Artists display confessions of passers-by...

Curiosity, inquisitiveness, challenges...are the stuff of the creators.

The following is an article reproduced from The New York Times today:


By KATHRYN SHATTUCK
Published: May 6, 2006
The woman in the storefront crooked her finger and silently beckoned.

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Keith Bedford for The New York Times
Confessions and portraits of passers-by at the "Inside/Out" installation.
"What, me?" a man on the other side of the glass asked nervously, glancing over his shoulder. "I have nothing to tell."

The woman, dressed in white like a 19th-century washerwoman, put her fingers to her lips and, with a wooden clothespin, underlined the words stenciled on the glass: "Air Your Dirty Laundry. 100% Confidential. Anonymous. Free!"

With that, the man picked up a clipboard with a blank sheet of paper and an envelope stamped "secret," and began to write. After a few seconds, he sealed his words — about a fleeting folly, perhaps? A mean-spirited act that had tormented him for decades? — and placed it in a bucket on the sidewalk. Only when he was well out of sight did the woman open the envelope (delivered to her by an unseen assistant), read the message and then tape it to a window full of secrets for the world to see.

Such exhibitionism is all part of "Inside/Out," a performance piece that opened on Thursday in a storefront at 112 West 44th Street in Manhattan. The two performing artists, Laura Barnett and Sandra Spannan, invite anyone and everyone to plumb their darkest recesses, and share.

As Ms. Barnett posted the anonymous missives, Ms. Spannan — her hair in a turban, a "third eye" pasted on her forehead and a pair of wings on her back — painted portraits from a storefront perch.

"Inside/Out" will be on view through Thursday in the window, one of several performance spaces operated by the nonprofit arts group Chashama.

It's hard to resist the temptation to compare sins.

On the first evening, there was this:

"I am dating a married man & getting financial compensation in exchange for the guilt. I'm 25 & he's a millionaire. It pays to be young."

And this:

"I make fun of this 1 friend behind her back all the time. She just enrages me! But I get freaked out when I think of what she might say about me ... I worry this means we're not really friends? Human relationships are infinitely confusing!"

The written secrets piled up, along with their odd punctuation and misspellings:

"My girlfriend & I both think Osama Bin Laden has a sweet-looking face."

"I like to be tied at my bed."

"The hermit crab was still alive when I threw it down the trash shoot."

"I haven't slept with my husband in a year & I am about to start an affair with ..."

"I want to see S.U.V.'s explode. Those people are so selfish."

"I haven't yet visited my dead parent's grave."

"New York make me feel lonely."

Ms. Spannan and Ms. Barnett began their individual halves of the project five years ago but have worked together since last June, first in a trial run at Chashama's former West 42nd Street gallery and then in Berlin, where Ms. Spannan grew up.

"The Germans were so dark," said Ms. Barnett, who was born in Manhattan. "It was like they had been waiting for us to come."

Though they arrived at their collaboration from separate points, they shared a goal.

"From Germany, I came to New York because of the diversity, and I used to sit on the subway and wonder who these people were," said Ms. Spannan, 35, who supports herself as a decorative painter for clients like Chanel.

"For me, that really was an important point," said Ms. Barnett, 41, who works as a casting director and producer, and teaches theater at St. Ann's School in Brooklyn. "I used to ride the subway and think: What if everyone had a cartoon bubble coming out of their head? What would their thoughts be?"

In search of answers, Ms. Spannan took her easel to the city's streets and painted portraits of whoever caught her attention. After Sept. 11, she set up shop across from ground zero and captured indelible grief.

"All these posters everywhere said 'Missing' and 'Wanted,' " she recalled. "My angle was to make people obsessed with images of people who are alive and that are sitting next to you, and you're ignoring."

Ms. Barnett decided to collect secrets by offering a makeshift confessional to anyone who might happen by.

"My goal was to have people reveal their innermost thoughts and in a way that is entirely confidential," she said. "What I found through this project is that no matter how much corporate culture tries to homogenize its citizens, people to the core try to reveal themselves on a basic level."

Ms. Barnett, too, gathered secrets at the World Trade Center, and in the rapidly changing Dumbo section of Brooklyn.

"There was a lot of questioning of identity, or impostor terror, a lot of anxiety about real estate, and super-duper amounts of bisexuality," she said. "There were major amounts of guilt in Dumbo, I'd say."

On West 42nd Street, "you got the feeling there were a lot of stories that went untold," Ms. Barnett said.

Clearly, that has changed. In the last five years each woman has collected thousands upon thousands of portraits and secrets, archiving every last one.

Some are obvious, pertaining to sexual infidelities, the workplace, AIDS, death. Others, not so: a fantasy about glass figurines and Arabian horse etchings. And body parts, especially feet.

"Some children's secrets really go under the skin," Ms. Spannan said, adding that some people write of having been sexually abused in their youth. "It's a way of feeling, 'I'm not alone,' " she said.

Then there was the person who said he had killed a man in 1957.

What did they do?

"I'm glad you asked that," Ms. Barnett said. "I take it in, and for me as an artist, after listening to all this, it can be extremely draining. I'm like a blank slate, with open pores. But do I go to the police? No."

Not that the women aren't often overwhelmed.

"Every single day," Ms. Barnett said firmly. "Because we go there, and the window is empty, and we're wearing all white. And at the end, the window is full and we're covered with paint. It's exhausting."

"Some of those things are really, really sad," she said, finally. "And afterwards, I need to take a bath."

posted by victor @ Saturday, May 06, 2006