MawsonKerr, Shawm House, West Woodburn, England, 2017
Perfection is something you never actually attain, because when you attain it it’s not perfection.
Thomas Keller, "On Perfection at the French Laundry," c. 2001 (via bourdain)
Diller + Scofidio, Increasing Disorder In A Dining Table, 2010 (via ediblegeography)
'This drawing documents the progression of a meal from a perfectly laid table, through a motion-trace palimpsest of the dinner party in action, to the wreckage of dirty dishes and crumpled napkins that confronts the host(s) after the last guest has departed. Diller + Scofidio’s drawings fill the gap left by etiquette books, which meticulously diagram the set design necessary for a successful dinner party, but fail to map the equally choreographed during-dinner movements and post-dinner dérangement that ensue. In fact, the reversed order of the Diller & Scofidio drawings almost seems to imply that the perfect dinner party could be run equally smoothly both forwards, starting with a perfectly laid table, and backwards, starting from the aesthetically arranged débris, if one was simply equipped with thorough stage directions. This is Dinner Party as absurdist theatre, a fertile territory for playwrights, and one that Diller + Scofidio have also explored elsewhere, most notably with their interactive video installation, Indigestion. In that piece, viewers could experience a dining performance from both the perspective of the diners’ dialogue (an audio track) and their hand movements projected onto the flat surface of a dinner table. But, like those micro facial expressions that give away liars, the two scripts did not necessarily tell the same story.'