Mid-August is hardly the high season of art and design exhibitions in New York City, but that didn’t stop artist Allan Wexler and architect-designer Michael Yarinsky from gathering 24 artists and staging “Table Top,” an end-of-summer show in the Rockaways earlier this month. Wexler and Yarinsky co-curated the show’s assortment of—as the title suggests—tabletop objects that sought to challenge the rituals around eating. Staged at Driveway, a garage art gallery just three blocks from the beach, the show’s opening reception all but encouraged sandy-footed attendees to take in Brecht Wright Gander and Georgia B. Smith’s spaghetti-slurping, cyborg-esque Date Night Device, or Carson Terry’s match and Marlboro-slinging steel spoons.
“Table Top” is just one such conceptual exploration that Wexler and Yarinsky are including in A New Futurist Cookbook, which will document the installations, dinners, and art at the center of the collaborators’ efforts to question and expand the ideas of function, purpose, and routine as they relate to food consumption.
“We tried to identify a wide range of artists whose way of thinking might fit our loose definition of ‘futurism,’ that we are outlining throughout A New Futurist Cookbook,” Yarinsky told Surface. “Artists and designers presented objects that could redefine our interaction with food and the table. These pieces aim to be evocative of how people may be able to interact in the future.”
For attendees of the 2025 edition of design fair Collectible, that future is not so distant. On its opening night, Wexler and Yarinsky will bring “Table Top” to life in a series of performances with chef Marissa Lippert. In performance form, “Table Top” will make use of Wexler’s conceptual table, Pulling Together, Pulling Apart in a choreographed work that explores how physicality and space go on to inform the social mores of a family-style meal.
