A fantasia in food

Saatchi Gallery, London, 21 June 2010, about 9pm. Jay Jopling is lying on an unmade bed with Bianca Jagger and Tracey Emin, carving a ham. Tracey says, 'It's my bed, and it's not my bed.'Across the room, Simon and Michaela de Pury do the wedding rounds, stopping by one food-laden bed after another to double-kiss Mario Testino, Nick Rhodes and Diane von Furstenberg. They then throw their champagne glasses off a bal-cony to smash on the floor below.

In celebration of their wedding, chairman of Phillips de Pury auction house Simon de Pury and his wife Michaela – a senior director at Phillips – commissioned me to create an interactive food installation at the Saatchi Gallery. The wedding itself, which was tiny and private and a tremendous surprise to the contemporary art world (no one even knew the couple had been dating) had taken place six months before.

The artwork I created was The de Pury Diptych, a piece dealing with the subject of marriage, weddings, contemporary art and art institutions. It was monumental in scale and scope. It required the Saatchi Gallery to be shut down for a day to install it (with crews working through the night) and it forced those who thought they were invited as wedding guests to shift their perception of their traditional role.

The assigned place of the guest at a wedding ceremony is that of passive witness. It's a role similar to the one occupied by the museum-goer: essential but not interactive; in awe and not overshadowing the main event. Much of what I do is about undermining that traditional viewer position and making it impossible. As a participant in one of my projects, you have come for a meal and you cannot eat or drink without physically engaging with the work, altering it. I wanted to do the same with the viewer here. Every object would require interaction, and the sum of the evening's activities would be a conceptual involvement in the marriage act.

My parents are the contem-porary art collectors Don and Mera Rubell, and I grew up so deep inside the New York art world that I approached all creative undertakings as art. From an early age (I'm now 40), I was fas-cinated by food and the rituals surrounding it. When my parents came home after a night of openings and dinners, I'd ask them for every detail: the sequence of a party, the shape and size of the glasses, the food, the speeches, the décor. I studied art history at Harvard, where I was president of the Signet Society whose only purpose was to serve lunch to its artistic members, and I later studied at The Culinary Institute of America.

My first works were breakfasts for 5,000 for the yearly openings at my family's museum, the Rubell Family Collection, during Art Basel Miami Beach. The breakfasts grew more conceptual and iconic over time, until there was one ton of bananas in a pile on the floor, or 2,000 hard-boiled eggs next to a sea of latex gloves. These days, I create large-scale food installations at museums and art institutions. My most famous work was probably the seven hanging sculptures of my head cast in Fontina cheese with heat guns pointed at them so they melted on to a pedestal of crackers below, at a Brooklyn Museum gala (at that event I also had canvases with taps dispensing wine and Dirty Martinis, and a piñata of Andy Warhol's head), or the chocolate facsimiles of Jeff Koons'rabbit sculpture that I had viewers destroy with hammers, then eat.

Food is the medium I think in. The materiality of food and drink – the constraints of perishability, seasonality, physical weight and palatability – is what gives form to my abstract thoughts. Not all my work serves the function of an entire meal, but when it does, as it did in the de Pury piece, the basic needs of that function are also important. Some kind of appetiser, main course and dessert are acceptable constraints to me, the way some painters accept that a painting must hang on a wall.

For The de Pury Diptych, I knew I wanted a narrative structure. The narrative I seized on was the passage from individual identity to public commitment. I re-searched recurring elements of wedding iconography in a variety of cultures. The ones I was particularly interested in were these: the separation of the bride and groom on the wedding day; the breaking of something; sex on a bed; and cutting the cake. I divided these elements among the four levels of the Saatchi Gallery, starting at the top. The evening would move from top to bottom, individual to joint, privacy to public. Here is what it looked like in the end (with a bit of why):

7pm Participants are sent to the second floor. They enter a dark anteroom and in two small, well-lit dressing rooms, whose doorways are covered in glass, there are Simon and Michaela, getting dressed, separately. Guests watch as Simon shaves and has a haircut. Michaela does her make-up, removes the curlers from her hair and gets a massage.

In the meantime, in the enormous galleries next to each of these little rooms are his-and-hers installations of food and drink: sausages hanging from the ceiling with knives on a pedestal below, plus an enormous plinth of pilsner glasses and beer next to Simon; 2,000 oysters on an ice-covered stainless-steel plinth and champagne next to Michaela. It's the kind of body-part joke the characters in a Breugel painting would come up with. I love the idea of weddings as this primitive, public acknowledgement of sex, draped in metaphor.