Alex Schweder & Ward Shelley: The leaky body in its portable house

In the first week of their exhibit at Lawrimore Project, Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley lived in their teeter-totter house, optimistically titled Stability.

Even when otherwise engaged, they were intimately aware of each other’s weight. With a tilt and sway, each affected the other. Should they have wanted more intimate contact, they would have had to meet in the middle, like single beds braced for fusion.

Maintaining their cheerfully weird fiction that they were comfortably kicking back at home, they lived like zoo animals. Naturally, visitors asked questions. Who wouldn’t want to hear what the monkey has to say? The most common query was obvious and frequent: Where do you go to the bathroom? (Check center spine for kitchen and toilet.)

Almost 40 years ago, when engagements of this sort broke new ground (among them, those of Joseph Beuys, Tehching Hsieh, David Hammons, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Kim Jones, Adrian Piper and Carolee Schneeman), artists tended to be more brutal with their persons. Who’d ask Kim Jones how he accomplished basic functions in his stick suit? The evidence of urine streaked the caked mud on his thighs.

There is less existential anguish in performance art today, and possibly more focused, conceptual intent. Schweder and Shelley explore the relationship between the housing and the housed.

I was out of town during the first week of Stability, but I don’t think I missed much. The piece itself is better off without the artists in it. It floats in space like a mirage. It’s the mytical room somewhere, a burrowing dream that surfaced in the air, the snail shell we long for but cannot possibly disappear into.

Asking Schweder where he pees makes sense, because his work is focused on body fluids. The long and honorable history of the urinal in art has never, to my knowledge, included actual urine, until now.

Below, Schweder. Plumbing Us, 2008. Virtreous china. 32 x 18 x 26 inches. Left
to right: front view of female urinal; side view showing shared wall;
detail of shared drain.
Edition of 3. The floor model is definitely in use.

I love Schweder’s salute to Lawrence Weiner,  Painting Instruction: Chair Exchange, 2009, Acrylic on canvas, Edition of 10. Each says, “Make your neighbor’s painting pinker.”

The dream of a room somewhere includes one enormous chair. Ms. Doolittle assumed the chair would hold its own under her weight, but Schewder’s version (a sofa, really) rides and fall with the movements of its occupants.

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Through May 2. My review of Schweder’s A Sac of Rooms Three Times A Day here. Jen Graves here. Graves on Schweder receiving The Stranger’s 2007 Genius Award for visual art here.