Hibiscus flowers
June 12, 2005
One million years ago, when I was a little girl, I had a piano teacher called Miss Pierce. She was an elegant and graceful woman, and ancient, as far as I was concerned. She was the secret girlfriend of Mr. Greenjeans, from the chilluns’ TV show, Captain Kangaroo! We lived in a university town full of orange and date orchards on the edge of the desert, and Miss Pierce was probably one of the few people there that fulfilled for me, in her own weird and spinster way, the notion of what it is to be ‘fabulous’.
I used to arrive at her strangely decorated house (entirely too much yellow) for piano lessons with my neighbour Michelle, who was even more of a tomboy than I was. The two of us played so rambunctiously that Miss Pierce decided to give us ‘lady-lessons’ at no extra charge. We agreed to the lady-lessons because we just loved listening to Miss Pierce blather on and on about table manners and gentlemen as we sipped hibiscus tea and nibbled girlscout cookies, all the while kicking eachother surreptitiously under the table.
Miss Pierce liked her hibiscus tea incredibly sour but I never added sugar because my parents had indoctrinated me to think that sugar was ‘White Death’, and I was trying to get my head around enjoying sour things. Hibiscus flowers in their wet form, alive and still on the tree, are forever connected in my mind with my father and his battle against vast herds of aphids on his hibiscus trees. But hibiscus flower in its dry form and as a tea still reminds me of my piano teacher, Miss Pierce, patiently battling to turn me and Michelle into ladies.
Today I’m experimenting with using hibiscus flower as a souring agent in a batch of quick pickles and a vegetable broth intended for a summer borscht although 12°c doesn’t really qualify as summer.
(Please read more… )
debra at 14:25 | Comments (10) | post to del.icio.us
Kaprow’s fluids
June 11, 2005
Art online or e-flux sent me this. It’s tomorrow so rush on down to Basel if you don’t want to miss out.
Allan Kaprow: FLUIDS, 1967/2005
International workshop of the Applied Arts Universities at Art Unlimited Basel
June 13, 2005, from 14.00h
To mark the opening of Art Unlimited in Basle, Allan Kaprow‚s Happpening FLUIDS will be reinvented for the first time since 1967 by an international workshop, in co-operation with the Department of Art and Design at Basle‚s University of Applied Sciences and the University Basle.
Father of Happenings‚ Allan Kaprow was born in 1927. Nearly 40 years later, the art form he created continues to provoke questions about time, community and collective structures. His Happening FLUIDS involved constructing enclosures with ice blocks at various locations in Pasadena and Los Angeles. Kaprow recruited participants using billboards that displayed the FLUIDS score: „During three days, about twenty rectangular enclosures of ice blocks (measuring about 30 feet long, 10 wide and 8 high) are built throughout the city. Their walls are unbroken. They are left to melt‰.
Groups of young people made his work a reality. They stacked blocks of ice, delivered by the Union Ice Company, into rectangular structures. Over the ensuing days, the ice structures melted. Photographs, film, the billboard score, the artist‚s notes and drawings, letters and press clippings document the ephemeral event.
Now FLUIDS will occur for the second time. Ice structures will be built at three different sites across Basle, including Art Basel‚s headquarters building and the roof of the adjacent parking structure. Co-operating in the Happening are the Department of Art and Design at Basle University of Applied Science (Creative Art ˆ Media Art Department), the art history seminars of Basle University, Basle and Lucerne University Departments of Art and Design, the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and the University of Weimar and Vienna. At the artist‚s request, students will spend two days in a workshop, devising strategies to realize the work. They will determine such particulars as how to co-ordinate delivery of the ice blocks, secure the necessary equipment and design of the structures. Thus they will create a Basle-specific, contemporary variant of the Happening, this time without the artist’s direct involvement.
Call ’em up!
Phone +41 (0)44 446 80 50
http://www.hauserwirth.com
debra at 0:18 | Comments (0) | post to del.icio.us
Fortunately the food was slow and dry
June 10, 2005
When the ‘slow’ is the Slow Food Movement and the ‘dry’ is Dutch design collective Droog Design, the combination of slow and dry is a good thing. In Dutch, droog means ‘dry’, and it refers to the dry humor of many of the collective’s designed objects. Droog is celebrating their Amsterdam Staalstraat location by hosting a temporary ‘fastfood’ restaurant to showcase their food-related design items (open until Sunday 12.06.2005). The menu is quintessential fast food; burgers, chips, shakes, but all the ingredients are sourced from local ingredients, made by artisanal suppliers and prepared with the love and attention of Slow Food Movement volunteers. I decided to be a lady who lunches and give their grub a try.
The foodstuffs arrive in round-bottomed ceramic bowls – all of which you may take home with you after eating! The strawberry shake contained a goodly portion of fresh, local strawberries. The burger bun was made from brioche dough, the burger, real chopped all-organic beef, dripping real meat juices! And so the story goes, good ingredients prepared with love from barnyard to burp. The restaurant is primarily about letting folks try out design objects in a real food context so not surprisingly the portions are mini-petit. This sweet and small design choice reminded me of the way Pee Wee Herman used to eat baby corn on TV; kernel for kernel typewriter style! After finishing my slow fastfood lunch, I wasn’t hungry but I did have a little hunquering to take home some more of those cute little round-bottomed bowls.
debra at 0:17 | Comments (1) | post to del.icio.us
