Art or Soup? - Rod Lathim

“Art or Soup?”

Neon, soup can reproduction

29 1/4” T x 16” W x 5”D

“Art Soup” is both homage and wink — a luminous nod to Lily Tomlin, Jane Wagner, and their brilliant lens on art and humanity in “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.” (One of my all-time favorite plays.)

Here, the ordinary and the iconic meet in a flash of neon. A simple can of soup — humble, mass-produced, familiar — becomes illuminated, reborn through light, reflection, and irony. Tomlin’s character of the bag lady Trudy explains art to her space alien friends. She pulls a can of Campbell’s Soup out of her cart and states,“This is soup.” Then she shows them a picture of Andy Worhol’s painting of a Campbell’s Soup can and says, “This is art.”

The piece celebrates that essential spark of perception — the moment when the everyday object crosses a threshold and becomes revelation. In its glowing contours lives both humor and reverence: a reminder that art is not a thing apart, but the way we see the things before us.

Like Warhol’s pop audacity and Trudy’s cosmic curiosity, Art Soup invites laughter, thought, and recognition — that the line between soup and art is as thin, and as brilliant, as a strand of neon light.