DEVOURING CITYCAKE

 

Artists, architects, musicians, writers, and the general public respond to Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's invitation to suggest "recipes" for Downtown - anything from a design for a new public piazza to the instructions for making a new kind of pizza.

 

A recipe ritual for lower manhattan

 

My recipe to spice up downtown is to re-create City? (2004), a three-dimensional aluminum sculpture of skyscrapers by artist Julian Opie - in cake. I would like to place this enormous, nine-foot-tall cake of the city in City Hall Park, where the original sculpture stood until February of this year. It will be public art as dessert, cityscape as nourishment. Everyone, including random passers-by, will be invited to have a piece.

 

New York is the city of desire, and people come here from all over the world to pursue their dreams. In this public ritual of communion, we become one with the city, literally devouring the place that feed us creatively and spiritually. At the same time, we acquire the city's properties as well. If this is a kind of cannibalism, it's a cultural and aesthetic one. Eating City?Cake will symbolize this hunger and satiety, the never-ending cycle between the city and its residents. Who says you can't have your city and eat it, too?

 

"Man's great affliction, which begins with infancy and accompanies him till death, is that looking and eating are two different operations. Eternal beatitude is a state where to look is to eat."

-Simone Weil