Danica Phelps

Danica Phelps is not the first artist to make life’s private activities fodder for art’s public display. From performance to the more recent “relational aesthetics” and particularly throughout the history of feminist art practice, reportage of daily experience emerges as a canonical strategy—what Virginia Woolf called “telling the truth 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 system of notational marks and pencil drawings, she catalogues all purchases and services rendered, including sales of her work. Recently, this archiving of exchanges with the world has expanded to include her own visits to galleries, where she draws and thus “collects” works she wishes she could afford. In fine, Phelps has extended her accounting through literal to fantasized economies, and perhaps it was inevitable that she would make a show about her sex life.

Such public intimacies have a distinguished artistic lineage and are not unfertile ground. What’s more, Phelps draws beautifully. So why then did this exhibition—which included some three hundred finished diaristic drawings, a second 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 press release. To my knowledge, no one has thoroughly deconstructed the role of this workhorse document, and maybe this is the wrong place to criticize it. But crucial information is often embedded in such texts, and furthermore Phelps explicitly signed hers, couching it as a personal letter to “Family, Friends, and Colleagues.” The missive announces that the artist has left her husband of seven years, now “a really close friend,” and fallen “head over heels in love with a woman.” “My God, I want to make love with Debi every time I lay my eyes on her,” the letter gushes, and judging from the drawings—which mostly depict the pair in the act—it’s true. The question is, Why should we care? Telling truths about female desire in Woolf’s late Victorian milieu or in the first-wave feminist era of Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, and other body-centered women artists involved a breaking of taboo linked with codes of misogynistic silence. It’s not that such codes are defunct, but under the aegis of tell-all interviews and reality TV, hyperpersonal revelation has become more gratuitous than challenging. Living in the gallery allows for personal, realtime exchange. But here, physical participation by the artist muddies the drawings’ strongest quality—their inescapably disembodied meditation on, and mediation of, the mundane requirements of life.

The fact remains, though, that Phelps’s drawings—which are as confident, sinuous, kooky, and absorbing as ever while also breaking new ground—are more important than the artist’s surplus presence and embarrassing explanatory letter. As usual, the red-for-expenses, green-for-income, gray-for-credit marks sit on the page like vivid, handmade bar codes, different single-dollar strokes flickering from grass to forest green, crimson to pink. This variation adds decorative, intuitive scope to the plain arithmetic. The human figures, meanwhile, express a gnomic, diaphanous physicality that perfectly suits their function as placeholders for sensory experience—mostly we see them in flagrante, overlapping and transparent, dorky-graceful, like real love. But we also see the Phelpsian protagonist schlepping her bike upstairs or using a new 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, but also ideas or integers or memories—is new. This truly suggests an “integration of sex” into the “everyday life” represented by her math. In the drawings, Phelps hits again on that blend of ingenuous and artificed confession that has made her work compelling all along.

—Frances Richard