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Thursday, June 20, 2013
The A-Mazing Bureaucratic Birthday
June 1988
Publication of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven
The A-Mazing Bureaucratic Birthday
By Mimsie Coleman
The Commissioners of Cake have assembled. The meeting has been called to order more or less. As the proceeding proceed, it becomes clear that this is no ordinary gathering. It is more like the Mad Hatters tea party in wonderland where things are not quite what they seem, where reality and fantasy converge.
The Commissioner of Protocol speaks. "Will now turn to the next item on the agenda which is whether to serve forks with the cake."
The Commissioner of Icing responds: "I think it is a good bureaucratic policy to offer forks, to offer people the option, but I don't think that requesting a fork should guarantee one."
Another voice, in rapid succession: "I move that we state in writing that we will offer forks, but that we make them unavailable."
A fourth voice: "I think we should consider the environmental impact that plastic forks will have and not offer them at all."
The environmental argument wins support within seconds for a No Fork Policy. The Protocol Commissioner announces, "I move that this be so decreed, by order of the Commissioner of Waste Management, of which there is none."
Believe it or not, the speakers here are actually leaders from New Haven's art and business community. There mission is a real one: to help plan part of New Haven Colony's birthday celebration by helping to design and facilitate distribution of 3,500 pieces of free cake-The A-Mazing Bureaucratic Birthday Cake, to festival goers on the New Haven Green, June 4th and 5th.
"Our primary mission is to serve cake." said Beverly Richey, the artist and organizer who dreamed the project up. "We'd also like to make the experience fun and insightful," she added. Richey decided that the cake, in honoring a city and its institutions, should also pay homage to its bureaucracy. She has planned a bureacratic maze to accompany the cake, facilitating an orderly approach and allowing cake eaters to participate in bureacratic inspired activities.
In exposing bureaucracy, Richey has created her own. She has established her own Cake Bureau composed of 30 individuals, including a system consultant, a fashion designer, cake production officials, maze developers, paperwork producers, and more than a dozen Cake Commissioners. The bureau has taken over all aspects of planning and design. So far for example, Leon's Bakery will bake the cakes: artist Ted Tihansky and others are designing its appearance; Project Director Joyce Greenfield oversees the mechanics; and of course, the all-important Cake Commissioners determine policy. They abide (albeit loosely) by Roberts Rules of Order, the rules which govern official meetings; they couch motions in semi-appropriate language, trying to be faithful to the spirit within bureaucracies, while creating an atmosphere of bureaucracy at its most absurd.
"I approached this expecting a crumby experience," Jim Greenfield, the group's undisputed bureaucratic spokesman par excellence, explains. "But I found that it is a very gratifying experience, that I am enjoying it a-la-mode. I had no idea the depths to which a bureaucracy could descende until my experience as a Cake Commissioner."
This same humor should prevail on June 4th and 5th, when the A-Mazing bureacratic wonderland is brought to the New Haven Green. The cake bureaucrats will be joined by various regional dignitaries, including Representative Bruce Morrison and Major Biagio DiLieto, to serve people cake. Cake will be served from 1-4pm and 5-7:30pm both days, at the Arts tent on the lower Green.
OTHER ARTICLES RELATED TO RICHEY'S ART/LIFE/WORK
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
No 'just desserts' on this birthday cake
New Haven RegisterSunday June 5 1988
No 'just desserts' on this birthday cake
By Barbara Steinberger
New Haven - Getting a free piece of cake wasn't a piece of cake in this city Saturday.
But according to designers of the A-Mazing Bureaucratic Birthday Cake, that's the price you have to pay for democracy.
In order to get a small square piece of dessert at the "New Haven Celebrates New Haven" festival on the Green, visitors had to survive a bureaucratic runaround that made waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles seem like a day at the beach.
For most cake-eathers, the ordeal began with a five-to-10 minute wait, during which over zealous cake commissioners passed out cake consumption permit applications (in duplicate of course) and "cake police" kept the crowd orderly. About 30 people milled around in line at any one time.
Then the nightmare began.
Bewildered visitors were forced to wade through a sea of red tape (in this case, red streamers and balloons), and get rubber stamps (in duplicate) proclaiming them for "zoned for cake consumption" and "approved for cake release".
After declaring whether they were "fork-users" or "non-fork-users" choosing the appropriate flavor, and confessing whether they had ever previously been denied cake, the by-now starving applicants took and oath and proceeded to the cake distribution center, where volunteer cake servers such as Mayor Biagio DiLieto and US rep. Bruce Morrison, D3, gave them the long awaited baked goods.
But those who declared themselves fork-users were out of luck since there were no forks available.
And as for the choice of flavor-well, those who picked chocolate cake with chocolate frosting just had to settle for white cake with green frosting, because that was all there was.
"We were told forks are plastic and if you burn them it releases dioxin," Morrison said. "And chocolate is too expensive. They can have any kind of cake they want, as long as it's what we have."
All this was just a little too much for some cake applicants to handle. "I don't believe I am doing this for a piece of cake," said a hungry Paula Diliberto of Bristol as she stood in line with her permit application. "Do we want cake this badly?" Another women asked her friend.
But this wasn't just some half baked idea. A 30 member cake bureau, including a panel of 13 cake commissioners, spent about six weeks formulating policy, defining terms, designing stationary and memos, and making up agendas and minutes, said Beverly Richey, marketing and membership director for the Greater New Haven Arts Council and the artistic director of the cake project.
The cake was made by Leon's Bakery in Hamden, which planned to give out 3500 pieces over four cake-serving periods Saturday and today, said bakery owner and chief cake commissioner Leon Weinberg. Visitors to the green can apply for cake today from 1-4pm and 5-7:30pm.
OTHER ARTICLES RELATED TO RICHEY'S ART/LIFE/WORK
A Cake by Committee transient Art an amazing part of 350th
New Haven Register
June 1988
A Cake by Committee transient Art an amazing part of 350th
By Markland Taylor
To Beverly Richey, Leon Weinberg, and friends, New Haven's 350th birthday celebrations this weekend are quite literally, a piece of cake.
To be precise, 3500 of official, free, individually sliced cake, which will be served to 3500 reveling members of the public on the New Haven Green on Saturday and Sunday afternoons and evenings.
It's all part of Richey and Friends' A-Mazing Bureaucratic Cake. A slice of transient culture commissioned by New Haven's 350 Committee and sponsored by Leon's Bakery, the committee, the New Haven Register, and the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. And what is more culturally transient than and edible piece of cake?
Actually, New Haven's A-Mazing Bureaucratic Cake is a combination of the edible and non-edible. The edible portion, supplied by Weinberg's Leon's Bakery, will consist of a generous supply of sheet cakes.
The non-edible portion will be an "elaborate and humorous" central structure-an 14-foot high iced facade of city hall.
It will have cut out windows through which the edible slices of cake will be served and part of the fun will be a "bureaucratic maze" (hence the cake's amazing title), a crowd-control device through which would-be noshers will be directed.
Be not afraid. The whole bureaucratic approach, including filling out a registration form, supplying requested information, and ultimately receiving approval for a piece of cake, won't take more than a minute or two-even allowing for "amusing bureaucratic mishaps".
The Arts Council of Greater New Haven's director of marketing and membership, Richey is no newcomer to transient culture or cakes.
Cake first became an art form to Richey when she worked as an apprentice to Paul Rutkovsky, the founder-director of Papier Mache Video Institute, from 1978-1983.
Then, in 1983, Richey's submission to the Connecticut Chapter of the Women's Caucus for Art Spring Cleaning Show was a twenty-inch tall cake in the shape of a Comet scouring powder can. It both delighted and fed the public.
The following year, Richey contributed a military wedding cake to New Haven's first show of 1984 (based on George Orwell's novel). And her work has continued with such appetizing pieces as Famous Cookie, Eat Audubon Street, and the Profitable Hartcake.
Her A-Mazing Bureaucratic Birthday Cake is, however, her biggest project to date, and the first time she hasn't baked the cake herself. "When I started thinking about the project after the 350 committee commissioned it, I found myself faced with endless questions," Richie {sic} says. "What is a city? What do you give a city for its birthday? What will the weather be like? Who will attend? How many will attend? and so on.
"Since this would be by far the biggest number of people I have ever served cake to, the main issue became the actual serving. Obviously, one person couldn't possibly serve 3500 people. So it became clear that I needed an organization, a system, a bureaucracy to make it all happen."
So Richey brought together some of her artist friends with some "commissioner type people" to interact. She ended up with a Cake Bureau or 30 individuals, including a systems consultant, a bureaucratic fashions designer, maze developers, paperwork producers, and more than a dozen cake commissioners.
"The bureaucracy involved frightens, inspires and fascinates me," Richey admits. "But through it all I've discovered that systems, hierarchy, aren't necessarily bad, that in certain cases they are essential to get things done. It's been quite a stretch for me working with so many individuals and groups."
The transient art will be documented for posterity-by the cake bureau's 3 documentation artists Michael Rush, Timothy Feresten, and Joan Fitzsimmons. And so that everyone can see everything that's going on at all times, there will be a television monitor revealing the action behind the city hall facade.
Richey knows a lot of variables inevitably impinge on such a project. "But the one variable I don't expect is no customers," she laughed. "Whenever I do cake I can't get them away from the table."
OTHER ARTICLES RELATED TO RICHEY'S ART/LIFE/WORK
BEVERLY RICHEY: A PRIME MOVER MOVES ON BY MIMSIE COLEMAN
Publication of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven
New Haven, Connecticut
USA
February 1989
BEVERLY RICHEY: A PRIME MOVER MOVES ON
BY MIMSIE COLEMAN
Intense, outspoken, and sometimes outrageous, Beverly Richey is a local artist committed to experimental art and to caustic criticism of contemporary values. With her short, black self cropped hair, and expressive eyes that crease into smiling eyelashes when she is amused, Beverly Richey is an easily recognizable figure in the local art scene, she is also generally recognized as a one-woman dynamo.
For over ten years Richy has been a creative generator within the New Haven art community - and originator of concepts, an organizer of happenings, and a basic prime mover. She has also served, for the past four-and-a-half years, as a resident artist and general communications director for the Arts Council. Richey is now leaving her Arts Council post; she is shifting gears and moving to other challenges. "It's clearly time to go," she explains. "I feel I've completed my job, and that there isn't anything left for me to do. It's time for other issues and other questions."
Richey's role at the Arts Council has been a unique one. She has helped design and implement community arts programs; helped to facilitate the growth of the Arts Council itself, and also has served as a meaningful liaison with the art world.
As a photographer, Arts Council board member, and friend, Tim Feresten, points out, "Her major contribution to the Arts Council has been her creative ability to involve the Council with the arts community. A lot of the things the Arts Council started doing were her ideas. ... She's an artist on the cutting edge of contemporary art, and having an artist of her quality involved with us put us in touch with the community of artists and art organizations in New Haven."
Richey, New Haven born and bred, began her career in the traditional genres of drawing and painting. Always attracted to the unusual, however, and equally interested in stretching herself beyond her current limits, she joined the city's former Papier Mache Video Institute in 1978. There, first under the tutelage of artist Paul Rutkovsky and later as the Institue co-director, she gave full rein to experimentation. The Institute, then on Hamilton Street, was a loft-space where a loose collaboration of artists explored experimental, non-traditional forms of art. They were the committee to the belief that art need not be hung on walls, that it is far more a creative process than a product to be bought and sold in the art market. They sponsored group exhibitions, performances, and happenings; they explored public art, conceptual art, transient art - interests which Richey helped them cultivate, and which have remained with her.
During her years of affiliation with the Institute, 1978-1984. Richey also began her investigations of edible art. She was making art at home at the time; kitchen products were easily accessible. In addition, with edible art she could combine an avant-garde interest in the transient and non-traditional with one of her many domestic interests. Richey's domestic talents are richly diversified: besides having a degree in nutrition, she has worked as a seamstress, can iron with precision (she is especially skillful with tablecloths), and of course, has turned cake-baking into a fine art.
More important, Richey's interest in cake art stemmed from a desire "to elevate traditional woman's work." "I had realized that I got that same flush you feel when you're working in a studio, when I was baking in the kitchen, that I was doing the same thing, only manipulating different materials. It's been that way with women all along, only their product is transient and it has become under-appreciated. With cake, I became committed to the belief that manipulating frosting and cake has just as much value as working in steel and wood."
Once cake became her major medium, Richey began giving it a variety of satirical forms. For a 1983 exhibit, The Spring cleaning Show, which was sponsored by the Women's Caucus for Art she designed a Comet scouring-powder can which stood 20 inches high. As with all her cakes, it was intended for viewing and eating pleasure.
For a 1984 exhibition which she helped conceptualize and organize, entitled The First Show of 1984 (a la George Orwell), she submitted a chocolate frosted military cake, topped with plastic soldiers and American flags. Later that year she continued them in an exhibit, Buy and Sell, which was a sometimes humorous indictment of our commodity-oriented society and our war-dependent economy. She hand-made flyers, coupons, and discount notices utilizing all the tools of marketing to complete the satire. In these pieces, transient, conceptual, and public art merged.
Last summer these same elements converged when Richey and Company served 3,500 slices of her art at New Haven's official 350th birthday party on the Green. Her piece, called the A-Mazing Bureaucratic Birthday Cake, was multi-faceted. In tribute to a city and its institutions, she decided to pay homage to its bureaucracy. The piece itself involved not only continuous sheets of cake (donated Leon's Bakery), but also an elaborately decorated booth, from which the cake was served; and also a bureaucratic maze to facilitate an orderly approach to the cake, and to allow bureaucratic-inspired activities to befall cake-eaters.
Due to its size and complexity, the Bureaucratic Birthday Cake also necessitated the creation of an actual bureaucracy - a bureau of people, including designers, bakers, and decision-making commissioners to plan and carry out the plans. Richey's involvement was mostly conceptual. She gave the project shape and direction; others gave it form. Her public art reached a new height.
It is with kind of undertaking, where she merges avant-garde art with public events, where Richey probably has her greatest impact. Fellow artist Robert(a) Chambers observes: "By doing public events she's gotten a lot of people exposed to her kind of thinking who wouldn't otherwise be... It's one thing to do things in an art gallery and another to do them at open-air festivals where the general public wanders. ... Beverly has brought a lot of original ideas to New Haven... she's influenced a lot of people in her brand and her presentation of art."
Richey's art is never separate from her life. Her creations often directly reflect her present situation. Once within the offices of the Arts Council, amazed by the accumulation of paper that ended up being trashed, she explored the concept of "waste". She also developed sticker art in response to experimentation with the office copy machine. And she has helped organize and coordinate events around those moral/political issues which are close to her heart. The Women in the Arts celebration, which was an original conception of Erector Square Director Ann Langdon, was thrust into being thanks to the joint efforts of the two.
Where Richey's inspiration lies right now is unclear.
"I feel I'm in the same place in my work as in my art - nowhere right now," "I've finished my work at the Arts Council. And I also feel I reached a crescendo with the Bureaucratic Birthday Cake. All the elements of the work came together for the piece: serving a huge amount of cake, working with large numbers of people, exploring organization.
The public side of me has become accomplished, she says. "The stuff now at issue is inside stuff. Where do I go from here? I don't know. I don't think it can be in the same direction. At this point, I need to recharge this whole organism.
"Not having anything ahead is scary. But facing that emptiness is what it's all about."
Link to myCAKE RABBIT HOLE
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