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Danica Phelps originally used stripes to represent money she personally spent or earned. Today, you can order one of her paintings and pay by the stripe. At 15¢ per slice, this painting, 20,000 stripes, would cost $3,000.
The artist is an information filter, creating structure out of free-floating information (so we don’t have to). There are strategies we implement in daily life, those little things: morning rituals, TV viewing habits, and the like. We need that order when possibilities of choice have been multiplied immensely. Can the I Ching help choose cable channels? Artists who use themselves to filter and create structure from reams of banal information do us all a favor — they reveal how free-floating input can actually add up to something. Danica Phelps gained notice in 2001 for loopy graphite drawings of her daily activities and financial transactions. If she drew the ice cream cone she ate that day, she’d note who she ate it with and how much it cost. Below the drawings, she added red or green hatch marks, based on income or expenses, each mark representing a dollar. The sales of her work became part of this system, which evolved into ever more elaborate schemes and increasingly larger conglomerations of lines. Her manner of translating impersonal data into something dazzling reached an apex with the many marks resulting from two real estate transactions. Interestingly enough, her most recent work is about eradicating the self by creating a madeto-order Stripe Factory. “The stripes have become unmoored from my personal data,” she writes, “and instead, represent only their own production.” If Phelps brakes for dollars, Lee Walton has given up his body to sporting events. Acknowledging both meanings of the word ‘score,’ he devised a pre-determined set of actions triggered by particular occurrences on the baseball field. For Opening Day: Giants vs. Marlins (2001), Walton would run across the street and scale a mailbox or other street fixtures as dictated by live radio coverage of the game. His rather graceful drawings serve as records or scores of the game, with curved lines perhaps representing a base hit. Imposing limitations on himself served as another organizing element. He played a round of golf, one shot a day (it took him five months), and vowed, after September 15, 2006, to never enter New York’s Union Square again. That’s one way of getting somewhere new.
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