Larry and Debby Kline artists and provocateurs – installation, performances, and other works
My Dinner with the Klines
“The Klines: Dinner and a Movie may be the most fun you’ll have at an art show this year. At dinner, The Klines don’t bring anything to the table but themselves and their talent for improvisation. No adhesives, no scissors, no tools. The couple’s collaborative style shows in their conversation. They riff off each other, like jazz musicians.” – Lonnie Burstein Hewitt, The La Jolla Light, Oct. 11, 2012
“They describe the experience of sitting and waiting in a restaurant between courses or waiting for service and feeling the urge to toy with the eating utensils – the napkins and napkin holders, place mats, chopsticks, straws, toothpicks, matches, teabags, condiment containers, turning them into miniature sculptures of angels and demons, saints and heroes, ballerinas. But they started to rethink their actions as they got more involved in them and as other diners, intrigued by the Klines’ constructions, gathered around their table and offered extra materials from the rubble of their tables, and suggestions for new images. So the Klines began to regard these dining experiences as performances that enacted the recovery of art from rubble.” – “Arabian Chess: The Rules of the Game,” written by David Antin for the 2013 San Diego Art Prize catalogue
UPDATE 2014:
We did a live performance of “My Dinner with The Klines” on ArtPulse TV and were thrilled that the episode featuring our work won an Emmy award for Arts/Entertainment Program. Our gratitude and congratulations go to Barbarella Fokos, David Fokos, and videographer/editor Giovanni DiGiacomo at Art Pulse TV. How cool is that!!! See the link below for our segment:
http://artpulse.tv/videos/
For years, we have engaged in an unusual ritual by making art when dining out. It is one facet of our art that spawned our collaborative ventures. These works capture creativity at its most playful state, resulting in surprisingly complex and impromptu sculptures borne of only the materials at hand. We use no tape, no glue, no scissors or tools of any kind! Once a part of our personal and private creative moments, we recently decided to share these events by documenting them through photography, sound and video. Each piece consists of a photograph or video documenting a work in situ, a display of select parts of the sculpture and the receipt for the meal.
These works become public art at the moment of creation, a direct response to our surroundings and materials, the character of the restaurant and the ideas that emerge and transform over the course of the meal. Since the pieces are constructed of the detritus left after a meal, they can also be seen as reflections on a disposable society.
My Dinner with The Klines book and DVD set is here and available to the public at the low, low price of $250! This 105 page book features the best of My Dinner with The Klines dinner sculpture photographs, stories and commentaries and 13 dinner sculpture videos with original soundtracks and musical scores produced by The Klines. And all of these images and videos were created in restaurants while we dined! We wish to thank those who contributed to our successful Kickstarter.com campaign (see below) to produce this beautiful limited edition hardcover book and DVD set.
Special thanks to the following people and organizations who provided material support for this project and made the production of the book possible:
La Jolla Athenaeum Music and Arts Library
Naomi Nussbaum/Synergy Art Foundation
Design Institute of San Diego
Erika Torri
Joyce Axelrod
Ashley Couts
Diane Gage
James Robbins
Andrea Villa
Alfred Pagano
Maureen Steiner Daviste
Joanne Chappell
Joanna Wheeler
Jones Sanchez
Joan Sobel
Luke and Luisa Patterson
Zeke Loftin
Charlie James
Larry and Carol B. Gartner
Vivien and Jeffrey Ressler
Larry and Debra Poteet
Louise Kline
Manny Macias
Mark Fanta
Gerda Govine and Luis Ituarte
Larry Zeiger
Ellen and Allan Wexler
Maurice Berger
Isabelle Wasserman
Colleen Keegan
Ronald Newby
Mary Herzog
Carol Bardwick
Phyllis Savin
Monika Hseu
Marti Kranzberg
Nina Waisman
Carol Buckley
Brainard and Delia Carey
Betsy Lane
Corine Maggio
Mary Lynn Dominguez
Claire Slattery
Trena Noval
Felicia Khor
Alex Schaefer
Miriam Schaer
Cate Finney
Susan Royce
Brian Dick and Christen Sperry-Garcia
Hilary Sinberg
Craig Roper
Ann Berchtold
Michael Ogura
Doris Bittar
John Robert Martino
Jan Litvene
Cecilia Stanford
Chen Tamir
Mark Kline
Judith Rubin
Ashley Lyman
Andi Schoenbaum
Stephanie Ann Taugner
Katie Cameron
Naomi Title
Karen Li
Janice Klein
Anne Mudge
Steve Lambert
