Breaking bread and boundaries: the act of dining creating and celebrating community in social practice art

To dine, not just to eat, but to eat together, is an essential aspect of human existence, it is how we mark occasions, celebrate our cultures, and bond with each-other. Given its central role in our social interactions, it is no surprise that social practice artists have brought dining into their work. This essay will focus on three works, the first of which is Suzanne Lacy’s International Dinner Party (1979), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a 24 hour worldwide feminist dinner happening, and an early example of social practice. The second case study is JR’s Migrants, Picnic Across the Border (2017), Tecate, a picnic shared across the US-Mexico border, and site specific photographic installation. And finally, Michael Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen (2012), Chicago’s first openly Iraqi restaurant. These works not only used dining to create and celebrate community, but used that conviviality to tackle political issues, women’s rights, immigration, and Iraqi representation in the US, respectively. These three works used dining to create and celebrate community across both physical and ideological borders, and illustrate the potential for political art to have real impact, if not on public policy, then on participant’s lives. By departing from the traditional structure of a single artist making an artwork, and viewers then having a solitary one-to-one experience with it, these artists enabled their participants and audiences to form communities via a shared interaction with the work (Bishop, 2004). I have chosen these works because of the impact they had on participants, and on me, as a reader, and their ambitious scales. There are, of course, many other worthy works, but due to limitations of length, I have narrowed my focus to these three, which share key similarities, while maintaining distinct identities, and challenging dominant theories of relational aesthetics.