Can-I-Ball?
Yes We Cannibal enlists Tunde Wey for a bold exhibition of meal as message
I had always thought of “gestalt” as effectively a fancy pronoun, the German equivalent of je ne sais quoi or “oh, you know, that whole whatever-it-is,” so when I signed up to attend the art collective Yes We Cannibal’s series of gestalt dinners, I effectively had no idea what they meant, or what I was signing up for.
Flash forward to me in an inflated hazmat suit, gloves, and veil-like mask, seated with thirteen strangers in a small gallery space. The walls were lined with balloons, and a video of a man and woman in African dress either speaking or preaching played on loop on the front wall. I tried to figure out how best to manage my glasses with the close-fitting veil—glasses on under? Glasses on over? Glasses off?—and ate my single roasted radish, scraping up the chimichurri-like sauce with the edge of my plastic fork. Even without expectations, this was not what I had expected.
We proceeded through the courses, which were announced by a voice over a loudspeaker: male, with a hard-to-place vaguely Northeastern accent. He also told anecdotes and gave instructions for the participatory aspects of the meal. At various points we danced, marched in a circle, and answered discussion prompts—though we were not to speak directly to each other, but instead had to call over an attendant to whom we would whisper our answer and who would repeat it aloud to the room. Intermittently, a child-sized figure in a hazmat suit matching ours would circuit the room and sometimes pop a balloon. To me, this was by far the most unnerving part of the evening, both because of how desperately I hate loud and sudden noises (“terrier nerves”) and because a civilization that needs to produce hazmat suits for children has gone terribly, desperately astray.
After the sixth course, we all sang, in unison, twice, Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” then were told we could remove our masks, gloves, and suits. The last course, boba balls in spiced coconut milk, was distributed, and the chef finally revealed: chef and artist Tunde Wey. We had, in a sense, been played. Yes We Cannibal was not a restaurant or eatery or even a “purveyor,” but had worked with Wey to create and curate this event at the intersection of installation and performance art, of Dada and dinner.
Wey was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and came to the United States as a student, ultimately spending about twenty years away from Nigeria because immigration laws meant that if he left, he was not guaranteed reentry into the United States. Now a New Orleans resident, he is a working artist using food, and perhaps more strictly-speaking, meals, to illustrate points about class, race, and inequality. He’s received the most press for projects like Saartj, a 2018 New Orleans pop-up that charged white people higher prices than people of color (a response in part to the St. Roch Food Market, an “urban renewal” plan that did not make good on its affordable food promises) and Hot Chicken Shit, a Nashville event that required white diners wanting a whole Nashville hot chicken to purchase it by signing over a deed to a property in gentrifying North Nashville.
"The suits and veils were the aspect that struck me most. Enclosed, I felt I was experiencing the meal alone—every introvert knows the feeling of being 'alone even in the crowd,' but to take part in this collection of strange rituals without eye contact, without a smile or a smirk across the table, made the weirdness of it all hit harder."
An admiring 2019 GQ profile of Wey by Brett Martin includes the line, “There are times when it appears that food does not even particularly interest him,” which is fair: the food served at the performance dinner was by no means bad, but it was also very much beside the point. Wey’s art is often aggressive and makes arguments through food and about food, but not really through flavor. He wants to use food to create reflection, discomfort, effect: I liked the coconut cassava very much, but I would be amazed if he cared. Despite his (seemingly earned) reputation for confrontational work, the man himself is charming and an appealingly casual speaker—and also apparently a master of mimicry, as it was his voice over the speaker, the faintest West African accent concealed under a convincing “you-talkin’-to-me” veneer.
I had mixed feelings about the work. At its best, it was thought-provoking and stimulating; other parts dragged and felt “weird for the sake of weird.” As Wey explained during a press conference/Q&A/hangout after the dinner, one of his major concerns in assembling the project was death: the seed of the project had been an idea for a dinner at the end of the world, which had evolved into the dinner I had experienced. It was his recently-departed mother in the film loop, joining his brother at a service of thanksgiving for the brother’s survival of a near-fatal accident. The meal had begun with, in lieu of grace, a short, guided meditation on death in which we were invited to imagine and to accept our eventual death, decay, and ultimate return to the earth. Coming soon after we had all put on identity-negating costumes, this was especially effective. In general, the suits and veils were the aspect that struck me most. Enclosed, I felt I was experiencing the meal alone—every introvert knows the feeling of being “alone even in the crowd,” but to take part in this collection of strange rituals without eye contact, without a smile or a smirk across the table, made the weirdness of it all hit harder.
[Read about Yes We Cannibal's December 2022 exhibit, Emptiness Ecologies, here.]
The absence of meat in a meal addressing death felt like a missed opportunity: the meal was nearly vegan (one dish had a little butter), but the provision of meat is how death most directly affects our tables. Also: it was too long. I left before the Q&A was over because I had to get back to New Orleans and sleep before my friends came to help me pack for a move in the morning: a glance at the car clock told me I’d been in there for four hours and forty minutes. I am a firm believer that you cannot effectively compete with the body for attention: if someone’s hip hurts or they have to pee, you’ll lose them, hence my enthusiasm for the eighty-seven-minute movie and the twenty-minute meeting. A broader point about the inversion of roles was lost on me—when the loudspeaker voice commanded us to dance, I did so because I like to think of myself as a good sport, and the idea that we were “dancing for our supper” in a reversal of the usual server-diner roles didn’t occur to me. (Also, as someone who is excellent dinner company, I am used to obtaining meals by providing light entertainment.)
If it didn’t all “work” for me, though, I can still praise Wey and the Yes We Cannibal curators, Mat Keel and Liz Lessner, for producing an event that was unlike anything I’ve encountered in my novelty-seeking, paying-the-bills-with-light-experiential-journalism life. The dinner challenged me (even if I did have to pee) and presented me with a truly new format for art: meal as message. Here’s hoping for seconds.
Explore more of Yes We Cannibal’s upcoming programming at yeswecannibal.org.