stated that everyone should bring a plate, bowl, or cup accompanied by piece of utensil. I figured some food would be served as part of the exhibition, giving me renewed motivation to turn up.

The last time I went to something like this was Belarus Free Theatre’s The Master had a Talking Sparrow, the family dinner table (replete with real Eastern European food and peppermint vodka) becoming the stage around which this existential argument about resistance against war breaks out. Anyone who feeds me deserves my eternal love; so, albeit visibly shaken, I left the play very happy. Hence why I arrived at Wentworth House in Wandsworth (the current home of WIP Space) with a smile on my face and grumbling in my stomach.

Everyone arrived either in a pair or a group, floating around the front room like gregarious ghosts, coalescing into billows of conversation becoming thicker and more difficult to intercept the more people joined in. My nerves high jacked by timidity, I felt marooned amidst a sea of smiling faces and paper. What… paper? Yes. The only island in the room was a gigantic black printer, an all-in-one behemoth with multiple paper trays, an inscrutable touch screen, and buttons which I couldn’t make heads or tails of. The thing felt more at home in an office than in the middle of a Georgian drawing room. Seemingly the result of some nightmarish print job that punished the machine through the night, cream-blue sheets of A3 paper were littered all about the floor at its feet. Blue waves of paper lapped and broke upon the printer as if it were some haunting black cliff. These sheets were spilling out of every tray, some rolling messily upon themselves as the cliff crushed under its own load. I picked up a couple from the floor and read through a script typed in neat Courier. It was impossible to glean a larger narrative from these fragmentary pages containing scenes of police searches, conversations with apathetic careers counsellors, and an extended rant about automated university timetabling. I was as lost as you are now.

Like a boat come to rescue me from this island, Birgitte entered the room in her green cardigan. After exchanging greetings and such, we bounded up the stairs with the rest of them. The pink floor burned against the white walls and tight corridors upstairs, leading to a door. A cryptic greeting was given by a cardboard box glued to the door with the words “NOTHING IS FIXED TREAD CAREFULY”, the last word spelt wrong. A warning? A threat? Or just some friendly advice?

Upon entering this large, dimly-lit room where sturdy wooden beams were holding the triangular ceiling up, I realised the aim of the message. Anything that wasn’t part of the floorplan was made out of cardboard produce boxes – some whole, some flattened – arranged and balanced on each other to create furniture. A whole dining table was fashioned in such a manner, canapes and cartons of grapefruit juice laid upon books and music CDs, presumably as coasters. Even the bar was made out of cardboard boxes.

“What can I have to drink?” I asked the polite lady behind the bar.

She pointed to a jug full of red and said, “There’s gin granita, and grapefruit juice in this one”, then she pointed to a cafetière with the filter press replaced by a deep-orange liquid and said, “this is a mix of Campari and vermouth which I’ll give you with prosecco if you like. Or there’s gin with tonic or grapefruit juice.”

Lots of bitter flavours, I thought. Feeling adventurous, I went for an icy glass of that gin, granita, and grapefruit mixture. It started with a momentary flash of sweetness followed by a puckering shockwave across my tastebuds. After retrieving my silver bowl and spoon, I dumped my backpack and jacket on the floor behind this strange prism-shaped enclosure… also made of cardboard boxes. The more I inspected the cardboard furniture around me, it became clear that nothing was glued or stapled together. Everything was either balanced or expertly joined by slits or cuts. I guess I really had to be careful about where I’m putting my weight…

Without chairs, this was a standing type of table around which everyone milled once they were here. It was while I was basking in the chitter-chatter of expectant guests that I realised something. So accustomed have I become to seeing artwork on walls, encased in glass boxes, or cordoned behind wires that it took me a moment to remove this institutional lens. By the sheer space the cardboard dining table took up in the room and how people were dispersed around it, everything inside these walls had become part of the artwork. Even the pile of bags and jackets in the corner – and other external possessions people introduced into the room – was co-opted into the work too. I’ve long found the metaphysical flirtation between art and the spaces they’re created and shown in confusingly fascinating. It’s usually a symbiotic relationship where they legitimise each other; here, however, art consumed the room in utero. In exhibitions where the space becomes a part of the art itself, I find there’s usually a central object or a collection of objects that destabilise the normal function of the space. These art objects emit such strong conceptual radiation that it penetrates through the walls of the space, making us recontextualise the room according to the objects in it. Concept supplants technical skill here. You can have an artwork that exudes technical skill of the highest order, but if its conceptual ideas don’t communicate with the room and the other artworks in it, then all you’ve got is some art in a gallery rather than an artwork that swallows you whole.

The concept of bitterness was tastefully woven through the whole show, making itself apparent in the devilish details which jumped out around the place.

Food glorious food would come after a short conversation between the artist Claire and someone by the name of Elizabeth Price. The host of this gathering, Claire shuffled through the crowd and took her place at the end of the table next to the bar. Someone handed her a bitter red elixir. Rectangular glasses balanced upon her loosely clutched hair and a navy sweater hugging her figure, she casually carried herself like an off-duty academic. In a voice equal part soft and deliberate, she fielded questions from Elizabeth about the show and her practice. All the while the sound of a printer churning out paper played over a speaker. The same printer – I like to believe – that made such a mess downstairs.

Contrary to the pervasive requirement of silence in galleries, once the first round of questions was done, the guests erupted into gleeful conversation with each other while tucking into canapes served out of metal foil trays. I appreciated the scrappy, makeshift quality of the show, like everything had been assembled by a team of kids insanely committed to the bit who had help from their mothers. There were little nibbles rolled up in purple lettuce; a vegetarian one with feta and olives and a vegan offering with smashed avocado and radishes. Also skewered sweet potatoes. I’d been saving myself for these so I greedily sampled all these cold servings.

While hovering around the room and butting into random people’s conversations, I noticed whole dried grapefruit littered all over the place; wedged in the space between the radiators and the walls, scattered under the table, collected in cardboard boxes. They weren’t giving off any rotten odour nor were insects gluttonously buzzing towards it, so they weren’t exactly decomposing. Petrified bitterness.

I won’t bother recounting my multiple trips to the rickety cardboard bar, for my trajectory between that oasis and the rest of the room was like a tennis ball.

After another round of questions – the contents of which I barely remember through a glassy film of drunkenness and surreptitious chatter with Birgitte and her husband Nathan – the main course was served. It was some kind of stew bursting with vegetables and beans; the portion sizes left a bit more to be desired but I understand that it all had to be fairly divvied out. Without any hoo-haa however, desserts were immediately served; coffee-flavoured ice cream in rubber cupcake moulds and tarts topped with bits of grapefruit, an exquisite combo! It was while I was eating more tarts than I ought to that I noticed what were being used as coasters. I mentioned earlier that they were books and music CDs but only now did I grasp that all of them bore bitterness in their titles. This was the kind of pulp literature you can find collecting dust on the shelves of airport WHSmiths, The Works, or rotting away in bargain bins up and down the country. Books with titles such as Bitter Sun, Bitter Drink Bitter Moon, Bitter Fruits, or Bitter Sweet, their lurid covers as tacky as their titles.

Ever the overthinker, I felt like I was stuffing my face with my own mortality. Our tastebuds lose sensitivity as we age, becoming blunted to the nuances of certain flavours, bitterness among them. Thus, this cornucopia of bitter foods had us revelling in these impermanent flavours while we still had the ability to properly savour them. Before we all resemble those half-dead grapefruits rolling around on the floor.

This whole show felt like a labour of love, from the intricate way the set pieces were fashioned to the blissful flavours of the food served. Food is an art in itself so I’m always happy to see it incorporated into a gallery setting, especially if I get to eat it. There was an almost carnivalesque lifting of the rules usually governing an exhibition. It didn’t feel like a private view either. More like a free-form rag-tag dinner party where few people knew each other. And in an age where more and more people are unable to host dinner parties because who the hell even has the space or money to afford a flat with a dining table, the Bitter Lucky Dinner Party was a delicious morsel of hope.