Dematerial girl - Whatever Happened To - Biography

ArtForum, April, 2003

LAURIE PARSONS made a modest stir in the mid-'80s with her ephemeral interventions. Less than a decade later, she had all but vanished from sight. Another testament to the brutal vagaries of artistic success? Not exactly:

BOB NICKAS's year-by-year chronicle of the dematerialization of an art career puts Parsons's disappearing act at the center of her project.

1986-87

An artist sends her slides to a gallery and is asked to take part in a group show. (And how often does that happen? Does never sound about right?) She exhibits unaltered found objects in the show, most memorably two metal patio chairs stacked one on top of the other, paint-flecked and rusted, holding a package wrapped in plain brown paper. Seen up against all the shiny new objects on display in galleries at the time, the work takes me by surprise. What's in that box? And who left it there? The artist, I'm told, doesn't make anything at all. Her name is Laurie Parsons, and she collects things on walks through natural, industrial, and urban areas--mostly in northern New Jersey-- brings them back to her studio, and lives with them for a while. Individually photographed pieces of wood, all dated 1986, account for one full sheet of slides. Parsons later writes that she was "interested in the presence they had that I found as powerful as that of a piece of art."

1988

A one-person show at Lorence-Monk Gallery, of objects collected over the course of a year. They are placed directly on the floor around the perimeter of the room in the order in which Parsons encountered them. A pile of charcoal, a weathered coil of rope, a battered suitcase, a yellow nylon noose, an uprooted log, and more. She later describes one particularly cryptic object, from 1987, as "an inverted triangle formed by three lengths of a bed frame with the two longer sides crossed at the bottom, which is titled V, to recall the Thomas Pynchon novel." No one, if you hadn't already guessed, buys anything.

Intent on opening up a greater engagement with viewers, Parsons shifts from gathering individual objects to large sections of the landscape. Field of Rubble, 1988, is drawn from a fifteen-hundred-square-foot plateau beside the Hudson River where rubble mixed with such oddities as "packets of soy sauce, keys, butts of lottery tickets," the artist recalls. "I spent weeks collecting the detritus, to later entirely cover the floor of a gallery." My immediate take is Smithson, entropy, non-sites, and a freewheeling spirit of adventure more '6os than '80s--a search for realism through the thing itself. About a year later, a worker at a storage facility will go into her unit, open up some of the containers, and, finding what seems to be merely gravel and grimy trash (in actuality, Field of Rubble), throw all of it away.

1989

Rolf Ricke, whose Cologne gallery was one of the first European venues for artists such as Barry LeVa, Richard Serra, and Keith Sonnier, presents a Laurie Parsons exhibition. All the pieces from her New York debut are shown. This time, however, someone walks in and, with the idea of keeping the show together as a complete installation, buys everything. His purchase, followed by those of a few other intrepid collectors, will lead Parsons to request that dealers no longer offer anything of hers for sale.

1990

A card comes in the mail, blank except for the name Lorence-Monk at the bottom, along with the gallery's address and phone number. This is Parsons's third solo show, and yet her name does not appear on the announcement, nor do opening or closing dates. The gallery has been retouched with a fresh coat of paint and the lighting has been redone, but the rooms are completely empty. She would later remark, "I felt it essential that I consider the gallery itself, rather than continue to unquestioningly use it as a context. With its physical space and intricate social organization, it is as real, and as meaningful, as the artwork it houses and markets." I pass more than a few confused visitors and note that Parsons has enacted a reversal of sorts of Robert Barry's famous 1969 piece Closed Gallery. She eventually removes the show from her bio, later saying that it felt "righter as opposed to wronger" to leave it off.

By year's end, Parsons considers installing a videocamera in her bedroom/studio to transmit "live images continuously for several weeks into a gallery....In some ways this project will recall the American Family television broadcasts of the Loud family in the early 1970s, but I will be alone with the camera and, unrecorded, the documentation will only exist in real time. I will try to be unaffected by the camera as I pursue my habitual activities. If I am out, the image will be of the unoccupied room, and at night, when the public venue is closed, the images will continue to be transmitted, though no one will be present to see them."

1991

Udo Kittelmann offers Parsons a show at the Forum Kunsr Rottweil. She proposes to move herself and a few personal belongings into the exhibition space for the seven weeks scheduled and to work in a local psychiatric hospital. Unable to speak German, she immerses herself in the language. She will ultimately split her time between the museum, the hospital, and a school for developmentally disabled children. Little by little, people come by to see this person living in the museum, many of whom have never before been inside. Parsons leaves the door unlocked and talks with everyone from the woman who owns a nearby bakery to a drunken man banging on the door late at night. Parsons had worded the announcement for the show to include her name, that of the curator, and Rottweiler Burger--the people of Rottweil. At a big closing party it seems as if the entire town has turned out.