Rita's Dream

Rita McBride, artist, indulges in some gourmet bathing, and floats Kranepudlian thoughts and imagery from a non-Kranepool Hotel in Limoges:

Eternity is somewhere between the porcelain and the glaze. Immortality is the fire that fuses the elements.  Hot water fills the tub with sexy sounds. Soap bubbles pop against the porcelain skin and creamy flesh. Sometimes I think I travel too much, and live in hotels too often. Glazed eyes watch the TV in the Suite’s other room.

Oh look, a hotel guest in the tub on TV is watching my real-life tub-time in a real hotel.

At the studio, I’ve worked with glass, wood, steel, carbon fiber and the printed word. Textiles remain an elusive and fascinating material. Those towels look so soft. I wonder if this joint offers Room Service massage...

O mighty Caesar, your Victory Dinner has arrived! Great, just leave it on the credenza there. Thanks.

When I was a girl I used to slosh oodles of shampoo in my hair and shape the white foam into horns, helmets, wings. The bathroom was like a hotel room inside our house. We had to make reservations. Steam turned the mirror into a screen for movies about a girl who lives her dream-life in a tub.

Juxtaposition of a hand-knit jacket and a flat-screen TV. The evil Pharaoh recommends cocktails in the Revolving Lounge upstairs.

Every hotel I’ve ever stayed in, I always go see what’s on the bookshelf in the lobby, and grab something to read. Beats carrying books around wherever I go. This time I picked up Haunts of the Black Masseur. What an intriguing title, I thought. It’s all about swimming, which brought me back to my water ballet days.

Asterix has just noticed that Wotan is watching the shampoo ad instead of throwing lightning at the Romans.

Why do I watch TV? Just part of being American, I guess. No matter how much time I spend in Europe, or traveling around the world, the electric heartland is buried somewhere within my heart. Even when the program’s some Star Trek re-adaptation of Richard Wagner’s remake of Aida interspersed with selected non-X-rated scenes from Caligula.

A movie still from the water ballet scene in Caligula Versus Aida on Ceti Alpha 1, filmed at Neuschwanstein, framed for display in a hotel.

What does it mean, when a conceptual/architectural artist has a Biedermeier highboy full of Meissen figurines and Limoges coffee cups in the living room at home, wherever that is?