Danica Phelps, artist

Danica Phelps with
The Cost of Love (2012) (see below)

Another artist I learned about from Eula Biss's Having and Being Had: Danica Phelps. It is in the section "Accounting," in a chapter titled "Accounting," about worth, value, in art, in life. I quote from Biss:

Income's Outcome is a project that began when . . . Phelps made drawings of everything she did with the money in her bank account until that balance was spent down to zero. She drew her son putting a coin into a parking meter, her hands opening bills, boots on her feet, a scooter, her son pushing a grocery cart. When she sold each one of those drawings, she recorded the income and drew everything she did with that money. The drawings are full of bodies, rendered in long liquid lines, overlapping in embrace, and hands holding things, cookies and eggs and apples. . . .

Her art is an accounting. When a drawing sells, she records the income by painting a green stripe, a tally mark, for every dollar. Money spent is painted in red stripes. Credit is gray, as it occupies the gray area between earnings and expenses. . . .

Not all the drawings she made for Income's Outcome were good, in her opinion, but she had to keep them all because they were part of the financial record, which was also the body of work. And so she priced them according to how much she valued them as works of art. "When I started showing my work, I put the price right on the drawing," she said. "In my first exhibition, there were pieces ranging from $7 to $1,600, based on how much I liked the drawing." The determination of the price, as one gallery noted, was her "final aesthetic decision." . . .

The value of Phelps's art, as she sees it, is inscribed on the art itself, art that illustrates what is done with money paid for art. Her work is both a rebuke of the art market and an acquiescence to that market. Because, as one dealer puts it, "There would be no drawing without the collector act of buying."

That final statement itself is a question definitely open to interrogation, but we are talking about capitalism in this book—a topic that Biss neatly segues into in the next chapter, titled, yes, "Capitalism."

Here are some photos from a gallery installation of Income's Outcome: 

Phelps has done visually similar, but arguably intentionally dissimilar, projects, including The Gratitude Project (2016), the proceeds of which, $20,000, went as donations to 41 philanthropic organizations helping Syrian refugees.

Here's Biss again, describing another project, The Cost of Love (see above, portrait of artist):

In 2012, [Phelps] exhibited a series of twenty-five plywood panels covered in 350,000 red gouache stripes for the $350,000 she lost in the foreclosure of the home she had shared with another woman, her former lover. The Cost of Love . . .  included words drawn from a housing court ruling: "animosity," "eviction," "mortgage." When she bought the home, she hired assistants to help her paint the 627,000 gray stripes that represented the loan of $627,000. But when it foreclosed, she painted every red stripe herself, which took five months. "It's like letting go of the house, every single penny of it," she told a reporter. "And once I've painted it, it's gone."

Here is a detail from "paragraph 2" of The Cost of Love. I am so glad there are obsessive artists like Danica Phelps out there: they help to give visible meaning to life.