An Artist on the ‘Magical Importance’ of a 15-Year-Old Tea Bag

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/t-magazine/art/laure-prouvost.html

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In this series for T, Emily Spivack, the author of “Worn Stories,” interviews creative types about their most prized possessions. Here, the Turner Prize-winning artist Laure Prouvost explains the role of tea in her work and life through a 15-year-old tea bag once used by her grandparents (partly fictional characters central to her practice). Prouvost currently has solo exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and The Bass in Miami Beach, and will represent France in next year’s Venice Biennale.

My grandfather would use tea bags and then dry them on the heater to reuse them. He’d have four or five on the radiator at once. This one is a bit special. It was a tea bag my grandma put in her bath. She’d make a tea bath after the bags had been used a few times and the tea didn’t taste so good. She just enjoyed it, the color. This tea bag is turning colors; it’s a greenish color with pink. I asked my grandmother for it about 15 years ago. I keep it in a little box, a relic of my grandparents’ lives.

A lot of my work starts around tea. One of my videos is called “Wantee.” It’s the name my grandfather’s friend, Kurt Schwitters, used to call his girlfriend because she kept asking him, “Do you want tea?” So calling her Wantee was playful but it was also patronizing.

I once showed a tea bag in an exhibition on a heater. It was the domestic entering a public space. People would tell someone working at the gallery, “Oh, someone’s left their tea bag on the heater.” It was a subtle work — it took time for people to notice it, and at the same time, they were like, why is this there? I’ve got a tendency to be attracted to the little things we’re used to having around us that we may not notice, and to give them a kind of magical importance.

A tea bag is meant to be thrown away. Why would you dry it and reuse it? It makes me question how much we consume. I like that you can look at something that seems like nothing, like a very, very boring object, but it’s got so much history — about colonization, migration, wars … the whole history of tea is very complex.

In France, where I’m from, you don’t drink much tea. In London, where I live now, it’s every two hours. It’s like having a cigarette. It’s quite dominant. And a welcoming gesture. “Would you like a cup of tea?” is the first thing you ask when someone comes over. Living in London, I drink a lot of tea. You turn into what you surround yourself with, so sometimes I feel a little like a tea bag myself.

This interview has been edited and condensed.