Cooking Up Criticism in the ‘Kitchenette’
No kitchen sparkles like Liza Lou’s.
The sink shimmers. The range glistens. Grime on Lou’s countertops? They glitter.
But where others use Comet, Lou gets her twinkle from beads. “A quadra-billion of beads,” says the artist, whose three-dimensional, life-size galley made entirely of the tiny glass bits is on display at Cal State Fullerton.
A sink full of dishes, cabinets and tiled counters, a cloth-covered table, the oven, the toaster, frilly window curtains and an open carton of milk.
Beads.
A cup of black coffee, butter melting on toast, water running from a faucet, a floppy dishrag, the morning paper, blueberry muffins and a shopping list, tacked to the icebox.
Beads. Most of them no larger than the tip of a shoelace.
Lou, who has had work shown last year at the Smithsonian Institution, has not harbored a lifelong fascination with beads, per se. But since childhood, she has liked art, especially art in the round.
“I’ve always been interested in things you can enter,” she says, “things you can stand in.”
The San Diego artist has been standing--or sitting--inside her rainbow-colored “Kitchenette” for the past three years. She first fabricates any given item’s armature, usually out of plywood or papier-mache , then painstakingly uses tweezers and white glue to apply her beads.
A work-in-progress, “Kitchenette” will take up 200 square feet when completed in the spring, by which time she expects to have finished two more walls, its ceiling and floor. Yes, all of that will be beaded too. But, Lou said during a recent interview at CSUF, the work is more than just a pretty facade. “It’s a metaphor for the experience of women,” she said, a “testament” to all those who have toiled in the kitchen and to “the history of the housewife.”
While whimsical above all, her kitchen is further meant as a satiric and “subversive” commentary against women’s oppression. A student of women’s history, Lou said she was appalled to learn that 19th-Century American women were educated chiefly “to attract a man.”
“Having domestic virtues was paramount, so women learned to write with a needle,” she said, embroidering finery with their newly mastered ABCs or with such good-girl adages as the one she saw on a sampler, dated 1812, and beaded onto her “Kitchenette” fridge:
Against idleness and mischief, how does the little busy bee improve each shining hour , and gather honey all the day from every opening flower. In works of labor and of skill, I would be busy too, for Satan finds the mischief for idle hands to do.
Lou, 25, proffers another indictment by beading an Emily Dickinson quotation on the kitchenette’s oven. The poetry, as she sees it, denounces the idea that married women must cast aside their own dreams and identity in marriage:
She rose to his requirement, dropped the playthings of her life, to take the honorable work of woman and wife.
And inside the oven, the artist has beaded buxom “babes,” like those still seen today on truckers’ mud flaps across the land.
“There is still pressure on women to look a certain way,” she said, “to be decorative, to underplay our strengths.”
Conversely, Lou’s work was criticized as “too decorative” when she began applying beads to her sculpture while attending the San Francisco Art Institute. It was 1989 and “pretty” bucked the post-modern art-world tide.
“I became an example in class of what not to do,” said Lou, who, as a result, left the institute, but never abandoned beads: All that criticism made it obvious, she said, that she was onto something.
Evidently, Lou was right. Witness last year’s Smithsonian exhibit and another ’93 group show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This spring, she’s slated for a solo show at New York’s Franklin Furnace, the respected alternative art space.
What brought the Establishment around? An unswerving commitment to her conceptual conceit and idiosyncratic style--despite its unapologetic beauty, Lou speculates.
“It’s a show-me world,” she said. “I had to do a lot of beading for people to get it.”
* Liza Lou’s “Kitchenette” remains on view through Sept. 21 at Cal State Fullerton’s East Gallery, 800 N. State College Blvd., Fullerton. Hours are Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, noon-4 p.m.; Wednesday, 3-7 p.m.; Sunday, 2-5 p.m. Admission is free. (714) 773-3262. Lou will present a free, related solo performance art work in her “Kitchenette” on Saturday at 6:30 p.m. She will discuss her work on Monday at noon at Rancho Santiago College, room C-104, 1530 W. 17th St., Santa Ana. (714) 564-5600.