Many chefs regard their dishes as works of art. Now the concept is to be turned on its head by an artist who plans to prepare a giant salad, dress it, mix it and dish it up for 300 people in an event at Tate Modern.

Alison Knowles, an American experimental artist, will coordinate the chopping, mixing and serving, set to the music of Mozart, in a performance designed to blur the line between art and everyday activity.

“It’s a participatory event in every sense,” said Kathy Noble, the event’s curator, “the work of the chefs, the observation of the audience and then their chance to eat what they have seen put together.”

Knowles, born in 1933, was an early member of the Fluxus movement in the 1960s with Yoko Ono, John Cage and Joseph Beuys. The avant-garde group, which was at its height from 1962-64, specialised in staging simple, often repetitive events combining different art forms and media.

The premiere of Make a Salad took place in 1962, and there have been occasional performances in America in the past decade.

This time Knowles will buy her ingredients – hundreds of lettuces, cucumbers, carrots and tomatoes – at a supermarket.

The event will take place on the spring holiday weekend on May 24 as part of a Fluxus extravaganza.

Knowles will act as head chef of Make a Salad, but will be assisted by five members of the Tate’s catering department, chosen for their cutting skills. A large trestle table will be laid out on a bridge, crossing 25ft above the floor of the turbine hall, the main atrium at Tate Modern.

A cellist playing a Mozart concerto will signal the start of the event, and once the music is over, the chopping will begin. The sound, amplified by speakers, will be relayed around the gallery for 15 minutes.

“The salad is then thrown down to a huge vessel on the floor,” said Noble.“We will do it in order – probably lettuce, cucumber, carrot and then tomato.”

Once the ingredients are in the plastic-lined vessel below, Knowles and her assistants will move downstairs to begin the mixing. The salad will be too big to toss and will instead be mixed with oars. Noble said: “We’ll also have a nice new wooden garden rake.”

Knowles has stipulated that olive oil, balsamic vinegar and herbs such as rosemary and fennel should be added to the final mix, before it is served up to the 300-strong audience.

The Tate’s salad will not be the world’s biggest. Last September, in the town of Pulpi in the Almeria region of southern Spain, 20 chefs mixed a salad weighing more than 6½ tons (6,700kg to be precise) of lettuce, tomato, onion, pepper and olives.

Even this was beaten in November when a small community in Israel made a 10 ton plus (10,260kg) whopper to set a new Guinness world record.

While Knowles’s art is preoccupied with meditating on the everyday – one of her works was based on her habit of eating a tunafish sandwich at the same time each day – other artists have a much less celebral relationship to food.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a keen cook whose recipes, including those for calf’s liver with prunes, sole with white wine and bordelaise fish soup, remain popular today. He also devised recipes for heron grilled over a vinewood fire, and cooked squirrel.

Alison Knowles homepage

Information on Fluxus at Tate Modern in May

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