All the world's a stage for 'restaurant theater.'

After covering the restaurant business for the last nine years, I've become even more convinced that it's much like theater.

Besides collaborating with each other, Komar and Melamid have collaborated with elephants, with history (in the project "What Is to be Done with Monumental Propaganda"), and with Stalin (in the remaking of Lenin's mausoleum). This time, they are collaborating with the silent majority of the democratic state. The subtitle - "Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art" - evokes two ideas of scientific truth: the Soviet Marxist-Leninist, and the American. Komar and Melamid do not parody either of these ideas. Instead, they dramatize their implications. If their fellow ex-Soviet artist Ilya Kabakov builds his installations on the threshold of individual obsessions and aesthetic dreams, Komar and Melamid build on the dream of the collective - from communist utopia to virtual democracy - and its grotesque distortion.COMMON DISHWASHER PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONSIt has often been suggested that in contemporary society, polls have replaced politics and polity. Even though the pollsters and statistics professors openly acknowledge that theirs is a limited science, it has been made to function as the true representation of the people's choice and is repeatedly manipulated by politicians, businessmen, and journalists. Seemingly the most democratic tool, statistical analysis is frequently used as the most authoritarian one. It doesn't describe a demand, but constructs it. Komar and Melamid, however, take the polls at face value. This literal-mindedness, coupled with fantastic technology, is characteristic of much of American media culture. The artists reveal its absurdity. The "most wanted," calculated with the help of the polls, is what nobody wants - except those who order the poll.Each issue of Dishwasher is brimming with cartoons and handwritten stories about the colorful characters who populate restaurant kitchens. It also makes some political points. In an essay called "The Slave Wage," Pete rails against the unlivable pittance the grunts receive and recommends they take over the means of production themselves and share the wealth.The artists, trained in conspiratorial techniques, realize that the only way to speak publicly about art, at least in American society, is by speaking about polls. In fact, the statistical graphs in the book themselves resemble abstract paintings. Modernist styles have been transferred into life, celebrating the victory of science, statistics, and the media. But at a focus-group discussion in Ithaca, New York, Komar raised the following question: If he ate one chicken and Melamid ate none, would the statistic say that each of the artists had eaten half a chicken? Even if Alex actually had gone hungry? A statistics professor who was participating in the discussion explained that his method was concerned with chicken consumption in general, not with individual eating habits. At this point, the hungry artists realized that the statistical approach might threaten the nature of their collaboration.Fourteen hours after they began, the house was back to as normal as it ever gets, and I was amazed at the crew's speed and professionalism. Now, a week later, I still get an occasional -- but extremely vivid -- reminder of my own brush with restaurant theater.I will open a kitchen cabinet, and there it will be. Total recall: a tsunami of lingering fried-chicken scent hits me smack in the nose.The dream of a universal language was the dream of modernism. According to Melamid, people believed that the square was what could unite people, that it was truly universal. But the blue landscape is what is really universal, maybe to all mankind. The Russian Futurist movement began with a manifesto entitled "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste." At first glance, it might appear that Komar and Melamid's project is a defense of public taste, a slap in the face of modernism and the art establishment. Yet the specter of modernism haunts the post-Communist artists.Pete says he's in no hurry to complete his U.S. tour. And after he reaches his goal of washing dishes in all fifty states, he says he may move on to Europe. Or he may to organize dishwashers into unions. "One thing about being a union organizer is it's about being flexible and transient," he says.I, meanwhile, toiled in my backroom office -- my furniture piled around my ears and only a pathway to get from the door to my phone, desk and computer -- smelling fried chicken wafting one way and, of all things, Lemon Pledge wafting the other. It seems my sun room off the office had become the commercial's dining room, and shining furniture was important to the atmosphere of the piece. I was caught in the middle but quickly adjusted.In his spare time, Dishwasher Pete frequents university libraries to research dishwashing labor history and collects stories, books, and newspaper and magazine clippings to review in the zine.As each batch would come out of the industrial-sized fryer that sat on my kitchen counter, two food stylists would grab the best-looking pieces to star in the final food shot -- the "hero," they called it. If this was any indication of how Hollywood depends on raw looks, I now see why actors and actresses say they feel they are treated like meat. The chicken tenders sure were.I live and work in a 1918 home, which by Dallas' standards is as old as civilization itself. Over the years several location scouts for production companies have used the little bungalow as a site for television commercials and print ads, but this production was on a scale that dwarfed all the others.

I don't mind, though, because in restaurant marketing that must be the sweet smell of success.

Author: Ron Ruggless