A Non-performance piece

If you walk past the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Downtown DC, you would find a woman silently standing on a platform in front of. She looks as though she was making some statement. Next to her platform is a row of glass jars, few are empty, few were filled with liquids, yes it was “urine”, she has been using as a bathroom since 6 o'clock yesterday morning. Her name, Melissa Ichiuji's , who ever passes through her pose, did not have a clue on what she was up to, might be a protest on something? Her dressing looks very much exposed. Who is she? She is just a performance artist in the final 36 hours of "Stripped," What her performance piece? (or "non-performance" piece [ as she calls it]). Washington post reports, “It is the last leg of a month-long journey toward little and less, and, in these final hours, public privation”.

Post further reports, the so called piece began in January when Ichiuji -- a married third-year Corcoran student in her late thirties from Front Royal, Va. -- started giving up things: coffee, television, soda and medication, followed in February by fast food and alcohol. As the seasons changed, she gave up cosmetics and chocolate, meat and magazines. Since the beginning of May, she's had: no newspapers, no music, no mirrors, no cell phone, no e-mail, no driving, no sex, no books, no family or friends or running water. No appliances, no speech, no clocks, no shoes, no food, no shelter. The idea is to let go of things that matter to the woman as a meditation on what matters most to the artist and, by extension, the audience.

Ichiuji's performance is scheduled to end this evening at 6, when presumably she will drive off with her husband. Perhaps later she'll talk about what she found when she went without, and went deep, and went in search of the there that's there when everything else is gone. Or, perhaps, as with any piece of art, it's for viewers to say what they took away. To Read more on this Click here

pic:The Washington Post