The Dishwasher Dialogues: Rags

But Not Riches

By: Gregory Light and Rafael Mahdavi - Jul 21, 2025

Rags to Dishes

Rafael: Sometimes in the early morning I went to the marché Saint Pierre, up near Barbès Rochechouart, that’s where Boulevard Magenta crosses Barbès. I walked around the chaotic markets under the metro. Makeshift stalls sold all kinds of things, from food to second-hand clothes and baby carriages. It was well known that some of the items on sale were stolen goods. At some tables, cardsharps and dice rollers were making speedy bets and keeping an eye out for the police. There were brothels in plain sight, you could see men in work clothes queuing up outside on the sidewalk. It was a sad sight.

Greg: These were the same ‘sights’ that made Paris so ‘picturesque’; an aesthetic of sadness stitched together with poverty and tears; suffering and despair; resilience and grim smiles. I like to think the threads that connected them to the city bore more than a fragment of delight.

Rafael: A little farther west was the Marché Saint Pierre where they sold all kinds of cloth, including canvas, lace, burlap, silks, satins, velvets, vinyl cloths of all sorts. The market was in a five-story building with no elevator. Every floor specialized in a type of fabric. Each saleswoman held a wooden meter stick while she stood by the tables on which there were hundreds of bolts of cloth. I would touch the canvases, feel the texture and tightness of the weave. I would tell the lady how many meters I wanted, and with fast, acrobatic movements of her arms she flipped the bolts back and forth, as if she were juggling, and unrolled the cloth, cut it, and folded it up. I paid at the cashier who sat in a cage in the center of the floor. Later, when we were working on your second play, One Day in May, I looked for other places that sold rags with which to build your stage set.

Greg: Every time I worked on stage with those rags, they carried the visceral senses of feel and touch and movement which you describe here. And the smell. Mixed with the paint you dripped and splashed on them.

Rafael: After asking around, I discovered the world of rag pickers, chiffoniers, on the outskirts of Paris. It was a marginal world, run by hard-working and tough-looking men and women. They collected the rags from the trash cans and textile dumps from all over Paris. They sold the rags to factories, restaurants, meat packers, house painters, paper mills, and other professions. The chiffoniers worked out of immense hangars. The people asked no questions. I told them I was building a set for a play in a theatre. A real theatre, they asked. Yes. And they said sure, take your pick. In these gigantic spaces there were two- or three-meter-high mounds of cloth, torn and cut. The piles were of different colors and patterns. Women were sitting at tables, cutting off buttons and zippers, and throwing them in tin boxes. So, I dug around these piles, and like a child feasting on goodies, I sunk my hand into these rag mountains and took armfuls of white rags, so I could splash them with paint. I jammed all the rags into my car, front and back seats. The VW looked like an overstuffed pillow.

Greg: The sheer volume of those rags was amazing. They packed your studio. They also filled countless large bags when we started transporting them. I am surprised you were able to get them all into your car.

Rafael: Some rags flew away. Nowadays the cop would stop me in a minute.

Greg: Less so for littering and more for the coming aesthetic assault on unsuspecting audiences.

Rafael: As I said, the rag folks were a tough bunch, and they made no bones about showing their knives and even a gun. That shocked me.

Greg: Certainly, puts an aesthetic assault into perspective.

Rafael: I am surprised nobody has ever made a documentary about that world. I took the rags back to my chambre de bonne studio. With clothes pins I hung as many as I could on strings back and forth. More were on the floor. And spattered them with paint. Different colors. Were you with me then, doing some of the spattering?

Greg: Yes, I remember going over to your studio and seeing the rags all over the floor, sagging and drooping everywhere on the lines you had strung up. You handed me some paint and told me to get going with splashes and drips. It soon looked like an outlandish industrial laundry gone amuck. Your paintings of the Rags series do it justice.

Rafael: The whole painting performance was like a dance. The cloth pieces took a week to dry. They were bright and colorful. And beautiful. The rag stage design costs us very little, not more than a hundred francs. I often thought of these rags later on. We made do with what we could afford.

Greg: It was a superb set design. Not only were the ropes and rags visually striking, they also permitted the actors to build unique shapes and environments during the performance, ever changing spaces to augment the play’s words and actions. The play was a series of interconnected monodialogues—dialogues in which only one side is heard—which gave the actors spatial freedom to explore the characters and their language within an immediate and tactile series of developing and collapsing, growing, and decaying environments of rags. It was also a practical and easy set to transport. It filled the stage for pennies. I remember you insisting that it had to be cheap and trouble free from the very beginning. And it was.

Rafael: In my own work the actual creative painting was the easiest part. From my first shows on, it was the transport of the pieces that was always an issue. Who would pay for it? So, I made sure the transport of this entire stage set be somehow cheap. If I remember correctly you took the entire stage set stuffed in plastic garbage bags up to Edinburgh. On the train.

Greg: Yes, we did take it on the train. And I do not remember any real glitches. Even though there was a cast of five, plus director and stage manager, going up to Edinburgh, the second time was much easier to arrange. But the venue and time slot were not nearly as kind to us. A near midnight closing time, on the geographical fringes of the Fringe, meant lean audiences. And even less media notice or review. One night, in the second act, I was perched up high on the rags and ropes where I could survey the whole auditorium. I could not see anyone. Only the glow of the exit sign. All the seats were empty. We completed the performance, but it felt surreal, very close to insanity. Later, Molly told me there had been one person.

Rafael: I’ll add here that I think the fact that we failed to achieve any significant success anywhere, in poetry or theater or painting or sculpture, critically or financially says something for our idealism and energy.

Greg: You mean we never became famous.

Rafael: Yes.

Greg: Maybe not. I think we simply did what we did. The ‘wealth and critical renown’ version of success that you are referring to was never the goal of what we were doing. Chasing that kind of success sounds to me much too much like art for identity’s sake, shaped by coin and recognition. Would such a gilded outcome have been a welcome by-product of what we were doing? My younger, poorer, and energetic self would have thought so. Even my older self wonders from time to time. But that is not how I would describe success. Not now. And maybe not even then. We were too busy just trying to get something done.

Rafael: As Beckett says: Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Greg: Good old Beckett. The perfect recipe for moving forward: trying, stumbling, making mistakes, stumbling better—and, as I interpret it now, all of it without complaint. That last bit is the hard part.

Rafael: You and I were outsiders. We didn’t belong to any networks, social or other, to get significant traction.

Greg: That is not completely true. When I look back, I am astounded at the communities we engaged with and how many connections we made.

Rafael: We didn’t do the necessary brown-nosing either.

Greg: Whatever that means. Some version of selling one’s soul.

Rafael: And most importantly luck wasn’t on our side.

Greg: Now, that does sound like complaint. Especially as we have both talked about how lucky we were.

Rafael: Point taken. But this point of view about luck is unpopular with modern cultural historians and arbiters; they haven’t been in the culture trenches.

Greg: Some may not have been. I suspect many others have been. And in deeper and darker and more dangerous trenches than ours.

Rafael: Because of bad luck. I believe in luck, bad or good, absolutely. We were lucky as human beings, not as creative people trying to make a meaningful difference.

Greg: I will allow this point, but under some protest about the meaning of the term ‘meaningful difference’ here.

Rafael: I suppose that what I am trying to say here is that I mistrust culture vultures, and esthetes even more.

Greg: This we can agree on. But they are not the ultimate purveyors of ‘meaningful difference’? The posthumous voice of eternity has not yet spoken. Seriously, as life and work have gone, I think we have been spoiled by much more than we might have expected was ours to claim. It is amusing now to think that making money in Edinburgh, for example, would have been a serious consideration. Or even impact. Unless high and dreaming way past the gravitational pull of reality. One Day in May was experimental theatre, after all. Success, then, was just building a world with rags.

Rafael: We made our dreams come true with rags.

Greg: I still have one of the paintings from your One Day in May series of paintings hanging in my home. The painted rags suspended haphazardly from the thick, rough ropes stretched from wall to wall across your studio.

Rafael: I did a few paintings on the rags theme, but they weren’t as good as I had hoped for.

Greg: The painting on my wall begs to differ.

Rafael: The rags were better for a stage. Literally, a world of rags worked better. And the world is a stage.

NEXT WEEK: THE END OF DAYS IN PARIS