Artist gives up all (except attention)

WASHINGTON — There is a woman silently sitting on a platform in front of the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
She is wearing thin white drawstring pants and a white sports bra, and she is barefoot.
She looks exposed. She looks vulnerable. She looks as if she might be making a statement about one of those causes that typically cause you to look away.
Next to her platform is a row of clear glass jars, some empty, some filled with urine, that she has been using as a bathroom since 6 o'clock the previous morning. It all makes her a bit suspect to the lunchtime crowd in downtown Washington.
She is just a performance artist in the final 36 hours of “Stripped,” her performance piece (or “non-performance” piece, as she calls it). It is the last leg of a months-long journey toward little and less, and, in these final hours, public privation.
Curious passers-by don't know what to make of Melissa Ichiuji's silence on a downtown corner. And, although she is discreet, pulling the ends of her white blanket fully around her form, they are quite thrown by the public urination.
The whole spectacle is arresting.
“I came to see the tourist sights, but this is the most compelling thing I've seen,” said Ray Wollaston of Seattle.
The piece began in January when Ichiuji — a married third-year Corcoran student in her late 30s 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 has 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.
“How much would you have to lose to appreciate what you have?” ask the postcards in front of her display.
A statement given out by the Corcoran staff says: “I decided that for 16 weeks I would try to do something that I thought I couldn't. I wanted to stop being so dependent on external things for comfort and security. I wanted to break patterns of behavior, attachment and consumption that, over the years, had become automatic responses to anxiety and boredom.”
Anthony Cervino, the Corcoran's director of college exhibition, says that Ichiuji was questioning her nice house and swimming pool.
“She was interested as an artist in where comfort becomes discomfort,” Cervino says. “She wanted to find her point of personal sacrifice. … How far beyond our needs do we need to go before it's egregious or wasteful?”
Ichiuji wrote: “I decided that I would see how far I could simplify. I wanted to face my biggest fears concerning isolation and poverty.”
Lorrie Oneal