“The best way to somebody’s heart is through their stomach,” says Michael Yarinsky before quickly clarifying, “That’s a dumbing down of it." As Yarinsky sees it, if you make something delicious, and make it beautiful, people who might never willingly walk into a performance-art piece might find their way inside. Today he is calling from the 2,000-square-foot concrete interior of Car Part Time, the Brooklyn collector-car showroom and cultural venue designed by Office of Tangible Space—the interdisciplinary design studio that he co-founded in 2018. He is preparing for the latest installment of “A New Futurist Cookbook,” a 10-part series in collaboration with artist Allan Wexler.
Across 10 meals, which feature recipes, objects, and performances, Yarinsky and Wexler set out to reframe mealtime as a way to interrupt the habits we rarely think twice about: where we sit, how we serve one another, what constitutes good manners, and, beneath it all, how we understand our relationship to the people around us. Part performance, part dinner, part book in the making, it is a contemporary answer to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1932 Futurist Cookbook, in which the Italian Futurist and fascist embraced multisensory dining and rejected traditional Italian cuisine—and even utensils. Unlike Marinetti’s project, “A New Futurist Cookbook” is deliberately social and collaborative rather than alienating. “We never want this to be a manifesto,” says Yarinsky. “We want it to be an invitation.”