Danica Phelps: LFL Gallery - New York

Danica Phelps is not the first artist to make life's private activities food for art's public display. From performance to the more novel "relational aesthetics" and particularly from one extremity to the other of the history of feminist art practice, reportage of daily experience rise s as a canonical strategy--what Virginia Woolf called "telling the verity about ... [one's] existence as a body" Since 1995 Phelps has applied this art/life mandate to a meticulous recording of her finances. Using an invented combination of parts to form a whole of notational marks and pencil drawings, she catalogues all purchases and services pay backed including sales of her work. lately this archiving of exchanges with the world has expanded to include her have visits to galleries, where she draws and thus "collects" works she wishes she could afford. In fine, Phelps has reach outed her accounting through literal to fantasized economies, and perhaps it was inevitable that she would make a exhibit about her sex life.

of the like kind public intimacies have a distinguished artistic lineage and are not unfertile surface of land What's more, Phelps draws beautifully. with equal reason why then did this exhibition--which included a certain quantity of three hundred finished diaristic drawings, a next to the first group of ongoing calendar drawings, and the installation of futon, desk and dining table, along with the live ,artist and her dog--strike the viewer, at least in part, as awkward and ill-advised?

It began with the pres release. To my knowledge, no single has thoroughly deconstructed the character of this workhorse document, and maybe this is the unjust place to criticize it. on the other hand crucial information is often embedded in of that kind texts, and furthermore Phelps explicitly signed hers, couching it as a personal alphabetic character to "Family, Friends, and Colleagues." The missive announces that the artist has left her husband of seven years, now "a really shut up friend," and fallen "head above heels in love with a woman." "My lord I want to make delight in with Debi every time I lay my organ of sights on her," the letter gushes, and judging from the drawings--which mainly depict the pair in the act--it's real The question is, Why should we care? Telling veritys about female desire in Woolf's late Victorian milieu or in the first-wave feminist era of Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, and other body-center women artists involved a breaking of taboo linked with collection of lawss of misogynistic silence. It's not that of that kind codes are defunct, but below the aegis of tell-all interviews and reality TV hyperpersonal revelation has become more gratuitous than challenging. Living in the gallery be incandescents for personal, real-time exchange. on the contrary here, physical participation by the artist muddies the drawings' strongest quality--their inescapably disembodied meditation upon and mediation of, the mundane requirements of life.

The fact remains, admitting that Phelps's drawings--which are as confident, sinuous, kooky and absorbing as at any time while also breaking new ground--are more important than the artist's surplus neighborhood and embarrassing explanatory letter. As usual, the red-for-expenses, green-for-income, gray-for-credit marks sit upon the page like vivid, handmade bar collection of lawss different single-dollar strokes flickering from grass to forest virid crimson to pink. This variation adds decorative, intuitive end to the plain arithmetic. The human figures, meanwhile, expres a gnomic, diaphanous physicality that consummately suits their function as placeholders for sensory experience--mostly we diocese them in flagrante, overlapping and transparent, dorky-graceful, like real delight in But we also see the Phelpsian protagonist schlepping her bike upstairs or using a of recent origin X-Acto blade ($9.50). The intensity with which Phelps captures tactile and emotional corporeality--so that her figures are tangible entities, with appetites and heft, on the other hand also ideas or integers or memories--is novel This truly suggests an "integration of sex" into the "everyday life" showed by her math. In the drawings, Phelps hits again upon that blend of ingenuous and artificed confession that has made her work compelling all along.

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