43 Futurist Holiday Dinners
Provocations and rituals for the festive season. Fruitcake included.
By Allan Wexler and Michael Yarinsky
In developing A New Futurist Cookbook, artist Allan Wexler and designer Michael Yarinsky explore how everyday dining rituals can be reimagined as acts of architectural inquiry—speculative proposals that merge the domestic with the tectonic, the ceremonial with the absurd. The following list continues this larger project of using material transformation, seasonal traditions, and humor to question how we gather, dine, and construct meaning through objects and environments. These fragments are not instructions but provocations: miniature architectures that invite readers to reconsider the infrastructures of holiday rituals and the latent spatial possibilities embedded within the familiar.
On a snowy day, place your dining table on a hillside. Using a carpenter’s level, pack the snow into a horizontal plane to create a level surface for dining.
Place steaming bowls of tomato soup onto a snow-covered picnic table. Bowls melt into the surface, slowly cooling the soup.
Boxing Day dinner. All furniture is made from repurposed gift packaging and decoupaged onto existing furniture.
Holiday dinner in the tropics. Dinner party in a walk-in freezer.
Spread a tablecloth made of heat-sensitive fabric across the table. As warm dishes are placed down, abstract patterns bloom across its surface, mapping the evening’s meal in real time.
The ancient pagan tradition of burning a yule log was used to celebrate the winter solstice. Place each leg of a table into its own lit bonfire to warm diners on a cold winter day.
Four individuals of different heights sit on wrapped Christmas gifts to raise their heights to the same eye level.
Purchase dinnerware from a thrift shop. Paint half of the ceramic bowls, plates, cups, and saucers Benjamin Moore - Cochineal Red, CW-330 and the other half with Benjamin Moore - Webster Green, HC-130 to celebrate Christmas.
The wreath for the front door is edible. Share it as a holiday dinner with neighbors.
Make fruitcake facsimiles of a dinner table and chairs.
Make milk and cookies for Santa. Leave outside so Santa doesn’t come inside.
Santa wants to become architecture. Santa is cast in brick and turned into a chimney.
Build a snowman and sit across from him at the dinner table. Enjoy the companionship of a meal together.
Create a small aperture in your holiday dishware using a diamond drill bit. Craft it into hanging tree ornaments.
Place the stem of a dreidel into the chuck of a battery-powered drill and spin.
Hanukkah table. Cut a dinner table into eight pieces. Burn one table section each night of Hanukkah to celebrate the Festival of Lights.
Buy eight Christmas trees. Burn one each night of Hanukkah.
Grease a squeaky table leg using a potato latke.
Chocolate menorah lit and melted over eight days.
Advent dinner party. Build one chair a day for 24 days. On the 25th day, build a dinner table and eat.
Advent table. Build 25 drawers into a dining table. Each one contains a complete meal to be eaten in the days leading up to Christmas.
Three tables are spliced together—not as three separate tables but rather a unified table with three distinct yet inseparable parts symbolizing the Trinity.
Fold and cut 96 linen dinner napkins into 96 snowflakes of different shapes, as all snowflakes are unique.
Ghost of Christmas Past Dinner: After completing a Christmas dinner on a white tablecloth, place the linen in the backyard and leave it there until the following Christmas Eve. Bring indoors for the festive holiday dinner the following year.
Encase last year’s Christmas stockings in polyester resin so that they can retain liquids without leaking. Drink hot chocolate from these repurposed stockings.
Place four 12-inch-diameter snowballs under a dinner table’s legs. The table’s height will slowly lower from bar height to dining height as the evening transitions from the cocktail hour to the dinner party.
A legless tabletop is elevated off the ground by four Christmas trees using a structure of 2x6s connected to the trunks of four pine, spruce, or fir trees.
Four trees within a pine forest make up the corners for the construction of a dining pavilion.
Attach tiny tuned metal bells to the handles of forks, knives, and spoons so they produce different pitches when used, creating accidental communal carols.
A metal paint tray with baker’s chocolate is placed over a pot of boiling water, melting the chocolate. Paint the dining room with the melted chocolate using a nine-inch flat-weave roller.
A fur-lined dinner table in memory of Meret Oppenheim.
Bake wedge-shaped gingerbread bricks and assemble them with royal icing into a fully compressive arch.
Eight diners sit at a table wearing woven holiday scarves that unite to create a tablecloth.
Create a table from beeswax. Line the perimeter of the table with wicks embedded through the center of the table. As the candles burn throughout the evening, the table drips wax icicles.
Dinner at the North Pole. The Lazy Susan centered on a table is a magnetic compass. When at magnetic north, it spins without stopping.
Four diners eat snow cones in the snow.
After eating a holiday dinner, frame soiled linen napkins and exhibit them at a local art center.
Preserve holiday dinner party leftovers in polyester resin and set them in a vitrine at a local museum.
Animatronic dinner. The centerpiece is a mechanical, edible turkey whose legs and wings are motorized with cams and servos.
Platters of food arrive at the table on model train cars. The track originates in the kitchen, traveling to the table and circling back to the kitchen for seconds.
Using blocks of ice and a chainsaw, sculpt four chairs and a table. Craft a chandelier out of collected icicles.
A negative table is carved out of snow, and concrete is poured into the voids. The curing of concrete causes an exothermic reaction, releasing heat. As the concrete hardens, the snow melts revealing a table.
Rip a paper table apart to reveal a holiday dinner. Rip apart paper chairs to reveal holiday gifts. ⌂
About A New Futurist Cookbook by Allan Wexler and Michael Yarinsky
We propose a dinner, a treatise, a restaurant, a happening, a cookbook to make people aware of food and its presentation, origins, distribution, assembly, construction, and raw ingredients. We imagine it as an event that will transform eating from a source of bodily nourishment to one that feeds spirit and intellect. Eating will become narrative and ritual. The organization of a menu, its delivery, and consumption will tell a story.
A New Futurist Cookbook by artist Allan Wexler and interdisciplinary designer Michael Yarinsky aims to be a response to the 1932 Futurist Cookbook, a manifesto of culinary innovation by F. T. Marinetti. This cookbook will be a compilation of collaborations with a community of innovative chefs and leaders in food culture and the culinary arts. Each recipe for a Futurist Dinner will be illustrated with proposals as to how to deliver and serve this food. We propose the uniforms, soundscapes, lighting, utensils, and furniture for each recipe using sketches, diagrams, drawings, photos of prototypes, and finally, a documented performance. This project aims to merge the culinary arts, the fine arts, and the applied arts to create a Total Work of Art.
The updated “non-manifesto” aims to be of interest to anyone who eats. Food is our most primitive and powerful social network. People think, dream, and act according to what they eat and drink. Our objective is to stimulate the reader to reevaluate the unchallenged habitual ways we use and source food.