This Week's Reviews

In the WaPo today, Michael O'Sullivan reviews "Close Up in Black: African American Film Posters," on view at the International Gallery of the Smithsonian's S. Dillon Ripley Center.

Yesterday in the WaPo, Jessica Dawson mini-reviewed our group glass show in Bethesda, as well as Kehinde Wiley's sold out show at Conner Contemporary and also "Rebecca Kamen: Meta" at the Emerson Gallery, McLean Project for the Arts as well as Elisabeth Lescault at Creative Partners Gallery.

In the City Paper, Louis Jacobson reviews Willy Ronis at Kathleen Ewing Gallery. Also in the CP, Joe Dempsey reviews "Collector's Choice" at Zenith Gallery. And the other Mark Jenkins reviews Gina Denton's installation at Flashpoint.

At the Gazette, Adam Karlin reviews the current group show at Harmony Hall. His colleage, Karen Schafer reviews "Portraits of Life" at the Technical Center at Montgomery College in Rockville.

At Thinking About Art, Kathleen Shafer reviewed Viktor Koen at our Georgetown space. And it was also reviewed by Alexandra Silverthorne at Solarize This.

At Drawer, Warren Craghead reviewed Kirkland's solo debut show at the University of Phoenix Northern Virginia Campus.

In The Georgetowner, John Blee reviews Woong Kim at Addison/Ripley.

Best Bet

The Washington Blade has the Tim Tate-curated "Compelled by Content" as their Best Best of the week.

Compelled by Content is at our Bethesda gallery until June 5, 2005.

Hot Pick

The Washington Times has the Tim Tate curated "Compelled By Content" exhibition currently at our Bethesda gallery selected as their "Hot Pick" of the week.

No Gehry?

"Hazel said he and fellow trustee Paul Corddry approached President and Director David C. Levy earlier this week and suggested he offer his resignation"

The above is from a WaPo article by Bob Thompson and Jacqueline Trescott on the financial woes of the Corcoran and possible suspension of the Gehry effort, which according to the story, could come as early as Monday, when the board is scheduled to discuss a new strategic plan for the Corcoran.

Read the story here.

Campello on Ichiuji

Both Bailey and Jenkins have expressed their thoughts on Melissa Ichiuji's Stripped non-performance. And I am thankful to them for adding their thoughts and words to our cultural soup.

Personally, I was both excited and pleasantly surprised by Ichiuji's project before it started; it showed a maturity and intelligence years ahead of most "art students."

And as the project developed, I visited her Live Update Website, and then eventually drove by the Corcoran, found a Doris Day parking spot right next to the building, and gawked at Ichiuji and the loads of tourists shouting questions and her and at each other.

Regardless of how it ended, I for one, applaud her courage, her ideas, her involvement, and above all, her ability to (as an art student), leave a strong footprint upon our art scene.

Bravo Melissa!

Bailey on Ichiuji

The Postmodern Art Joke of Suffering

By James W. Bailey

The jokes in the world of high art often write themselves. Indeed, we were recently treated to the rare spectacle of an immensely funny postmodern art joke with artist Melissa Ichiuji, as reported in the Washington Post article, "Calling a Halt to Suffering for Her Art."

Ichiuji, who was suppposed to stand in the semi-buff in front of the Corcoran Gallery of Art for 36 straight hours, was forced to call a 14 hour early halt to her "non-performance" piece "Stripped" after nearly collapsing from heat exhaustion from excessive exposure to the balmy weather as enhanced and amplified by the unnatural elements of Washington, D.C. concrete and asphalt.

Mrs. Ichiuji supposedly shed herself of the excesses of her life (Starbucks, NetFlix, Whole Foods, Politics and Prose, those types of things I guess) in an attempt to explore something about who she really is outside of the unnatural products that she takes into her body and mind.

We are told in this supremely funny high profile Washington Post article that her only company prior caving in to upper middle class reality was a homeless man who lay down nearby to watch Mrs. Ichiuji struggle through her "non-performance" in all her sunburned and diarrhea-stricken agony – no doubt the homeless man could identify with that low profile real life struggle.

We’re also told Mrs. Ichiuji tried to contact her husband for emergency rescue from her plight. Apparently, her husband never bothered to return the desperate messages that were left on his cell phone. It’s also reported that one of the other luxuries in life that Mrs. Ichiuji swore off for her art was sex – I guess that might help explain the husband’s failure to respond to those text messages.

Although her husband is a banker, poor Mrs. Ichiuji, apparently penniless (I guess her sports bar didn’t have a change holder), was forced to thumb a ride in a cab back to the modern comforts and conveniences of her home. That must have been an interesting cab ride. One can easily picture Mrs. Ichiuji, half-starved, jumping out of the cab at every delicious chain restaurant in the District begging the management to freely inhale at will from the salad bar.

Now, nobody loathes postmodern art theory and theorists more than I do, but I just can’t help but deconstruct Mrs. Ichiuji "Stripped" to discover a greater truth and meaning about her project. There's a remarkable parallel between her self-imposed bodily denials leading to her near collapse and the refusal of a banker to assist her with the similar bodily denials (usually state enforced against the will of the child and their parents) that are found among hundreds of millions of impoverished children throughout the world and the refusal of the World Bank to assist them.

But unlike Mrs. Ichiuji, those kids don’t have a cell phone to call a high ranking bank official, let alone the ability to hitch a ride in an air-conditioned cab to a safe, cool and well-stocked abode.

James W. Bailey
Experimental Photographer
Force Majeure Studios

Jenkins on Ichiuji

By Mark Jenkins

I'm wondering if anyone else has found Melissa Ichiuji's "36 hours" a little unsettling in its aftermath.

Weening herself from cellphones, and TV, etc... I can see as a return to a more animal nature. I'm all for that. As for fasting, and cutting off social contact with friends, peeing in public, that's where it gets a little gray.

While the peeing part might be animal (I suppose), cutting off social contact while sitting on a corner on a platform and not talking to anyone seems to make yourself like an animal at the zoo with people gawking at you.

I too, came by, maybe to gawk, or to watch other people gawking; and anything done outside in the name of art outside (physically at least) of the institutions always gets my curiousity up. But upon arriving I discovered that she had left.

Just a note that said that she was ill. She'd left and taken her pee jars with her!

And in the aftermath, in my own comic way that amuses me if no one else, I sat on her empty perch and ate a hot dog, and when a few people came up and asked where she was I responded, "She's sick."



They looked a little concerned, disheartened, and sweaty (like me) after having made the walk over from their workplaces.

Ultimately, I think she's a caricature of our own inner selves who, seeing the ever increasing trash of technology, turns its absence into a treasure. But the catch is that even while seeking it you can't seek it purely.

One of Dostoevsky's characters said something profound once that I remembered. Something to the extent that modern man has become diffuse in his thoughts; he can no longer think a sole thought but always has several competing interests to contend with.

Buddhist monks would agree. And I'm sure probably wouldn't have given her a high chance at reaching any sort of success in this small amount of time. And of course there was the congential defect in her mission, that even while she fasted, and weened, her website blinked, (and blinks now) about Washington Post coverage and in the back of her mind, she was thinking...