The Art of Nothing

"Can I come do this with you?" she asks Ichiuji.

No response.

"Maybe this will bring peace," she says. "I just lost my nephew in Iraq," she adds to no one in particular, one of the nearly dozen people watching Ichiuji. Then she turns and runs off because, after all, art isn't supposed to talk back.

A trio of staffers at the nearby Daughters of the American Revolution Museum, Genevieve Ellerbee, Melanie Sklarz and Travis Childers, read about Ichiuji on an art blog and now are considering her performance. They talk about the hours she's been there and the hours she has to go. About the power of sitting without interruption.

Childers is reminded of the strictures of Eastern religions and the spirituality in giving up earthly things. "To fail here" -- to leave, to go home, to grab a burger -- "is worse than making a bad painting," Childers says. "It's like you weren't able to overcome your physical self. It's more personal."

And "more public," agrees Ellerbee.

A moment later, Ichiuji suddenly gets down from the platform and walks into the museum. Cervino hurries after her, and the crowd starts speculating about art without an artist, about the vacuum of meaning and the loss of center.

Now what ?

Sklarz finds her absence intriguing. "How long before she comes back? Will she come back? It's a mystery," she says. The trio wonder if the performance is over. They wonder if she had to use the bathroom again or if she's gone to get something to eat.

Childers and Ellerbee are disappointed. For a performance to engage, Childers says, it needs to be "beyond what someone would normally do. To behave the way we normally do and leave at lunchtime makes it a non-event. Everyone breaks for lunch."

"She's leaving an empty stage behind," says Ellerbee. "It's like if I went to see a painting and it wasn't hung."

Suddenly, Ichiuji returns. Resumes her sitting and sipping and silence.

Cervino has no explanation. He says only: "She was laying in the bathroom with her face pressed against the floor." Hard to know if that was within the parameter of her art or a departure brought on by the pressures of public isolation.

Ichiuji's performance is scheduled to end this evening at 6, when presumably she will drive off with her husband. Perhaps later she'll talk about what she found when she went without, and went deep, and went in search of the there that's there when everything else is gone. Or, perhaps, as with any piece of art, it's for viewers to say what they took away.

"I think many times a day about the suffering and grief being experienced by millions of people while I enjoy myself eating expensive food, buying lavish clothes," Ichiuji wrote in a journal in front of the platform.

And as she sits in silence, her audience, the lunchtime crowd in downtown Washington, stop briefly to contemplate the curiosity and strange poignancy of a woman who has nothing. A thing, after all, not so very rare.