Nicole Gruter and her stuff launch a Tea Tour
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It doesn't seem right to label Nicole Gruter a "conceptual artist" or "performance artist." She presents herself as more of a cheerful hostess with a clever metaphysical plan. At a group art show last year, for example, she invited guests to sit around a table and enjoy tea from a tea set she inherited from her grandmother. Granted, she was tying people's hands to the teacups and teapots with lengths of yarn as we all engaged in pleasant small talk, and explained that the "piece" was all part of an ongoing effort to deal with all the "stuff" she has piled up at her house. She completed her Master Of Fine Arts at UW-Madison this spring with Out Of House And Home, in which she invited people to take an audio tour of her Monona house and witness her "year-long experience of purging and organizing her belongings." Before the month is out, Gruter will be taking her tea set out on the road in a van that literally has a handle and a spout, which she'll show off at a kick-off tea party Monday afternoon at Mother Fool's Coffeehouse. (Gruter will also be performing in her Wilhelmina Baker music project Tuesday night at The Frequency.) On Tea Tour 2009, as she calls it (she'll be blogging about it here), Gruter will be setting up at coffee shops, art spaces, bars, and clubs across the country, and even tourists spots such as the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone National Park, with the simple goal of getting people to sit down with her for tea.
"It's the idea of a ritual relaxation that people do every day in certain countries, and that we've completely dismissed as necessary," Gruter tells The A.V. Club. Yet she's asking her guests more than you'd demand of your dollies in the back garden. She wants them to talk about the stress brought on by the Western world's hectic lifestyle, in which we're rarely encouraged to take a moment for ourselves, quit fidgeting with email, and give our brains a rest. "People understand, 'Oh, my life is stressed-out,' but to talk about the very specific elements of how we might address it is another thing," she adds.
At the Mother Fool's event, and all her tour stops, Gruter plans to have a "Tea Cam" to which guests can "confess your stress" for a video offshoot of the project. She hopes the conversation about stress will take on different shades as she catches people in different settings, including the vacation destinations mentioned above: "Your priorities shift when you're on vacation, even though some people fill up their vacations with a huge agenda and feel stressed out when they don't get to everything they're supposed to."
People will know she's coming, too, as she's had her van converted to a "Tea-Mobile," with fiberglass protrusions—a spout, handle, and teapot lid—welded and bolted to the front, back, and roof. Does this raise any safety concerns? "As far as curiosity getting the better of the sheriff in Wyoming, I'm prepared to get pulled over." It remains to be seen just how America will cotton to the idea of having an impromptu tea party with a complete stranger from Wisconsin, but isn't there just something disarming about a lady who rolls up in a giant tea pot?
