A rotating display in the window of The Flow Chart Foundation, at 348 Warren Street in Hudson, NY.

Cake (Archive) is the most recent in an ongoing series of text/cake objects. Existential sculptures of a sort, the series repeatedly makes use of this format for customizable, decorative text to render phrases that are situated in the immediate moment, while also being somewhat perishable. This dynamic suggests the triumph and dissatisfaction—the short-lived stimulus—of cheap consumption. Each ephemeral cake/object text is determined directly in relation to the context in which it is presented. While the primary message is always “Now,” the secondary message arises from a sensitive consideration of the circumstance. 

Designed specifically for the Flow Chart Foundation, Cake (Archive) is at play with the conditions of an archive. Archives, among other things, construct an indexical platform for understanding and building upon past knowledge systems, yet as a monument of many elements, the figure that is at its heart is more than the sum of its parts. Related to the way that reading a poem is like a schematic to rebuild a poetic world in each recitation, to follow a recipe materializes a sensorial reward that will ultimately disappear.

Like Robert Morris’ 1961 work, Box with the Sound of its Own Making, the cake is a text that articulates the process by which it has come to be. Speaking from the perspective of the public-facing platform of the Flow Chart foundation, it sits appropriately in the shadow of a poet who was said to have “constantly contextualized the momentary.”

— Constance Doulcemer