ReadyMade: Instructions for everyday life

The methods behind Karen Azoulay’s unique madness could apply to all manner of entertaining themes—from a Pop Art blowout to a quiet Impressionism tea party.

1. FIND AN INSPIRATION Select an influence or muse, but don’t worry about being perfectly faithful. Immerse yourself in the topic, pick and choose the elements that excite you, and disregard the rest.

2. DEFINE YOUR PALETTE Committing to a color scheme will help you stay focused. A simple way to develop unity without looking too matchy-matchy is to delete one or two colors from the rainbow.

3. TOSS YOUR GROCERY LIST Wander the aisles of your local supermarket with an eye for seductive colors, compelling shapes, and curious textures. Allow yourself to consider these foodstuffs simply as the raw materials for visual accents like bouquets and centerpieces.

4. VISIT SPECIALTY SHOPS Drop in on your local cake decorating, hardware, or medical-supply store. They can spark your imagination and lead you to bizarre objects that are just begging to be transformed into sculptures or table settings.

5. ADD A DASH OF FORMALITY Delivering little speeches or presentations throughout the evening will not only give you an opportunity to point out the details you labored over (your guests should know!), but also transform your dinner party into a theatrical experience.


Karen works intently on transforming a floor lamp (from Home Depot) first with paint, and then by wrapping the flexible arms with skeins of silk ribbon in coordinating colors.

A BANQUET TIMELINE:

1. 1 month out After nailing down a date and securing a friend’s apartment, we mailed out the invitations, which proved to be the biggest challenge of the entire production: It was genuinely painful to limit the guest list to only 20 people, and I’m not exaggerating when I say friendships were damaged.

2. two weeks out As Karen holed away in her studio making the table settings and decor, I taste-tested salt & vinegar potato chips (the winner: Trader Joe’s brand) and calculated drink ratios: 15 bottles of wine for 20 people turned out to be exactly right; 40 bottles of seltzer is about 25 too many (I have no idea what I was thinking).

3. 3 weeks out At this point the menu was the least of our worries. First, Karen had to scour the city for materials as I anxiously juggled the RSVP list and rued the day I was born.

4. one week out Not owning a car demanded we strategize about shopping and arrange for deliveries of heavy supplies like drinks and ice. To spare ourselves the hassle of actually cooking, we started to organize the menu around low to no-prep foods: raw vegetables and fruits, boxed soups, frozen ready-made appetizers, all manner of nuts, snacks, and candies.

5. the menu: 5 courses + dessert. 1. One medicine dropper full of pink bubble-gum infusion. 2. Skewer of strange tastes (jelly donut, pickled plum, limed marshmallow, vegetable dumpling, chili mango) with purple blindfold. 3. Frozen soup ice slabs and rubber gloves. 4. Anti-Caesar salad with gelatin dressing mounds. 5. Meat loaf wedding cake with chartreuse mashed potato piped icing (the only course cooked from scratch). 6. Miracle fruit berry with lemon wedges and salt & vinegar potato chips.

   
   
   

   
   “Icing” the base of the meat loaf wedding cake with mashed potatoes, Parmesan cheese, mascarpone, and food coloring.
   
   

6. day before Leaving all the grocery shopping until now did not make for a stress-free prep process. Were we to do it again, we’d do the bulk of the buying at least a week in advance. Likewise, starting the meat loaf at 11 p.m. was not a very good idea, especially when I realized I couldn’t get it out of the pan (a near-disaster averted by much gentle tugging and prodding).

7. day of Mayhem. Karen worked from dawn until dusk (with the help of a few saintly friends) to get the room in order while I raced between Whole Foods and Chinatown in search of last-minute provisions. When our first guests appeared at 8 p.m., as instructed, I actually had to ask them to leave and come back in 15 minutes. We were convinced we were doomed.

8. party! Needless to say, all that last minute frenzy had me braced for disaster. But thanks to the miracle that is unpredictability, the evening actually surpassed our wildest expectations.

   
   
   

   
   (From left) Slate’s foreign editor June Thomas, author Malcolm Gladwell, and artists Rebecca Watson Horn and Glenn Ligon navigate their “skewers of strange tastes.”

The Futurist movement, which was founded by the Italian poet and impresario F.T. Marinetti in 1909, grew to encompass every mode of creative expression—poetry, sculpture, film, fashion, even typography and ceramics—before vanishing with his death in 1944. For our banquet, Karen created a vaudevillian laboratory theme by drawing on the Futurist fixations she found most inspiring—unexpected elements and bright colors, unusual textures, variations on scale and, of course, gastronomical cunning—all united by her signature touch: an obsessive attention to detail. “Dinner guests have to stay seated for a long time,” she explains. “I wanted every single thing their eyes fell on to be a surprise.”

The -ist List of Entertaining: Seven Schools of Art-making to Inspire Your Next Soiree

by Alexa Fornoff

Romanticist (Edgar Allen Poe, Hudson River School, Moby-Dick, Nationalism)
Throw out the logic of the Age of Enlightenment and stir up emotions suppressed by the French Revolution. Celebrate the macabre, the dark, the awe-inducing with compositions from Chopin, deeply vibrant colors, and supernatural imagery. Include visual cues that cause gut reactions alongside folk art.

Impressionist (Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Visible Brushstrokes, Painting en plein air)
Both genders can get in on the fun, either going all out with face paint or staying subtle and exaggerating normal makeup colors. The trick is to be able to see the brushstrokes in the end, so use big, full brushes to cover more area. Think MAC Paint Pot makeup ads circa 2007, and you’re at a good place.

Cubist (Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Disassembly, Plural Viewpoint)
Do like Picasso and develop various ways of looking at one thing. Use the same basic element, like a bottle of wine, and take different stances for each party favor. One guests actually gets an entire bottle of wine, but others may get just an empty bottle, the wine spilled on a cloth, a cast of the space the bottle occupies, a bunch of grapes, or a drawing of how one feels when drinking wine. When all of the gifts are together, the entire group gets the bigger picture.

Constructivist (Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko, Photo Collage, Rejection of “Art for art’s sake”)
Reject art for art’s sake, and get aspirational with industrial materials. Use iron, glass, steel, and wood for your serving trays and food displays. Make a matchstick model of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International to serve your appetizers and use photomontage placemats pieced together from news photographs and painted pieces, acting as a descriptive name card for the guest who should be seated there.

Dadaist (Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Anti-art, Nonsense, Viewer Interpretation)
The major party trick for this –ist shindig, chance, can be achieved through intriguing food pairings. This can get as fancy or inexpensive as you want, but it’s nice to include some readymade (thank you, Duchamp) items in the mix. Bring arresting flavors together and have your guests pick a few items at random, then dine on their newly concocted combination.

Surrealist (André Breton, Salvador Dali, Elements of Surprise, Idiosyncrasy Party Games)
Try the exquisite corpse as your next party game, and do one for each guest to keep as a favor. Start with a four-times folded sheet of paper and assign a body segment to four players. Without seeing what the others have drawn, each draws their respective quarter. Before unfolding the masterpiece, play another version of the game and assign each person a fragment of this sentence to serve as the title of the piece: “The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun.”

Minimalist (Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Sol LeWitt, Void Spaces, Geometric Forms)
The idea behind this movement of the 1960s and ‘70s is to strip every non-essential element away, leaving only what is necessary. Could there be a more perfect theme for a boozy (and short!) cocktail party? Keep it neat with a rocks glass and an alcohol of your choice, that’s it. Friendly reminder: This is also a time when it’s okay to sip, not slam.