White Zinfandel #2

ISSUE NO. 2, F/W 2012: TV DINNERS

The second issue of White Zinf, as we have come to refer to it, brings together a mostly new cast of characters who have devoted their creative energies to indulge our sometimes perverse obsession with art and food. The first issue of White Zinf was inspired by the ethos of Gordon Matta Clark’s FOOD restaurant—raw, resourceful and a celebration of New York’s downtown artist community in the 1970s.

For the second issue, we swung the pendulum in the opposite direction. Rather than the singular and novel we were inspired by the generic and banal. As a perfect marriage of pragmatism and cultural excess, the TV dinner represents a culinary baseline that spans nearly fifty years. Its origins can be traced to middle America in the early ‘60s to various processed food companies.

But the exact moment of the TV dinner’s invention is vague, not unlike the processed foods sealed within. As an archetype and common denominator of Western Pop culture, the TV dinner spans our collective nostalgia with conflicting sensations of comfort and disgust