The Housewife´s Lament (or Useless Infatuation)
with Genevieve Waller (USA)
‘One day I was walking,
I heard a complaining
and saw an old woman the picture of gloom
She gazed at the mud on her doorstep ('twas raining)
and this was her song as she wielded her broom:
Oh, life is a toil and love is a trouble
beauty will fade and riches will flee
pleasures they dwindle and prices they double
and nothing is as I would wish it to be.’
(from “The Housewife’s Lament,” a song)Ayala and Waller address the satisfaction and frustration of household chores and implements by taking the vocabulary of housework—hanging laundry out to dry, setting up the ironing board, putting out platters for a meal—and remaking it or overdoing it.
Instead of one ironing board they use five, and they position them at all angles such that ironing would be impossible. And rather than filling platters with food, they stack them into candy-colored towers.
The materials are right but the placement and combinations of them are wrong for domestic work. They are rendered useless while simultaneously useful in new ways as building blocks for a mountain, a miniature monument, or an invented other.