Sebastian Hempel

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.

Via Super Secret Pow Wow.

If you look up ‘tea’ in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points.

This is curious, not only because tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country, as well as in Eire, Australia and New Zealand, but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.

When I look through my own recipe for the perfect cup of tea, I find no fewer than eleven outstanding points. On perhaps two of them there would be pretty general agreement, but at least four others are acutely controversial. Here are my own eleven rules, every one of which I regard as golden:

• First of all, one should use Indian or Ceylonese tea. China tea has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays — it is economical, and one can drink it without milk — but there is not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more optimistic after drinking it. Anyone who has used that comforting phrase ‘a nice cup of tea’ invariably means Indian tea.
• Secondly, tea should be made in small quantities — that is, in a teapot. Tea out of an urn is always tasteless, while army tea, made in a cauldron, tastes of grease and whitewash. The teapot should be made of china or earthenware. Silver or Britanniaware teapots produce inferior tea and enamel pots are worse; though curiously enough a pewter teapot (a rarity nowadays) is not so bad.
• Thirdly, the pot should be warmed beforehand. This is better done by placing it on the hob than by the usual method of swilling it out with hot water.
• Fourthly, the tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right. In a time of rationing, this is not an idea that can be realized on every day of the week, but I maintain that one strong cup of tea is better than twenty weak ones. All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes — a fact which is recognized in the extra ration issued to old-age pensioners.
• Fifthly, the tea should be put straight into the pot. No strainers, muslin bags or other devices to imprison the tea. In some countries teapots are fitted with little dangling baskets under the spout to catch the stray leaves, which are supposed to be harmful. Actually one can swallow tea-leaves in considerable quantities without ill effect, and if the tea is not loose in the pot it never infuses properly.
• Sixthly, one should take the teapot to the kettle and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours. Some people add that one should only use water that has been freshly brought to the boil, but I have never noticed that it makes any difference.
• Seventhly, after making the tea, one should stir it, or better, give the pot a good shake, afterwards allowing the leaves to settle.
• Eighthly, one should drink out of a good breakfast cup — that is, the cylindrical type of cup, not the flat, shallow type. The breakfast cup holds more, and with the other kind one’s tea is always half cold before one has well started on it.
• Ninthly, one should pour the cream off the milk before using it for tea. Milk that is too creamy always gives tea a sickly taste.
• Tenthly, one should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject. The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round.
• Lastly, tea — unless one is drinking it in the Russian style — should be drunk without sugar. I know very well that I am in a minority here. But still, how can you call yourself a true tealover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it? It would be equally reasonable to put in pepper or salt. Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter. If you sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar; you could make a very similar drink by dissolving sugar in plain hot water.Some people would answer that they don’t like tea in itself, that they only drink it in order to be warmed and stimulated, and they need sugar to take the taste away. To those misguided people I would say: Try drinking tea without sugar for, say, a fortnight and it is very unlikely that you will ever want to ruin your tea by sweetening it again.

These are not the only controversial points to arise in connexion with tea drinking, but they are sufficient to show how subtilized the whole business has become. There is also the mysterious social etiquette surrounding the teapot (why is it considered vulgar to drink out of your saucer, for instance?) and much might be written about the subsidiary uses of tealeaves, such as telling fortunes, predicting the arrival of visitors, feeding rabbits, healing burns and sweeping the carpet. It is worth paying attention to such details as warming the pot and using water that is really boiling, so as to make quite sure of wringing out of one’s ration the twenty good, strong cups of that two ounces, properly handled, ought to represent.

A Nice Cup of Tea by George Orwell

Via The Dusty Bookshelf

Discover more than 8000 objects by Gerrit Rietveld. Many people are familiar with the red-blue chair and the Rietveld-Schröder House, but Rietveld has designed many more pieces of furniture and houses. On the special Rietveld collection website you will get a good impression of his complete oeuvre. Here you can find all objects by and about Rietveld owned by the Centraal Museum. It concerns more than 300 museum objects, mostly pieces of furniture, and over 7000 items of archive material. This archive material consists of a great many items, varying from architectural drawings to personal scribbled notes on business cards. The archive is owned by the Foundation Rietveld Schröder Archive and kept by the Centraal Museum.

Rietveld Collectie

Imagine this scenario: you are locked in an empty white room. You share this cell with twelve other people, but you are not allowed to speak. You are under constant observation. [...] it is the first day of the 1969 autumn term in the Undergraduate Degree Sculpture School at what was then St Martin’s [sic] School of Art. The students, including Richard Deacon and Tony Hill, were locked in a studio every day for eight hours for a term. They were not allowed to leave the room, and remained under the staff’s constant surveillance. Each student was given one particular material – it might be a block of polystyrene, or a bag of plaster. With this they had to work for an unspecified period of time, with no critical feedback from their tutors.

The programme, known familiarly as “The Locked Room”, represented one of the most radical episodes in British art education. The students began their academic careers with an attempt to erase tradition, art history and even, at times, their own work. Under the direction of tutors Peter Kardia, Garth Evans, Gareth Jones and Peter Harvey, The Locked Room was a prescient response to the emerging conceptualisation of art practice in a post-1968 world. The students were, essentially, starting from scratch. Such a tabula rasa was intended to provide an alternative to traditional teaching methods. As Kardia said: “I wanted to put them in an experiential situation where they couldn’t grasp what they were doing. What I wanted was ‘existence before essence’.”

The preceding generation of St Martin’s [sic] students, including Richard Long and Gilbert & George (who had themselves rejected Anthony Caro’s sculptural teaching aims), hadn’t just reduced their dependence upon the sculptural object; they had done away with “matter” altogether. Such a removal raised a sticky question for art educators: how do you teach something that has no defined subject or medium, process or protocol?

Kardia established a pedagogy based on paradox: literally imprisoning students in order to liberate them.

[...]

The programme demonstrated Kardia’s conviction that the greatest danger to artistic endeavour is habitual practice. They were trained to see with un-habitual eyes – a perspective that would prompt them to re-conceive traditional materials as they arrived at a fresh understanding of their media.

The Year of the Locked Room by Hester Westley (Tate Etc.)

Sally Bennett Jones, 1944–1988. Center medallion of triangles, surrounded by multiple borders, 1966, cotton, 86 x 77″

Linda Pettway, born 1929. “Logcabin” — single-block variation, tied with yarn, ca. 1975, corduroy, 88 x 78″

Mary Elizabeth Kennedy, 1911–1991. “Housetop” — “Logcabin” variation, ca. 1935, cotton, rayon, 84 x 79″

Quilts of Gee’s Bend Catalog