Social Sculpture 06/19/2010
I begin new work on a series inspired by a quip by Peter Sagal on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. Something to the effect of "Prettily dressed little girls and armed militia are showing up at the same tea parties." The work will involve tea service, with multiple forms and surfaces to comment on civility, ceremony, imperialism, hospitality, health, etc. The quintessential potter's challenge, the teapot, throwing itself into the social sculpture fray. The artist's talk to close the exhibit? A tea party with tea poured from the (socially) constructed art forms. While sitting in the Hartford Public Library this afternoon, tapping my foot to the live music of a marimba band during the festivities held there in honor of International Refugee Day, I find a tea poem by Wallace Stevens, Hartford's amazing poet of simultaneous certainty and contradiction. He writes: Tea at The Palaz of Hoon Not less because in purple I descended The western day through what you called The loneliest air, not less was I myself. What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard? What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears? What was the sea whose tide swept through me there? Out of my mind the golden ointment rained, And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard. I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange. CommentsLeave a Reply |
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