[MUSIC PLAYING]
J. MORGAN PUETT: Every aspect of life
is a rigorous engagement with the banal.
So at Mildred's Lane, we make that a creatively charged
practice from washing dishes out in the landscape to cooking
a meal over an open fire to learning how
to clean out a toilet properly.
Everything is rigorous, whimsical, fun, engaged,
and we do it together.
Today, we're in Beach Lake, Pennsylvania at Mildred's Lane,
a 96 acre site founded and hosted
by the artist J. Morgan Puett.
It's named after its former resident,
and Puett, along with her son and a number
of other collaborators, has transformed it
into what she likes to call a new art complexity.
In the '80s and '90s, Morgan lived and worked
in New York City as an artist and fashion designer
and ran a number of stores where she showed
her seasonal clothing collections
But since 1997, she has lived here and developed this site
as an ongoing experiment in living activated
by the people who come here.
Mildred's Lane is a place where Morgan and her friends
explore the interconnection of working, living, researching,
and making.
And they practice what she calls creative domestication,
bringing rigorous attention to every aspect of daily life.
This manifests in collaborative dinner parties determined
by algorithmic games, carefully curating the refrigerator,
and the collective development of projects and events
that question how we live, divide labor, and relate
to the environment.
There are no art studios here.
This whole place is the studio.
And we have the privilege of being here today
and talking with Morgan and seeing
what aspect of her practice you might bring to your life.
Hey there.
I'm J. Morgan Puett, and just is your art assignment.
Hoosh the way I use it is quite different than the term
itself, but it's related to.
But as an installation artist, I've kind of tweaked it
and reinvented the term so as to help
identify what it is we do on a day to day basis
here, which is we conceptually and very intentionally arrange,
rearrange, pull things apart, put them back together again.
Everybody collaborates on the hoosh here in the landscape.
It can be a table top situation or it
can be the entire landscape.
A great way to have a successful collaboration
is by using algorithms.
Algorithms, you can make up rules and games
to create new problems, not just to solve problems
but to create new problems that also
make it a socially democratic landscape for everyone's
experience.
So it's a surprise in the end.
It sort of creates a way to do something together
without any one person taking authorship,
that everybody is in it.
Your assignment is to produce a Mildred's Lane scramble
Scrabble dinner.
You need to select a nice cloth that you
can wheat paste and harden and spread out
on a table or a wall, and you're going
to be more or less playing a Scrabble game,
but the ingredients are the players.
If I were playing with Sarah Green and Mark Olsen
and myself, J. Morgan Puett, then those names
would be written out on the cloth.
And then we would make as many food items
as you can possibly make out of the letters
of that-- that person's name.
Also include ways of preparing food.
Then you rotate the cloth so that everybody
can play each name.
You use that list, and you play-- with a lot of room
around it-- you write that word out very cleanly on the--
towards the middle of the napkin.
And you keep rotating it so that everybody's playing
and building on every dish.
Pretty soon, you'll get to a point
where dishes are emerging, and you
start sketching out what the dish might
look like on the cloth until you get to the sketched,
and even possibly the way it might be served.
Your collective creativity starts
playfully imagining what this table top dinner will
look like.
That is the collective experience
that you're going to have.
All right.
So I think we actually have to do this one.
Oh, we're going to do this.
Great.
But it's pretty complicated, so I'm
wondering if people can just kind of use it as a framework.
Yeah.
It's a little confusing, but I think
you sort of take this as like a loose framework
and then you play whatever kind of dinner algorithm game
you like.
Also, I know that you hate this question.
I know it's your least favorite question, but I do.
There is a little part of me that
wants to understand why this particular dinner party
game is art.
OK.
That's a legitimate question for sure.
And I think you could play this game and not consider it art
and that would be fine, but I do think
that you might have a better experience with it if you
consider a little bit of art history and the fact
that Morgan's practices is very much informed
by the Fluxus Movement that was from the 1960s and '70s.
It was a loose international network
of artists, and their leader, George Maciunas
published a series of manifestos that described what Fluxus is,
and I want you to read from one of them, John.
OK.
All right.
This is some atypical grammar here, Sarah,
but I will read it. "To establish
artist's nonprofessional, nonparasitic, nonelite status
in society, he must demonstrate own dispensability.
He must demonstrate self-sufficiency
of the audience.
He must demonstrate that anything can substitute
art and anyone can do it.
Therefore, the substitute art amusement must be simple,
amusing, concerned with insignificances,
have no commodity or institutional value.
It must be unlimited, obtainable by all,
and eventually produced by all."
So I assume that this week's artist
is from this Fluxus Movement.
You're right.
We're going to be talking about the artist Alison Knowles, who
was a key member of this group.
In October of 1962, s Knowles first
performed "Proposition No.
2" at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.
Also titled, "Make a Salad," the piece involved the artist
standing on stage and chopping the ingredients for a salad.
It's an example of an open score,
almost like a musical composition,
a template able to be realized by others
and open to interpretation.
Like other Fluxus numbers, Knowles
was influenced by John Cage's teaching about indeterminacy
and chance operations.
Creating preconditions for her work
and not knowing exactly how it will play out,
she then served the salad, welcoming the audience
to be part of the work and continued
to act out the proposition on a number of future occasions.
Knowles, like Morgan, takes something
uneventful and domestic and elevates it
into an occasion worthy of attention and great care.
Morgan's scramble Scrabble dinner
also encourages an inclusive, collaborative,
and improvisational approach to the chores and activities
of life, re-imagining and re-contextualizing
a thing as simple as dinner into an unpredictable and
multi-sensory event.
Very important to try to break your habits, not
to predetermine what this thing is going to look like
or how it's going to taste.
Don't try to go to the conventional dish
that you think is emerging out of the Scrabble.
Try to challenge the dish.
So each person who plays it should challenge the dish
a little more radically than the last.
The less cooking experience you have, the better
because it's just more fun.
It's just hilarious what happens.
So a naive approach is sometimes the most profound.
It's kind of the word that fills in the gap for, like,
whatchamacallit, anything.
Like, girl, you're hooshed up.
Or did you see how hooshed he was?