 So I'm here today to talk about the work of Lucy Orte. The social power and importance of restoring communal bonds and the belief that this can be done through an artistic practice is at the heart of Orte's ove. Her impulse to begin creating works of art did not originate in an individualistic notion of self-expression but as an empathetic response to a crisis. Trained and working in the fashion field it was the suffering and displacement caused by the Gulf War and ensuing economic recession that inspired her first series of artistic works. Using her fashion background she began sketching ideas for multi-purpose garments that would address the needs of the homeless and marginalized victims impacted by the conflict. The first work of the series refugee wear habitant as its name implies is a weatherproof outer garment that transforms into a tent providing a habitat, a semblance of private space protection and sanctuary to those suddenly deprived of such basic comforts. Later clothing based works expanded quickly from this first effort becoming more interventionist placing individuals and pairs in refuge wear in public places to disrupt the complacency of the urban street and then developing into conjoined outfits known as nexus architecture worn by large groups of participants parading through cities, deserts and political protests connected by link garments. Beginning with all in one basket from 1997 through her ongoing 70 by seven meal projects or to like many feminist artists of the past return to the traditional maternal role of providing nourishment and encouraging familial bonding through the shared meal to provide a direct political engagement with the real world. The first 70 by seven meal was held in 2000 in the galleries of Kunzbram Innsbruck for 14 invited guests. I'm sorry, I'm one behind. The second was arranged in a small village of Diz where 1,950 of the town's citizens or two thirds were seated at one table which stretched from the salt mines to the town hall. Almost 30 such events over almost 20 years of various sizes and in various locales have been presented since then. Each becomes its own unique work with specially designed royal limoush plates and printed tablecloths modulating the theme and iconography while the placement in town squares, galleries or an open field alters the institutional context. Orch's work is often praised for its graceful bridging of disparate fields such as fashion and art, art and performance, and activism, yet its specific similarities, particularly in these food-based works to feminist art projects that also worked in this liminal space seems to have been missed. Her communal works are most often associated with the social situation making theorized by Nicholas Borio's relational aesthetics rather than as a performance history that would link Orta with collaborative production and performance structures of pioneering feminist artists like Judy Chicago, Suzanne Lacy, Leslie Labowitz, and the interventionist histories of Adrian Piper, Alan R. Anton, and Valley Export. Yet, while the critical images for this kind of collaborative and performative work is first defined in Suzanne Lacy's own book, Mapping the Terrain, New Gen Republic Art, from 1995, which lays out a history of communal art stretching from marginal groups like feminism and other racial groups. This Borio's theory is not based on a defined trajectory, but it does mention past projects with what he deems a similar relational character, focusing on conceptual artists such as Ankoara, Daniel Byrne, Dan Graham, and Gordon Mada Clark. He does not include a single female artist from that period, and mentions art developed from such purposely marginal positions only to pronounce, quote, social utopias and revolutionary hopes of the 1960s and 70s have given way to everyday micro utopias and imitative strategies. Any stance that is directly critical of society is futile if based on the illusion of marginality that is nowadays impossible not to say regressive. As a result, relational aesthetics proposed political strategies stay very much within the art world, with aspirations focused on changing the model of reception and interaction within the art context, so that it can then model micro utopian interactions outside of that context. Therefore, the inclusion of feminist work in Orte's lineage is important for framing the performative in a politically appropriate way. For while there has been no shortage of critical attention for her artistic projects, it seems to me that the reluctance on the part of the artist and critics to identify aspects of her process, modes of medium and production, and even the work's empathetic inspiration with feminism, threatens to diminish the degree to which the work is read as aiming towards real social change. Again, one is forced to interrogate history and the making and wonder what is lost and who gains if feminism becomes just one instance of post-modern thought as Clive Owens once claimed, rather than as its own defining critique. Focusing on the 70 by seven project provides an interesting case study then to see how returning the direct political intentions of early feminist interventions of meals as art offers a way around some recent critiques of the communities produced in relational contemporary art. At the same time, it shows Orte creatively rethinking the identity politics of the previous generations for the era of globalization, using feminist strategies without focusing on exclusively women's issues. The dinner table as a symbol of dialogic relationships, conversation, and conviviality was a key part of Judy Chicago's famous dinner party installation, one of the most iconic works of feminist art and now housed here at the Sackler Center. Also central to Chicago's project was the elevation of traditional feminine crafts to high art through the work's focus on the place settings with their individually designed porcelain plates and embroidered runners, which we see echoed in Orte's use of these very same design elements to create an aesthetic and political coherence for each iteration of the 70 by seven meal. Less well known as Suzanne Lacy's International Dinner Party from 1979, which was 200 actual dinners with thousands of participants from around the world which were held in coordination with the San Francisco opening of Chicago's dinner party. And her river meetings, a 1980 potluck dinner for a racially and economically diverse group of 500 women in New Orleans. Later, more formal public performative dinners highlight the voices of the participants, bringing private conversations into the public sphere, for example in Crystal Quilt of 1987 where older women seated around tables speak about aging and death. Orte's 70 by seven project takes aspects of each, combining the permutational potluck model with the formal aesthetic design of carefully crafted table settings. However, Orte doesn't intend for her pieces to cohere into a traditional performance with selected dialogue or choreographed movements or a static installation that is reinstalled in new locations. Instead, the artistic product is the event itself and the relationships that evolve between participants and the particular context and conversations that they produce. In addition to nourishing the social in a casual sense, Orte also calls upon our social responsibility in regards to the physical survival of individuals and the planet itself by reimagining food distribution and preservation. Like her first artistic venture, Refugeware, 70 by seven the meal was an artistic response to a specific event. To protest European Union trade laws, French farmers would annually dump tons of fruit on the highways, a scene that Orte witnessed in the news in 1996 and identified as part of a much larger system that waste food while millions go hungry. Observing the Parisian farmer's markets, Orte found that at the end of every day, thousands of bruised, dented or simply unsold fruit and vegetables were thrown onto the sidewalks and washed into the sewers at night. To her surprise, she also discovered regular scavengers who would come in the evening to pick through produce and realize that they were quote, consciously or unconsciously creating a pocket of urban environmental equilibrium. She joined their ranks collecting fruit every Saturday and returning home to create jams, preserves and syrups from her finds and recording interviews with her fellow scavengers. All in one basket then was an open-air buffet of dishes made entirely out of Orte's preserved leftovers presented in the historic Parisian markets of Leal. While serving, Orte engaged in conversations about the project and the problem of food and ecological waste with the 1,300 people who stopped to taste her dishes. Visitors were also encouraged to see the related exhibition in a nearby gallery in which the jars labeled with photos of the discarded food were on display and collecting carts had Walkmans attached playing the scavenger interviews recorded at the markets. Gallery goers were then filmed as well talking about the issues raised by the project extending the cycle of participation and inter integration. By pushing an engagement not only between individuals but with the issue of food where it comes from how it gets to some and not others Orte ensured that the meal and not just the social situations it allowed remained a central concern of the work. Orte considers all in one basket to be act one of the 70 by seven project and many of the later sit down meals also use recycled food and local produce as their main ingredients. The topical focus derived from all in one basket is also present in the design elements of each 70 by seven iteration. Editions of porcelain plates are individually designed featuring symbols of both hope and global crisis and tables are often attached to beds of military vehicles or juxtaposed with other signs of emergency as we saw earlier. And I realize these will be impossible to read so the plate on the left says in truth the story of water almost always involves abuse, waste and even tragedy. And the plate on the right has words such as participation, communication, heart, network, survive, determination, abundance, belong written in alternating German, French and Italian. The point is not to proselytize for a specific solution but to remind us that we need to repair communities and reestablish lines of communication not only for our own comfort and enjoyment but is the only possible basis from which to achieve political alliances and communal action in a postmodern micro political age. It is here that Orte's evolving conception of community needs to be examined as it pertains to concerns that have been raised around the two other models of seemingly similar practices those understood as relational aesthetics and those identified with new genre public art. In Untitled Steel, Recreatier of Aenegia's now legendary first solo show at 303 Gallery in New York. He set up a makeshift kitchen in the office and storeroom of the gallery and cooked curry for visitors who were then encouraged to stay and socialize. One of the most well-known examples of relational aesthetics, this piece formed a major part of Boryard's book on the subject. In its simplicity, it showcases the characteristics of a dematerialized relational practice particularly well. Critique, I'm sorry, Critic Claire Bishop therefore used this piece in particular to critique relational aesthetics in her essay, Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics. She incisively analyzed the politics inherent in such models of communication and community. Arguing that democracy is not demonstrated through harmonious togetherness but through the ability to sustain antagonism and contestation, she points out that the community in the 303 Gallery was predominantly art world insiders. Citing a newspaper quote that the related installation, Tomorrow is Another Day, which reconstructed Thierry Aenegia's apartment replete with the kitchen to cook in, offered an asylum for everyone. Bishop writes, but who is everyone here? This may be a micro utopia, but like utopia, it is still predicated on the exclusion of those who hinder or prevent its realization. His installation reflects Borrio's understanding of relations produced through relational works as fundamentally harmonious because they are addressed to a community of viewing subjects with something in common. This is why Thierry Aenegia's works are political only in the loosest sense of advocating dialogue over monologue. Thierry Aenegia's micro utopias give up on the idea of transformation in public culture and reduces its scope to the pleasures of a private group who identify with one another as gallery goers. I've quoted Bishop at length as she presents the most important and common critique of utopian-tinged participatory practices, but also because she points through a number of directions where nuanced differences could lead to a more politically significant effort. Bishop takes her argument in one specific direction, one that is extremely critical of any positivistic notion of community as holistic and unifying, supporting artists instead who disrupt community to highlight its exclusions. However, I believe that Orta's 70 by 7 project presents a surprising alternative answer that refuses to negate the potentiality of community but is still able to answer the critique posed by Bishop and others of its exclusionary nature. For the communities that Orta posits through the realization of the ongoing 70 by 7 acts seems to operate on three ontological levels. First, those who are actually seated around a table and participate in a particular meal together, eating food in the same space. Second, the larger community formed by those around the world who at different times and places have participated in one of these collective meals. And finally, those who are addressed by and connected to the issues of the project and who could potentially be part of it in the future. In 70 by 7, the rhizomatic structure of the project is such that while some meals have been in and of themselves limited to a small group, those invitees have been then asked to invite seven guests of their own to the next dinner, implying a continual chain that could extend forever. At the same time, some meals have been planned to include the entire population of a given locale, taking the definition of community at its word and working to reinforce it beyond the physical sharing of a space. Each of these first degree communities, each of these is a first degree community but taken together, they form a second degree as well. As we've become more attuned to the overwhelming presence of delocalized communities in the internet age, we can certainly recognize the importance of such social articulations. Those who have contributed and participated in the umbrella project of all the 70 by 7 iterations will never having met share a similar connection to each other through the artwork as a friend of a friend on a social networking site. This chain of relationships in conjunction with the actual events in turns constitutes a critical part of the artwork in its fullest sense. But what of the third level of community? Who are they and why are they important to conceive of as a community relevant to the project? This brings us to the thorny questions of issues which underlines critiques of both relational aesthetics and new genre public art. In antagonism and relational aesthetics, Bishop observes, quote, communication is fine to an extent but it is not in and of itself emblematic of democracy. To be fair, I think Borio recognizes this problem but he does not raise it in relation to the artist he promotes, quote, connecting people, creating interactive communicative experiences, he says, what for? If you forget the what for, I'm afraid you are left with simple Nokia art, producing interpersonal relationships for their own sake and not addressing their political aspects, end quote. Borio's championed artists, however, are very rarely willing to commit to a what for. Direct political work seems to have gone out of favor as either naive, utopian or regressive. Discursively open and ambiguous projects are far more prevalent. Strategies of aesthetic participation preferred over strategies of political participation. This sense that oblique references to repressive capitalistic forces are safer than taking up specific issues is well founded as evidenced by the intense criticism level that so many artists who misstep in their attempt to negotiate this terrain with politically explicit or activist agendas. Accusations of opportunism, exploitation, exclusion, cultural insensitivity, theoretical simplicity and ignorance, accompany charges of aesthetic failings, propagandistic tendencies, overly-positivistic representations and or objectifications of the other, levels at artists that, if nothing else, are generally well-meaning in their goals. Whether these critiques are fair, the risk is obvious. To be specifically political is to endanger one's artistic standing. Much of the artwork taken to task for these transgressions is critically framed within Suzanne Lacy's new genre public art, one of the few recent theories that explicitly supports artists addressing social issues through their practice. Critic Mi-Won Kwan in her 2002 book on site and community-specific art, One Place After Another, however, criticizes the conflation between issues, identities and communities in many such practices. For Kwan, the lurking danger behind this participatory turn is that the interest in creating structures for positive self-expression and community unification suppresses the actuality of the alienated, fragmented subjects so carefully articulated by advanced postmodern theory. Kwan specifically critiques Lacy's project Full Circle, an urban intervention which honored the service of Chicago women and culminated in a large dinner ceremony for, quote, orchestrating a conceptually coherent unity of women that celebrated an abstract gender unity eliminated in this case by a set of service-oriented characteristics, end quote. This universalizing common denominator of woman is seen as automatically trumping all other aspects of identity, individual specificity, and subjective instability, and is therefore deemed false and regressive. As the other side of the coin, Kwan points to community-based public art in which artists identify a contentious issue and then narrowly match it with a related community. For example, an artist who's black is presumed to be an appropriate delegate to address inner-city race conflicts in partnership with an African American cultural organization. In general, the communities in this type of project are disenfranchised, marginalized, and again defined by a similar identity that serves as a fixed notion, that serves as a fixed common denominator to mark out a specific limited community. Without entering fully into this debate, you can see that the primary arguments in relation to community practices seem to circle around the conflation of social issues with specific communities and or the suppression of difference and exclusion. However, I would argue that the relationships between communities, issues, and identities, and Orta's work breaks with these models and key ways by challenging some of the assumptions that underlie the above arguments. I'm almost at time, so I'm gonna try and speed up. By organizing the 70 by seven project around pressing issues of food politics, globalization, and emergency support for those in need, the work has a clear articulated content that addresses the what for indicated by Boreo. At the same time, the community that is related to them, the community of those who need food to survive, has no outside for the human community and therefore is related to issues of food quality and distribution, those who are related to issues of food quality and distribution are not only those at one end of the spectrum, the undernourished, for example, but equally it is a challenge to the overnourished, the subsistence farmer, and international seed corporation. For each and every person who could be seated at the table would always already have been part of this community and does whether they participate or not have a stake in the issues resolution. This is a return to perhaps an overly idealistic notion of the interconnected global community, but now recognized as neither intrinsically good nor bad, but simply a practical reality with potential for either. Therefore, the community that Orta presumes that community, I'm sorry, the community that Orta posits is not presumed harmonious, but to whatever degree an increased recognition of interdependence can inspire us towards more equitable, more civil, more empathetic alliances, this should be supported rather than denigrated as naive or utopian. The community and communication available through the medium of food moves her project ever closer to the improbable, but hypothetically imaginable goal of global collective care and action, and what could be better goal for feminism and feminist art practices both now and in the future. Thank you.