Kitchen (1991-1996)

screenshot taken from Whitney Museum of American Art website

after the beaded installation by (and with quotes from) Liza Lou

A housewife’s hallucination: disco floor, Vegas curtains, free peepshow in the oven. Pink garbage dazzles from the dustpan like jawbreakers or sea urchins. Plated germs luxuriate in the swirling sink. You’ll want to have a seat: a breakfast chair is a portal in here, a TV-shimmer dream following five years of Liza Lou spitting glass beads on hands and knees in her mother’s kitchen. The devotion of a number like 30 million feels debilitating.

It is work that most clearly shows my mother to me. She put shoes on people for a living—twenty-five years in her father’s store on hands and knees. When she started selling Avon on the side to pay our Catholic tuition, a new box of makeup arrived like a holiday every two weeks. Retired now, my mother hates Christmas because she’s the only one in the house who’s working. Lost in a haze of joy, you might lose sight of the artist’s pain-staked beer and Lay’s, her emerald Comet, her individual Frosted Flakes.

Our kitchen was old and ugly, but I didn’t know it. I loved the red and gray checkerboard linoleum, the cherry Formica countertops with chrome trim, the fake-brick wall and its laundry chute clogged with Halloween candy. Lou’s spoof paper teases: Housewife Beads the World! Divorced and single, my mother was more house than wife. When our oven went up, she beat the three-foot flames out with a wet towel before the firetruck arrived. We cooked beneath a wall of melted brown vinyl for a while after. I didn’t know the kitchen was ugly because my mother never told me. Infinitesimal acts but the scale is 1:1—back-breaking magic, the monumental labor of making a life for someone.