Existing comment:
Liza Lou
Kitchen, 1991-96
A full-scale and exactingly detailed kitchen encrusted in a rainbow of glistening beads, Liza Lou's monumental installation took five years to make. After researching kitchen design manuals as well as historical tracts about the lives of nineteenth-century women, Lou made drawings and three-dimensional models to achieve a loose outline of Kitchen's floor plan. She then fashioned the objects out of paper mâché, painted them, and applied the beads in a mosaic of surface pattern. This work, in Lou's words, "argues for the dignity of labor" -- a labor that here manifests as process and subject alike, and which is linked to gender, since crafts and kitchen work are traditionally female domains. Kitchen might also be read as a commentary on American life -- even the American dream -- with its ubiquitous products (Tide and Cap'N Crunch), aspirations (glittery surfaces and suburban assimilation), and realities (dishes in the sink and other kitchen drudgery). |