Siamese teacups and other cutesy post-modern bric-a-brac
A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of being paid a laughably high hourly wage to “gallery-sit” a number of works by the famous British artist Mona Hatoum, which were installed in a small room that was usually full of people. The most fun part of this job was trying to prevent people from stepping on one of her cast-silicone floor mats, which was, per her directions, installed on the floor with no ropes around it or any other indication that this was a very expensive piece of art and thereby, implicitly, not for walking on. The mat, shaped like some intestines or something, was also placed just under one of her other works, such that anyone who wanted to look at the piece on the wall was very, very likely to step on the piece on the floor. After a while, the volume of people coming through the gallery was such that the other art-sitter and I just gave up, and hoped that no one was wearing soccer cleats.
Another piece that I spent the weekend with, however, irked me in a different way. T42, a pair of fused porcelain teacups, made some kind of clever commentary about the ready-made and utility of objects and the Meret Oppenheim or Duchamp something something… but mostly it was a cutesy piece of crap that makes two people drink out of it at the same time, cheek-to-cheek like some kind of 1950s commercial.
Because if only one person drank out of it, they would get hot tea all over themselves! Get it? The curator who put together the show demonstrated this piece a couple of times by way of flirting with VIPs who came by the gallery. Not with real tea, or real mouth-touching, you understand, but with real commodity-based intimacy, or whatever.
Anyhow, I think it’s dumb. I am glad that a guy from the London Evening Standard was up-front enough to call it “an attractive work [that] fails to disturb any preconceptions whatsoever.” If you really find this kind of thing “disquieting,” your life is too damn quiet. I also have rarely seen an art piece which more screams, “collect me! I am an hott commodity! Put me on your shelf with your stuff and only those people who know will know, you know?” I find it rather irritating when grown-up artists with pretty okay bodies of work and international reputations decide they should crank out some crowd-pleasing bridge-collection stuff like this to get $$. And then it gets put in shows and I have to look at it and get angry, because I draw better ideas than this on napkins in bars when I am drunk, and then use the napkins to clean up my spilled beer because they are still not such great ideas.
If I had access to a porcelain farm, I would grow some three-way-conjoined teacups as a response to these teacups, and call them Menage-a-Trois. I think this name is apt because, whichever way you drink it, someone gets hot and wet. That’ll be 3 grand apiece, thanks.
