Dishwasher. - periodical reviews

Washing dishes is one of the country's least esteemed professions, ranked in opinion polls only slightly above drug pushing and prostitution. But Dishwasher -- the self-published zine created by Dishwasher Pete -- creates a different picture from the drudgery usually associated with the work. Dishwasher Pete (who does not use his last name) is a twelve-year veteran who travels restaurant to restaurant, state to state.

Dishwasher Pete hopes to wash dishes in all fifty states. So far, he has made it to twenty-three. He says he likes his profession because of the freedom it affords him. "The one thing about my job is that my mind is free. They're buying my time and labor but not my mind," he says.Officials from the advertising agency, Levenson & Levenson of Dallas, sat in what is ordinarily the dining room to watch video monitors as the act unfolded. Workers with the production company, The James Gang, changed sets and lights for each of the scenes. Dozens of neighbors stood in front of the house to watch the proceedings.For there is trouble in the paradise of the blue landscape. In America's Most Wanted, the eyes of the wandering George Washington never meet the gaze of the contemporary vacationers. in Russia's Most Wanted, the Jesus Christ look-alike seems to turn his gaze away from the laboring youth. They inhabit the same painting, but seem to exist on different planes. The smooth surface of these paintings is deceptive. Like Total cereal, the paintings have an extra helping of everything the people want without any interrelationship among the ingredients. Something is deliberately out of joint. In fact, the seamless surface is a collage.Yet the citational texture of the paintings does not suggest a post-modernist multiplicity of narratives. The ironic artists take their blue landscapes seriously. It may be an artistic cliche, but for many people the blue landscape represents a moment of disinterested contemplation of almost Kantian beauty in everyday life. What is common to those polled is not so much their attachment to nature as their shared everyday dream of the beautiful. The kitschy, partially clad humans and animals that seem to come from international calendar art only deepen the strangeness of the background's haunting blue.As the chicken-tender rejects piled up in an aluminum pan at the side, production assistants would saunter by, grab a piece and marvel at the jalapeno flavor.While cameras rolled in the living room, the makeup artist was practicing her craft on the actors outside on the sidewalk, caterers were setting up lunch on the backyard lawn and a Churchs unit manager was frying up a truckload of chicken tenders in the kitchen.For this project, more than 35 film and advertising agency workers converged on the little bungalow, moving three rooms of furniture and replacing it with their own, draping the outside in black curtains to prevent natural light from entering, removing the front door and installing a more suitable one, erecting huge lights outside and in and covering the hardwood floors with wall-to-wall cardboard to protect them from rolling cameras and countless creative feet. The art director and her staff took down window blinds and put up plantation shutters, took down paintings and put up new ones, rolled up rugs and put down new ones and hauled out plants and added their own.Each of the paintings in the book seems thoroughly quotational, often citing from a national tradition. The triangles in Russia;s Least Wanted resemble those of El Lissitzky or Wassily Kandinsky, while the mother's unclad breasts in France's Most Wanted vaguely evoke Delacroix or Manet (as well as some amateur pictures from the beach in Normandy). None of the blue landscapes, however, was executed en plein air. Instead, an ideal landscape based on the work of Italian painter Domenichino was used as a template. The blue landscape, then, does not depict anyone's native soil, but rather a paradise within, a nostalgia for freedom. "Making people hermits for a second - maybe that is the basic idea of art," writes Komar.While it's wildly irreverent, Dishwasher's class consciousness may inspire kitchen employees to organize -- or, at the very least, grab a free bite now and then. Dishwasher Pete has published lists of all the food he eats or takes home from restaurant kitchens. He implores zine readers not to ash on their plates so employees can eat the leftovers from the bus tubs.

Please note the cardinal rule to dishbreaking: Break the dirty dishes! You don't wanna break dishes you just labored to clean; you wanna break the dirty ones so you don't have to clean 'em.

Author: Catherine Capellaro