26 April

Irresponsible Stacking: When Life Meets Art, Things Break

by Jon Katz

(Warning. There is some humor in this piece, for those of you who don’t care for that in our serious times.)

As some of you know, Maria and I have  been butting heads (or spirits) over what I call her Irresponsible Dish Stacking, in which she sees stacking washed dishes in chaotic stacks as art, a chance to build a different kind of sculpture.

I see them as a guaranteed opportunity to break glasses and plates.

Some couples fight about big things, some fight about small things. Lately we’ve been fight about dish stacking. I’m not sure “fighting” is the right word, more an intensifying disagreement over what art is and how far to go with it.

Maria does not take well to being challenged, especially by men. Things have gotten headed.

She has gone low, accusing me in return of being clueless about art form. She says I am a lousy dishwasher, my plates and glasses, she sniffs, have “schmutz” on them, whatever that is,  a charge I vehemently deny.

She has learned from our leaders to never retreat, only attack.

I’ve become a bit neurotic about the dishes. I am almost desperate to wash dishes these days, otherwise the glasses and plates have little time to live. If there is a glass or plate in the sink, I grab the dish sponge.

She is accusing me of sabotaging her art. And you know what? She may be right.

And yesterday she jeered “well, at least you’re washing the dishes more!” Another low blow, Maria in a supermarket or standing near a stove is rarer than a Dodo bird in upstate New York.

The other day,I came across on her stacking sculptures (above) and got a picture of it. You can see what I’m up against. Later, she claimed it was a joke. Ha! She is wily.

For Maria, there is absolutely no distance between art and life, both are the same thing and everything in our lives is art – fences, dishes, walls, bathrooms, kitchen floors, windowsills. You either get it or you don’t.

Art takes precedence over just about everything in our home, especially the cheap and fragile glasses she likes to buy at thrift shops.

Like the Goddess she is, she doesn’t care to have her visions messed with.

I am  a dull man. When I stack dishes, it’s to let them dry. How odd.

When she stacks dishes, it’s a chance to make a kitchen culture, something to smile over, to photograph

It doesn’t matter if some of the glasses – almost all of the glasses – eventually make their way to the floor in pieces.

It is not uncommon for me to be in my office working and hear a crash in the kitchen, when one of Maria’s quite dramatic creations slides off a pan and shatters.

“It’s just a glass,” she says haughtily, “we can replace it at the Thrift Store for a dollar.”

Usually I’m the money spender, she is tight as a tick – she’d walk a mile to save a nickel,  but dish stacking is just making a different kind of quilt – she loves working the angles and the colors in a particular way.

Yesterday, this fight spilled out into the open, we debated the stacking issue on our new podcast.

In its own way, the dish stacking controversy takes on epic proportions in our own lives, the struggle between art and life. Oh yes, I know how this story comes out:

Yes, dear, you are probably right.

 

9 Comments

  1. This situation cannot be tolerated. One of you needs to be flogged with a wet dishrag. But I don’t dare say which one. I’m laughing too hard!

  2. Sweeping up broken glass and buying new glasses to replace the broke ones seems like a waste of time to me, our most precious resource. Can Maria make the dishes both artistic and the stacking functional? Like her potholders? Art and function are not mutually exclusive as she well knows!

    1. We are quite sensitive to the environment around here, Janet, but we also try not to take ourselves so seriously that we can’t ever laugh…as I said at the beginning of the piece, there was some humor, so there, so perhaps we can lighten up..

  3. One more wonderful part of Bedlam Farm life to be photographed! Laughing and nodding yes, over here on rainy Cape Cod today, as this subject is a hot contest in my life, too. My partner, Lou stacks the dishes SO neatly, and even washes them in some sort of order he has invented, and if I am allowed near the kitchen sink, my work is often re-arranged. In an all-very-sweet way he tells me to sit down and relax…..he can handle it. When he is out, I do wash my own dishes and relish the moment with a smile, knowing he will check my work out. It is all very dear, as we, as you and Maria, appreciate the quirks of others. Looking forward to seeing more of Maria’s dish drainer delights!

  4. Many years ago in MOMA we saw a free-standing sculpture which was extraordinary. We walked around and around it and could not leave the room. It was a random single stack of giant dishes, maybe 10 feet tall, leaning this way and that and apparently stacked most dangerously. Yes, it was art but it was so unnerving. It even seemed to move a little with a frightening sway, but I don’t believe that it did.

    I wish that we remembered the maker’s name.

  5. 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
    Reading about you and Maria and the dishes gets me laughing more than ANY sit-com on TV EVER could!!
    🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

  6. “Schmutz” is traced from Yiddish (no “c’) to middle high German, and means grime or dirt in general. In my part of the world, schmutz is the stuff that is left there after someone has cleaned the thing. Check the little crack between the baseboard and the floor, or where the kitchen base cabinets meet those floor tiles. What you can dig out of there is schmutz. There is a fellow who leads some sort of a massive clean up campaign in this state whose working t-shirts are printed with “Schumtz-Buster!”

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