The dirt arrived first. Five and a half tons of it. At first, it simply lay there, caked across the massive dining table, quietly unsettling in its presence. Then came the platters, gleaming silver, borne aloft like offerings in a ritual.
FOOD, performance artist Geoff Sobelle’s ’97 latest theatrical feast, is not a dinner party. It is a dissection. Over the course of the evening, the act of eating unspools into something grotesque, philosophical, absurd.
FOOD, staged by Stanford Live from Feb. 5 to 8 at Memorial Auditorium, serves up odd dichotomies: an enormous communal table, yet no one truly dines. At the center of the show — if one can call it a show and not an extended provocation — Sobelle commands the space with a sort of predatory languor. One moment, he is a gracious host; the next, he is biting into a bloody fish, its viscera splattering across his face as he locks eyes with the audience. Detritus dribbles down his chin, then gushes. He eats money. He eats cigars. He plunges a hand into the depths of an oil well, groping for something unspeakable. “Consumption does not require permission,” the performance seems to whisper.
But if FOOD revels in appetite, it is less about pleasure than about power. Who eats? Who pays? Who builds the table and who sits at it? Sobelle hands out miniature houses, little buildings pressed into the hands of unsuspecting audience members. The gesture is generous, but the symbolism is biting: we inherit systems, debts, expectations. A woman drifts past, intoning, “You can look, but you can’t touch.” Is she part of the show? Of course she is. So are we.
The spectacle oscillates between the intimate and the industrial. A chandelier of plastic bottles looms overhead, a monument to waste. The table groans under the weight of its own metaphors. In a moment that feels eerily prophetic, Sobelle invokes the bright lights of buildings at night — the modern measure of progress, of prosperity. But what, he asks, remains when the lights go out? The answer is in the dirt. Organic matter decomposes; glass and steel endure. The things that hold memory disappear. The things that do not — trucks, oil, capital — persist.
Much like the menu at an avant-garde restaurant, FOOD varies by the night. My ticket was a whim, a Wednesday indulgence, but those who dined later in the week described different flavors. A friend who attended Friday’s show noted an increased sense of urgency in the movements, as if the performance itself was consuming Sobelle. By Saturday, he would be gone, catching a red-eye home for his son’s birthday. Even the creator, too, must eventually step away from the table.
It has been weirdly difficult to figure out whether I liked FOOD. I certainly watched rapt, intrigued from the front row, uncertain which of my senses to trust. An icy fog swirls around the table as he searches for fish, yet I feel no chill. Am I being tricked into hearing the sound of water moving through MemAud’s pipes? Is the crunch of Sobelle inhaling his fifth apple really that loud?
Like all my experiences with surrealist-esque art, this show is less a thought experiment than a statement about our present, and in this case a rather pointed one. On his website, Sobelle includes a mission statement, declaring a personal view of his body of work as a “colossal practical joke.” Dining out is, after all, a performance of its own. Alone, we eat for sustenance. Together, we eat for spectacle. And in FOOD, Sobelle takes that idea to its extreme, devouring with reckless abandon — guzzling ranch dressing, siphoning raw eggs, inhaling an entire onion. There is no shame, no hesitation. Just the sheer commitment to consumption.
At some point amidst the absurdity, I half-expect an audience member to blurt out, “We paid money for this?” But that’s the thing about Sobelle — he doesn’t ask for permission. Like consumption itself, he simply takes. And we, unable to look away, keep watching.
At one point, a guest at the gargantuan table reads aloud the night’s wine selection — “Big Red” from Escondido Village. The reference, a Stanford nod, gets a knowing chuckle from alumni in the crowd. But like any good joke, audience matters. We gorge on his energy, this man who has the audacity to carry out silliness with focused determination.
In the end, there is no resolution, no digestif to ease the stomach. The audience is left to ruminate, the taste of dirt still lingering in the air. Was this a meal? A farce? A warning? FOOD does not ask for our approval. It only invites us to sit, to watch, and to wonder whether we are eating — or being eaten.