Vegetable Wisdom – 2016

 

Vegetable Wisdom:

 

In late 2016 we received a 4Culture Project grant for our piece ‘Vegetable Wisdom.’

Inspired in part by Charles Schultz, creator of the “Peanuts”, who responded to his characters’ cry for help by setting up Lucy as a 5 cent psychiatrist, the Mob proposes to dispense vegetable wisdom to curious people.

We built a wisdom dispensing carrot. We created large papier maché vegetable heads and wear them with our carrot cart in a public setting. In recognition of public interaction and exposure we carefully consider access, durability and safety while also loading the art with joy, surprise, and whimsy.

The grant we received afforded us the opportunity to build all of our props and perform at two venues in Seattle, the Seattle 1st Thursday Art Walk in Pioneer Square and The Capitol Hill Farmer’s Market.

While acknowledging our sense of humor, it’s important to note that we also take on the responsibility of making and conceiving art seriously. Many of our past projects have been oriented toward participatory installation and we are excited to plant ourselves into this new work. The risk and challenge of performance hold the promise of a greater reward for both us and our participants.

As Seattle increases its population density we are interested in the tension between urban lifestyles and our agrarian roots. Just as vegetables don’t grow in seclusion from their surroundings, our project serves as a reminder that people are nurtured by connections to their living environment.

The authors we borrowed wisdom from are grouped below, this list will surely continue to grow.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, W.H. Auden, St Augustine, James Baldwin, Gregory Bateson, Charles Baudelaire, Jean Baudrillard, John Berger, Joseph Beuys, William Blake, Marcus Boon, William S. Burroughs, John Cage, Italo Calvino, Albert Camus, Nicholas Carr, Lisa Carver, Ed Catmull, G.K. Chesterton, Chao-Li Chi, Leonardo Da Vinci, Maya Deren, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Frederick Douglass, Jane Elliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jamie Fisher, R Buckminster Fuller, Suzi Gablik, Sigfried Giedion, John Glenn, Hans Haacke, William Hazlitt, Zbigniew Herbert, Sheila Heti, Jenny Holzer, Fanny Howe, Zora Neale Hurston, William James, Erica Jong, Carl Jung, Franz Kafka, Pir Vilayat Khan, Jack Kerouac, Tracy Kidder, Maxine Hong Kingston, Suzanne Lacy, Karl Lagerfield, William Lawson, Ben Lerner, Pia Lindman, Daniel López, Nasargadatta Maharaj, F.O. Matthiessen, Marshall Mcluhan, Henry Miller, Lorrie Moore, Marianne Moore, Yoko Ono, Blaise Pascal, M. Scott Peck, Adrienne Rich, Philip Rieff, Will Rogers, Edward St. Aubyn, Laura Silerman, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Julian Stallabrass, Gertrude Stein, Henry David Thoreau, Dom Toretto, Mark Twain, Meyer Vaisman, Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Waits, Curtis White, A.N. Whitehead, Oscar Wilde, Dean Young, Michael Zimmerman