Dematerial girl - Whatever Happened To - Biography

Invited to create a work for a Paris gallery during the winter, she proposes that the glass from the skylights be removed for the duration of the show--"it would just open things up to the sky." Faced with the possibility of rain and snow, the gallery declines.

1992

Parsons participates in "The Big Nothing" at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Most of the artists play hide-and-seek with their work, installing pieces on the ceiling or in other unlikely locations. Parsons contributes a stack of dollar bills about four inches high (the museum provides half of the three hundred dollars) and tells the guards not to interfere when people avail themselves of the piece. It quickly disappears.

1994

Asked to enter a competition for a sculpture park in Nordhorn, Germany, Parsons visits the site and comes away with a number of ideas, some of which are completely fantastical, with no hope of being realized. "I had the thought that the moon should be brought to settle over Nordhorn.... I do have issues with the format of proposals and art. What do you want? Make it. Pay for it. Anyway, this thought was not as tongue in cheek as it may sound. I meant it with warm feelings. Bring the moon to hang over Nordhorn each night that you may, that it is visible. I meant a sincere level of poetry here." After seeing Joris Ivens's film Rain (1929), and one by Kenneth Anger with fountains (Eaux d'artiflce [1953]), she suggests "a fountain that goes straight up." My favorite idea, part fairy tale, part Thoreau, had implications for all her work to date. She proposed that visitors to the park be told she had camped there for an entire year. "What would it matter if I didn't? Indeed, isn't that somewhat more interesting? Pe ople would bring their imagination to the project, regardless of whether or not I actually had been there. And it would be a departure for me from my rigid 'real' investigations of the past. Is not 'deception,' subterfuge, also real?"

From this point on, Parsons no longer participates in exhibitions, although a project developed with the New Museum is ongoing since '92. That institution, like most, had an unspoken policy that guards shouldn't volunteer opinions about the works being shown; if they spoke with visitors at all, it was to ensure that the art was neither touched nor photographed. When curator Laura Trippi asks Parsons to propose a project for the educational component of the New Museum's exhibition "The Spatial Drive" (1992-93), to think about how the show could be presented to the public, she recalls a recent experience there: "I had a four-by-eight sheet of plywood in the New Museum benefit; a friend visited and told me about listening to a guard go on and on to a visitor about the plywood. How ridiculous he had thought it was, and then how it grew on him. It was very clear to me what to suggest; this guard, Kimball Augustus, had already taken it upon himself to express stuff about the work. We spent a good year having the guards and admissions-desk staffers do studio visits where possible, or have museum meetings with participating artists, or at the very least full presentations of their work." The security and admissions staff, having been given an opportunity to meet artists before shows open, visit studios, and learn about works the y would otherwise simply be guarding or merely selling tickets to see, are able to directly engage the public during each exhibition.