The Downtown L.A. Warehouse Where Video Art and Hip Chefs Converge
Four views of the "cube" at the new Downtown L.A. pop-up location of Monkey Town, an immersive film and dining experience that originated in Brooklyn.CreditCreditYo-Yo Lin
By Kevin McGarry
Cameras in cellphones weren't the only breakthrough hybrid of 2003. It's also the year that Montgomery Knott reinvented dinner theater by bringing together video art and haute cuisine in his then-underground event space Monkey Town. After he saw an immersive installation of Christian Marclay projections at Paula Cooper gallery in Chelsea, Knott drew a simple square on an in-flight cocktail napkin en route to San Francisco. That square eventually became the basis for Monkey Town: four movie screens cocooning a private loft in East Williamsburg, within which sat four long tables catered by Michelin-starred chefs moonlighting at the space from around the city. "I just thought it would be cool to construct narratives on multiple screens," Knott recalls. "But the concept of an audience facing each other, watching things in front of them while others watch things behind them, was much more powerful than I ever imagined."
The unique experience caught on, and by 2005, Monkey Town was a brick-and-mortar business on the rapidly developing Williamsburg waterfront. But perhaps predictably, after five years in the shadows of multiplying luxury high-rises, the project shuttered. Since 2013, Knott has taken the show on the road. The first stint was a summer engagement in Manhattan at the media art center Eyebeam (then based in Chelsea, now in Gowanus), followed by a five-month run in Denver in 2014, a three-month pop-up in Barcelona in 2015 and a four-month residency in Austin that concluded in February.
Where next? "L.A. is having a moment," Knott says, echoing a sentiment that is by now quite familiar. "The weirdo melting-pot dream thrives here in a very messy American way." Today, Monkey Town 8 opens in a 10,000-square-foot warehouse in Downtown Los Angeles — "in the middle of nowhere, but close to everything," Knott says. The Alabama-born Momofuku alum Nick Montgomery has designed four- and five-course seasonal menus to complement the program of videos by artists like Shana Moulton, Johanna Billing and Takeshi Murata, plus special weekly performances by various artists and musicians. Meals and screenings take place in a raw space with 22-foot ceilings, while preshow receptions are relegated to a former office Knott describes as "someone's genius combination of wood paneling, vintage wallpaper and generic ceiling tiles. We're leaving a lot as-is and just embellishing around the edges."
After September, Knott intends to concentrate on personal projects: an album, a book, a movie. After 13 years, he promises that this is the final chapter of the story, with one caveat: "If I fail, the world may yet get another Monkey Town, probably somewhere on the West Coast. So maybe in three years, maybe 30 years, there will be another cube. And by then, everyone will look at VR headsets like they were Segways!"
Monkey Town will be at 111 W 21st St, Los Angeles, through Oct. 1, monkeytownhq.com.