Culture Feed is the blog for arts and culture in the Bay Area – produced by the culture desk of The Bay Citizen. From breaking arts news to event coverage to YouTube videos, Culture Feed aims to bring you the best in culture from around the Bay. Please drop us a line and let us know what’s on your radar.
It was a sunny day in Sacramento on Sunday, and the plants in front of the Crocker Art Museum were soaking it in.
But it wasn’t just an ordinary afternoon of sunshine for the greenery, which was enjoying an organic, locally sourced meal at the world’s first “Photosynthetic Restaurant” – courtesy of conceptual artist Jonathon Keats.
Plants in Sacramento have no shortage of sunlight. But it’s a tedious diet: day after day of ho-hum full-spectrum light – the plant equivalent of eating oatmeal for breakfast, lunch and dinner for your entire life.
In order to spice up their menu options – why should humans be the only species to enjoy gourmet cuisine -- Keats installed color acrylic panels to filter flavorful red, yellow and blue light onto the hungry plants below.
It was hard to tell what, exactly, the flora thought of their meal – but they appeared to be wolfing it down.
Gourmet cuisine is not the only entertainment that Keats, who describes his art as “thought experiments,” has created for the plant world. In “Cinema Botanica” he made a porn theater for some potted house plants by projecting uncensored scenes of pollination directly onto their leaves in a darkened room (see the trailer!). He also produced travel documentaries for plants – images of the Italian sky that he screened for some palm trees in New York that were never going to make the journey to Europe.
“The Photosynthetic Restaurant” is open at the Crocker Art Museum through July 17. A cookbook, “The Photosynthetic Restaurant: Gourmet Sunlight for Plants,” is also available.
© The Bay Citizen, 2012
