• For the 2002 Biannual at the Musee Renoir (Sept 2002) I am making a occidental tea house

I am not a tea master nor am I French. Yet the joie de vivre of the tea ceremony and the wabi of the French countryside intermingle in my mind.

The idea for making an occidental tea ceremony isn’t new. It came to me as a teenager of perhaps fifteen after I read Okakura Kakuso’s The Book of Tea. It occurred to me that the way of tea, Chanoyu, was doomed to be for most westerners myself included just a complex and elitist ritual. Yet this was in direct contradiction to its ideals. Was not the tea ceremony reduced to a mere foreign exotica much like tea itself when first imported from China to Japan?

Could not the spirit if not the letter of chanoyu be expressed using things from the present and near past? Simple, ubiquitous objects consigned at garage sales to the cardboard box marked 50 cents each. Cups and baskets so ordinary, they aren’t considered individually.

Yes, with time such bits and pieces might, like depression-era glass, become expensive collector’s items. Yet would they not retain, even as a liberty quilt above a billionaire’s mantle retains, its dignity by virtue of the viewer’s memory of its origin? Indeed was this not the hidden wisdom of a ceremony that placed so much emphasis on material objects, which connects it intimately with Zen?

The origins of Zen Buddhism are said to have began when one day instead of his usual lectures Buddha only wordlessly held up a single flower. One disciple understood and so began a lineage of intuitive flashes stretching into this moment.

Yet this western tea ceremony has hovered unmade for more the twenty years.

One literal translation of word most often used to describe the esthetic of Chanoyu, wabi, is worry. I worried that my idea would be construed as disrespectful or undisciplined. Perhaps after a trip to Japan or studying with a tea master. Perhaps. Each time the idea came forward it was pushed back in politesse.

So this idea might have forever floated incomplete if I had not come to spend so much of my life in France. Here was the spark.

I was invited upon meeting my neighbors for the first time over for a coup (drink) the following afternoon at their cave. My husband and I arrived to find our neighbors waiting around long rough homemade table in the cool dim light. The table was covered with an amazing assortment of finger food. After we were seated, drinks were poured for us and I noted that each person had a full untouched glass. We sat there for almost 20 minutes while no one touched the food or their glasses. I knew just enough not to drink until a toast was given. My meager French was long exhausted and I took a cracker so that I would have a brief excuse not to talk. Immediately everyone else took some food and the host proposed a toast.

In a small village in the Loir valley I had discovered a living embodiment to the tea ideal. Here was a formality without ostentation. No one was trying to impress or intimidate us. The group was still dressed the work clothes worn that day to tend their gardens. The glasses, although spotlessly clean, were unmatched and hardly crystal. The delicious hors d’oeuves were not made with caviar or expensive ingredients but simple food lovingly prepared. No one scolded me afterwards by word or gesture for taking 20 minutes to figure out the obvious. The wait was meant to honor me as a special guest not to score etiquette points.

There was nothing in my background or disposition to suggest the conviction I felt and still feel about the tea ceremony. The only tea I had ever drunk at that point in my life was Lipton Ice Tea. I had never even spoken with anyone Japanese or for that matter French. The French have a phrase for such things I found in the dictionary, science infusion, knowledge that comes without training or experience.

So this floating idea, this chanoyu occidental , delicately condensed around particularly Gallic bundle of sensations: long lunches that taste like colors, the scent Proust’s Aupines and searching for lime blossom tea at the pharmacy, picking through rusty spoons and mysterious hand tools at the brocante, treasure hunting in old barns, the smile of a farmer in his blue cap who needs nothing from me and so gives me all.

Above all else Chanoyu, western or otherwise is the art of suggestion. No words, explanations, diagrams or formulas can do it justice so it follows naturally that what follows is little more than words, explanations, diagrams and formulas….

To G. Visari: see attached.

• Bio
• CV
• artist statement
• press

memory of a guest that linger but a day

an experiment in set theory , tourism, digital photograhy, and endurance- also a very crazy way to see Paris

alchemic light

A idea that won't go away and hasn't found the right space. in doubt just look at the qt movie

Poetics-

all hail the written word - some poetry, some essay

Aprille

email me, let me know what you know

Datum Blog 2002

I like the idea of stream of concience linking- I never mananged a private diary - maybe a public on is the way to go

Archived Site

my biggest pet peeve is deleted pages or reroutes which take you the top level page for no appearent reason - bits are cheap so I can't very well not archive my own elderly pages