000 Manifesto
Open Kitchen is Phil Zheng Cai’s curatorial initiative focusing on systematic critique.
It selects, examines, reveals, interprets, and criticizes all systems mechanical or societal via methods and presentations of contemporary art.
As a contemporary expansion and philosophical variation of Institutional Critique, Open Kitchen aims to generalize and re-contextualize, inspired by the precedents of the movement which was initiated in the 1960s and more or less continued through this day in a stagnant fashion.
On the one hand, it targets all systems by their ontological definitions and constructions, providing a wider range of criticism even though it mostly relies on the outputting mechanisms of contemporary art linguistically.
On the other hand, contemporary Institutional Critique is mostly over-reliant on the action of abstraction and de-materialization, particularly in the curatorial landscape, rendering the Critiques dry and unrelatable. Open Kitchen proposes to de-abstract, and return ideas to their co-existence with rhetorics whilst maintaining the abstractabilities, forming “wet” critiques that exhibit both strong narratives and philosophical depth.
Ultimately, the specter of the following question lingers at the foreseeable end game of systematic critique:
Would the critique of any system suggest a replacement system?
With the question unanswered and arguably irresolvable, Open Kitchen cooks ahead.
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A working and ever-expanding list of subject systems:
Art Institutions, Art Making Processes, Partisan Politics, Positivism, Structuralism, Semiotics, Linguistics, Educational Institutions, Artists as Communities, Ethnicities as Communities, Geography as Communities, Identity Assimilation as Communities, Nomadism …
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An aperitif
Contemporary art, as well as all systems, sources, processes, and presents.
Open kitchen is an attitude of transparency at the entire process.
Tenderness lies more in the allowance to fully inspect than the grades of the meat.
Transparency reveals not only the flow from ingredients to dishes, but also the absolute allowance in an open exchange of techniques, ethnicities, and idiosyncratic associations.
Kung Pao the Brooklyn thin crusts; Sous Vide the chicken tikka masalas; and Sweet Green all those caviars and oysters sourceable at the deepest of Sahara.