Public performance artist analyzes the cost of war

Artists like Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock- all painters in post-World War II America-developed a form of expression through repetition. By echoing images, techniques and styles, they created famous images and left a mark on modern art. Now, more than 60 years later, contemporary performance artist Joanne Rice displays an urge to express the present in her piece, "The Human Cost of War."

She borrows from that technique of duplication, but in a completely unique way. You may have walked past her any day this week, month or year as she performed her slow and meditative recital. Rice belongs to an artist group called Mobius, and according to mobius.org, Rice started her project on Oct. 7, 2007, and intended to work on it daily for two years. This Tuesday marks the completion of her project. Every day, sometime between the hours of noon and 2 p.m., Rice stands on the grass by Trinity Church. Dressed head to toe in black attire as if she were grieving the loss of a loved one, she clutches a pristine white box. Inside the box are 100 small stones that represent lives lost in the war in Iraq. Rice begins her performance. She picks one rock out of the box, holds it in her hands for a couple of seconds, and appears to be reflecting on it. She then brings the stone with her on a slow journey, shuffling to a large and ever-growing pile of stones. She then kneels down and selects a specific spot in the cone-shaped pile. She places the rock down as if she is saying goodbye to it; she retreats to her starting point and repeats this action 100 times, moving no faster and treating each stone with the same respect as the last.

The site should eventually accumulate 70,000 stones-the number of people who had already been killed in the Iraq war by Oct. 7, 2007, according to iraqbodycount.org, Rice said in an e-mail to The Beacon. Rice's performance piece is not the only response to the war we have seen in recent days. Graphic artist Shepard Fairey similarly took advantage of public spaces when he created large-scale posters that depicted anti-war ideals and hung them on walls around Boston: brightly colored images of soldiers with roses in the barrel of the guns they hold and children with grenades.

Karen Finley, a visual and performance artist who was Emerson's artist in residence in 2007, displayed her discontent with the war in her piece "Nation Building," which resided in the Huret and Spector Gallery. "Nation Building" was made up of drawings of political figures and events, an enormous rope noose sculpture, and a ghostly installation of a printer that continuously spat out names of lives lost, both American and Iraqi, in the war. Displaying political responses, themes, and ideals in art is not a new concept. However, Rice has something here that most others don't. She uses repetition through an almost impossible form of persistence and dedication.

This is not to say that these other artists don't care as much, but there is a deep impact that comes out of Rice's daily replication. It is a personal piece that an audience does not frequently get to see. A gallery can be walked through a few times, and a play can be seen once or twice, but knowing this has been Rice's ritual for the past two years is quite remarkable. It is hard to know for sure whether Rice has kept up her endeavor by being at her spot every single day as she intended. However, observing her performance and devotion to this piece, and judging by the number of times she has been spotted, it seems safe to say she sticks to her word. Rice declined to comment, but instead sent a very brief e-mail in which she mentioned that it is hard for her to speak on the subject. She signed it with, "I watch the pile grow and grieve, I pray for peace."

Rice's completion of "The Human Cost of War" this Tuesday marks two years since the the project began. This piece provokes so many questions about Rice and her work. Why did she start this? How does she find the energy, time and determination to do this day after day? Did she lose someone in the war? However, the artist gives no easy answers. By choice Rice is silent-perhaps to encourage her audience to contemplate the issue at hand through her unspoken message and to sadly look on as her monument grows and grows.

My Day at Deitch

Why is it that dying makes you so famous? Anyone can do it, its not hard, and it's inevitable and most of the time it doesn't cost anything.

But it has seemed to work for Dash Snow, the young artist who tragically died at the young age of 27. Either that or he's been around and I am just extraordinarily out of touch which is also very possible. But whatever the case is, the death of this man immediately made me want to see what his work was all about, so I found myself wondering around Soho looking for his memorial exhibit at Deitch Gallery.

Full of seemingly outdated mediums like old newspapers and polaroids, Dash Snow's exhibit is a documentation of what was his unique lifestyle. Polaroids of parties and penises line the walls, and Dash's tall, white, thin and tattooed body are featured in many of them. Girls flashing the camera, body parts in bottles, people you dont ever want to see have sex having sex with other people you never want to see have sex and other good times with friends are featured in collage style frames. Snow was a photographer who exposed not only a drug and party atmosphere that had a sense of humor and wit to it. The photos aren't just like an album on someone's facebook, but its as if they say "we know about drug culture but here's how we do it, and look its repulsive, funny, and beautiful."

In other frames are sketches of his tattoos that he drew before having them forever etched in his skin. Snow also often worked with newspaper, cutting out words and headlines to make messages, often having two meanings. There were no pictures of his graffiti though, except for the giant replica of Snow's tag that Deitch painted on the outside of the gallery for this show.

What I found pretty interesting were

Dash's "Hamster Nests," I read that Dash and his friends would get high, FILL a hotel room with ripped up telephone books and mattress stuffing, and crawl around until they were high enough to FEEL like hamsters. As absurd as this sounds the moment of pure happiness captured in this photo would surly make anyone who knew him choke up at the thought of him being gone. Below is a poster for a project Deitch worked on, in which Snow and his friend and fellow artist Dan Colen re-created a Hammster Nest in a grand proportion for an exhibition.

There is also a large banner at the exhibit that reads "How much talent does it take to come on the NY Post anyway?" This is referring to many front pages of the post that Dash and his friends ejaculated on, and sometimes filled it in with glitter. Maybe it doesn't take much talent, but tell me this, has it been done before? Some of the post's headlines have made me want to laugh until I puke, but I can't say I've ever been so disgusted with it that I could degrade it in such a manor, and then let the world know. Just by the very sight of it, the audience immediately knows what Snow is trying to express, and that impact is what makes it worthy of being on a wall.

I think the reason people flock to a dead person's body of work is because now, there will never be an answer. While an artist is still alive, we trust that someone will unlock his or her secrets. That he or she will tell some reporter the meaning of the work and give the world this great and eye opening realization. Of course this never happens but it is always a possibility when the artist is alive. When he or she is dead, we are only left to speculate their intentions and what they're work means to our society, without giving them the chance to defend it or to create more.

I was then intrigued to walk down Wooster St to where Deitch's other location was featuring a piece called "Black Acid Coop" to which I will attribute my most uncomfortable yet curious experience I've had in a while.

I was made to sign a waver before entering the exhibit, which definitely added to the experience, I think. I didn't read it (which was dumb) but it immediately made me tense and cautious up on entering. What I found when I went in the exhibit was a fun house like atmosphere, except it wasn't very funny. As I explored each room, I felt as though I was a foreigner walking through an abandoned world. In this world people were conducting science experiments (or running a meth lab which I think is the case). Tubes connected to beakers twisted and tangled overhead and onto scorched kitchen counters and stoves. After walking through a hole in the wall (literally) an abandoned asian sex toy store, with display windows of plant life greeted me. After walking up and around stairs, I found a room that looked like a cross between the inside of a log cabin and Doc's lab from Back to the Future. Through a corridor littered with Newspapers were other rooms. One was a giant, dark room, that looked as though some large dart had hit a spot on the wall and peeled all the paint off. This room for it's size and lack of explanation was to me, the most eerie.

My day spent exploring the Deitch galleries was wonderful. My brain was so challenged and for a minute I stopped trying to figure everything out and just took it all in. These exhibits will definitely challenge everything you think you know while entertaining the senses. Check it out they both are open until the 15th!

Sophie Calle: A narcissus flower or a bloomin' genius!?

French photographer, writer and all around character Sophie Calle has recently caught my interest. Her odd hobby of voyeurism, and ways she deals with her insecurities make me love her art and wonder about her as a person. 

She is a photographer mainly, and her subjects usually involve random people. Her photos are voyeuristic. Calle would walk out of her house one day, pick a random person walking on the street and follow and photograph him or her going about his or her day. This project turned very interesting when Calle asked her mother to hire a private investigator to follow Calle around, this way she could see her life through a voyeurs eyes, and have some kind of documentation about how she lived her day.

She even found a job in a hotel for an entire year, just so she could photograph people's rooms when they were not in them, so that she could learn about them through their belongings. 

Another project she worked on was one that involved birthday presents. Every year, Calle would through herself a party inviting the number of people as the age she was turning, with one surprise guest. She would keep all of the presents she received in a menagerie so she could be reminded that there are people that love and care about her. 

I found out that she had a show called "Take Care of Yourself" at the Paula Cooper Gallery  in Chelsea, NY a few weeks ago, and I went to check it out. 

A very straight forward and frank note hung on the wall at the entrance to the gallery. The note explained that Calle's lover broke up with her through a very unclear e-mail that ended with the words "Take care of yourself." Calle was so distraught and confused by this break-up that she asked about 30 women with various professions to analyze and interpret the note as they would in their job. 

The results were very interesting and obscure. Calle had her letter interpreted in a variety of ways. There was a video of an Opera singer singing her response to it, a data chart made by a data analysts of some sort, she had it highlighted and crossed out as a copy editor edited it, she had it footnoted by a translator, she even had it made into a cross word puzzle by a woman who made puzzles for a newspaper. She had it decoded by a detective, and even had a parrot's interpretation for the letter. I'm no zoologist but I'm pretty sure it was a Cockatoo. 

The gallery looked beautiful. Giant signs and video displays of the letter re-arranged and interpreted in so many ways hung on the walls, and videos of women dancing, singing, and even miming the letter (one woman was a professional mime!) are all around you, until you can feel consumed and lost in the words "take care of yourself" as Called must have been. 

Seeing this exhibit lead me to start reading the book "Leviathan" by one of my favorite authors Paul Auster, who created a character named Maria inspired by Calle, who is a friend of Auster's. Some parts of Auster's character are true to Calle's real life habits, other parts are fictionalized but they are not far off. As a result Calle offered as one of her newest projects to live like Auster's character. For example, in the book, for a period of time Auster's "Maria" only ate foods of a certain color on different days of the week. Some days she only ate green foods, other days only white, yellow, pink, etc. Calle then did this in real life in order to bring the fiction to life, and make it non fiction. 

This leads me to wonder about her. As interesting as I first found her, I'm wondering if she has any views or artistic ideas that don't involve herself. Is she a genius? Or is she simply narcissistic? I' can't seem to figure her out, but I have to say she does keep me quite interested. 

Think about if someone came up to you with this letter from an ex boyfriend or girlfriend, asking you to analyze it. Part of me wants to tell her that she is not the first and only person to suffer a broken heart, and another part of me is delighted in the way that she thinks about and uses her creativity for the problems in her life. 

One part of me wants to judge her, for thinking people's belongings make them who they are, and another part of me commends her on her observations and dedication to a project. 

Although I have to say, "Take Care of Yourself, " her birthday present project, and the voyeurism that she turned on herself remind me very much of the greek myth of Narcissus, in which a boy is so vein that he is sentenced to fall in love with his reflection in a lake. The boy stares so closely at his reflection that he eventually drowns and turns into the flower, narcissus. 

So is Calle simply in love with her reflection, or is she a 

truly talented artist? The fact that she keeps me guessing and that she continues working on odd projects keeps me interested to see what she'll do next. 

Woman at Copley Square

My latest subject of interest is a woman I often see at Copley Square. I don't know if anyone else has noticed a pile of pebbles that has been growing larger and larger outside of Trinity Church. It is easy to walk past considering it's a busy area and it looks simply like a pile of rocks. But it's so much more!

There's a woman that shows up there daily, performing some kind of ritual. She stands about three feet away from the pile and holds a small stone in her hand. She then slides her feet right up to the pile, and slowly bends down to plays the stone in the mound. She then repeats it over and over again. I recently learned (and for the life of me I can't remember where I read it) that this is a memorial for those who die in Iraq daily. She's out there rain or shine, creating a visual connecting the public to a seemingly far off number. 

It becomes a whole new ball game when you have something to visually represent something that seems so far away, so "not in our backyard." Hearing 47 lives were lost this week in the war is different from seeing 47 objects to represent it.  

This displayreminds me of when the artist Karen Finley brought her exhibition "Nation Building" to Emerson. One part of the exhibit involved a computer printer that churned out a seemingly endless list of names of those who had died in the war. It was utterly haunting. It was so dehumanized in impersonal because of its mechanical nature, and to see the pile of papers stack up really made an impact. That is what this woman is doing here.

I can't wait to write a story about her. 

I wish I could have gotten a better image of the grooves her feet left in the grass there. I'll take a better one next time I'm out that way.

One of my professors was talking about Frank Lloyd Wright the other day, and just then I remembered rumblings I've heard about a Wright house in my home town of Mahopac, NY, a small town just north of Westchester. I did a little research and I found the most interesting thing!

This is probably old news, but it only recently sparked my interest. You can read about it in this NY mag article 

To sum it up, basically Wright was instructed by a family to build his dream house on an island on Lake Mahopac. It was supposed to be his greatest work, surpassing his then widely known masterpiece called Falling Water in Pennsylvania.  The family then ran out of funds so the house was never built, and then Wright died. A man named Joseph Massaro then got a hold of the plans and built it exactly as Wright would have. He paid much attention to detail and was very meticulous in its construction. He even invented tools to make sure he could get everything just right. How cool is that! 

When I told my professor about it she said that I should ask if I can go in it. She said something like "I ask people if I can go in their homes all of the time, how else are you supposed to see amazing architecture?" She's great, and I might see if I can do just that! 

Some Street Candy

I spotted this today outside of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston today. I thought it was pretty cool so I snapped a picture of it

It just seemed like a thoughtful little couplet to stick on a tree, and a pretty ballsy move to put it outside of the MFA so I thought it warranted recognition. My foot got all wet when I jumped in a snow mound to take the picture though! 

I also took this in San Diego, I think it was the only picture I took while there. 

 you cant really tell but I loved how it said "Left Brain" "Right Brain" at the bottom.

Poster Boy brings Bedrock to NY

 I'm a big fan of Poster Boy whoever they may be. I thought his mash-ups of advertisements in the subway were brilliant, I loved that the subway transformed into an art gallery. I thought they really made a statement and had an impact on people. 

But recently the group has attacked the pieces MOMA put up, and I feel like that weakens what they stand for. If they are against advertising and big business, why would they go after art? Aren't they on art's side? So I guess they really dont have a purpose then? They'll just attack anything that's put up in the subway even if it stands for what they are trying to portray with their own art? Poster Boy has his own gallery show -- so if that gallery put their art up in the subway, and I messed with it, then it would only make sense right?

I guess it makes sense because it IS an add afterall, I just thought they would appreciate MOMA but it makes me think maybe their whole stance on art is to do what they are doing even if it is affecting what we consider art today. 

Oh and it's hilarious by the way!

I found the article on Gothamist.com

I also found this on Gothamist, it's a bit strange, definitely creepy. However it does my favorite thing, uses unconventional space. I love crafty and creative uses of public space, and I love people that have an eye for it. I think that's why I try and see things from Poster Boy's perspective when I may not initially agree.