Half-Baked Baked Alaska: Eating Marina Abramovic’s Volcano Flambé

The worlds of art and food share a paradoxical passion for authenticity and celebrity, aesthetic novelty and rarefied sensations—the stuff of art-fair-vacation weekends. The artist-chef collaboration epitomizes this young marriage. And who better to whet the tongues of collectors and connoisseurs than the so-called godmother of performance art, Marina Abramović?

Her new dessert at Park Avenue Winter, like her recent MoMA retrospective, hinges upon what the artist has called the "exchange of energies." For The Artist Is Present, that exchange consisted of Ms. Abramović sitting under klieg lights in the museum's atrium for up to 10 hours per day, draped in an operatic gown, engaging visitors in staring contests. A film crew was present throughout; Sharon Stone and Björk made appearances; interlopers staged counter-performances; visitors were moved to laughter and tears; and scores of YouTube videos were posted. Attendance was high, but the exhibition was most successful as a media event, a melodrama reproduced daily for an audience elsewhere. (Eight hundred thousand people tuned in to the show live on MoMA's Web site; one million more browsed a gallery of sitters' head shots compiled on Flickr.) The pinnacle was the closing party, hosted by Givenchy: The artist vamped in a black snakeskin jacket while a parade of celebrities—Courtney Love, Ciara, Christina Ricci—walked a gold carpet punctuated by a 10-foot-tall portrait of Ms. Abramović looking extremely pensive.

The 64-year-old Yugoslavian-born artist's Volcano Flambé ($20), devised in collaboration with Park Avenue Winter's executive chef, Kevin Lasko, does for diners what the performances in her retrospective did for museumgoers: carve out space and time for a self-regarding experience of attentiveness, the immediate result of which is the satisfaction of knowing how attentive you are. Only the environs are slightly more intimate, and the dessert, an aphrodisiacal variation on the baked Alaska, is encased in Swiss meringue rather than a gown.

Actually, Volcano Flambé ($20) is not a dessert but a "multisensory culinary intervention." Meredith Johnson, curator at the public-art organization Creative Time, which is spearheading the project, told The Observer that the term "intervention"—rather than "artwork" or "dessert"—was crucial to Ms. Abramović. "Although there are performative aspects" to the work, "she's not actually performing."

This in mind, The Observer visited Park Avenue Winter to sample Volcano Flambé ($20). The first performative aspect is the plating: a custom-made pine-colored cigar box containing a pair of headphones and an MP3 player arrives alongside the pyramidal meringue construction, which is ringed by chocolate crumbs and topped with a gold diadem of spun sugar. Ms. Abramović's breathy voice—she makes Kathleen Turner sound like Pee Wee Herman—comes through the headphones with a yogic incantation: "This is an experiment. ... For the moment, close your eyes, concentrate and focus your mind on your breathing. ... Breathe in, breathe out. ... Open your eyes and focus on the blue flame in the center of the volcano."

At this point, the server ignites a pitcher of dark rum and pours it onto the dessert, which briefly, kind of, if you will it, seems to be erupting. The gesture goes some way toward realizing a recipe for "fire food" included in a booklet accompanying the dish: "on top of a volcano/open your mouth/wait until your tongue becomes flame/close your mouth/take a deep breath." Until the fire is extinguished, and your server leaves you with Ms. Abramović, who dictates, "Like in a dream or a strange dance, [you] take the fork and take the piece of melting volcano in your mouth."

Having found your center and achieved sufficient mindfulness, you burrow into the meringue flank, through the exterior layers of lava and ash—gingery sugar crystals, creamy banana mousse and dense almond cake—before arriving at a magma chamber of 98-percent-cocoa sorbet. The phone-sex yoga continues, Ms. Abramović purring each word, climaxing with "Feel sensations of cold, white, gold, crunchy, soft, salty, liquid, creamy, spicy, silver, black, gold, burn." Think Padma Lakshmi meets Deepak Chopra.

"Marina wanted an exploding volcano, but it's very difficult to make something that will explode on command," said Mr. Lasko, a cherubic 29-year-old. "We tried some things with Diet Coke and Menthos, but we couldn't get a controlled explosion. We decided the best way to get hot and cold was a traditional baked Alaska."