First, how small and ordinary it is
People expecting an icon are often surprised by the scale. This is not a monument. The cup is about 4 3/8 inches across, the saucer about 9 3/8 inches, the spoon roughly 8 inches long, and the whole assembled set stands only about 2 7/8 inches tall. It is a normal teacup, exactly the size of the one you might have had your tea in this morning, and the cup, saucer, and spoon beneath the fur are plain, cheap, store-bought goods. The whole charge of the piece comes from something cheap and familiar made strange, not from anything grand.
And then the fur. Every one of the three pieces is sheathed in the same speckled tan gazelle fur. This is the first thing to register: it is not one furred object sitting on bare china, but a whole matched tea service gone shaggy, the unity of a place setting preserved and turned animal. The cup is furred, the saucer is furred, the spoon is furred, all in one pelt.
Where the idea actually lives
Look at the lip of the cup, the edge you would drink from. That is where the work happens. Porcelain is made to meet the lips; fur is made to lie against skin; and the rim is the seam where Oppenheim presses the two into the same inch of space. To picture drinking from it is to feel hair on the tongue, and the whole queasy idea of the piece is concentrated right there, at the place you would put your mouth.
Now the spoon. Its shape stays legible under the pelt; you can still find the bowl and the handle. At 8 inches it runs nearly twice the cup’s width, a long thing for so small a cup. And a fur-coated spoon is the most useless of the three things. You cannot stir with it; you cannot lift anything to your mouth with it. The fur does not hide the tool so much as cancel it, leaving the unmistakable silhouette of a spoon with the function stripped clean out.
Two responses, fired at once
Take in the whole set and notice that the fur cancels every use at the same time: a cup that can’t hold tea without soaking, a saucer that can’t catch a drip, a spoon that can’t scoop. It looks completely like a tea service and works like nothing. And the surface that does the canceling reads, at first glance, as soft, strokable, even luxurious, the touch of a good fur collar. Then the mind sets it in the mouth, and the softness curdles. Both responses fire almost together: the pleasure of the pelt and the small gag of fur against the lip. The work holds you in that double take, and refuses to release you to one feeling or the other.