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 The Art of Nothing
 
 By Lonnae O'Neal Parker
 
  There is a woman silently sitting on a platform in front of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. She's wearing thin white drawstring pants and a white sports bra, and she's barefoot. She looks exposed. She looks vulnerable. She looks like she might be making a statement about one of those causes that typically cause you to look away.
 
 Next to her platform is a row of clear glass jars, some empty, some filled with urine, that she has been using as a bathroom since 6 o'clock yesterday morning. It all makes her a bit suspect to the lunchtime crowd in downtown Washington. But it turns out she's neither a crackpot nor an extremist in a town that can sometimes bend toward both.
 
 She's just a performance artist in the final 36 hours of "Stripped," her performance piece (or "non-performance" piece, as she calls it). It is the last leg of a month-long journey toward little and less, and, in these final hours, public privation.
 
 Curious passersby don't know what to make of Melissa Ichiuji's silence and serenity on a downtown corner. And, although she is discreet, pulling the ends of her white blanket fully around her form, they are quite thrown by the public urination.
 
 The whole spectacle is arresting. "I came to see the tourist sights but this is the most compelling thing I've seen," says Ray Wollaston, a Seattle graphic designer.
 
 The piece began in January when Ichiuji -- a married third-year Corcoran student in her late thirties from Front Royal, Va. -- started giving up things: coffee, television, soda and medication, followed in February by fast food and alcohol. As the seasons changed, she gave up cosmetics and chocolate, meat and magazines. Since the beginning of May, she's had: no newspapers, no music, no mirrors, no cell phone, no e-mail, no driving, no sex, no books, no family or friends or running water. No appliances, no speech, no clocks, no shoes, no food, no shelter. The idea is to let go of things that matter to the woman as a meditation on what matters most to the artist and, by extension, the audience.
 
 "How much would you have to lose to appreciate what you have?" ask the postcards in front of her display.
 
 "I decided that for 16 weeks I would try to do something that I thought I couldn't. I wanted to stop being so dependent on external things for comfort and security," reads a statement given out by Corcoran staff. "I wanted to break patterns of behavior, attachment and consumption that, over the years, had become automatic responses to anxiety and boredom."
 
 Anthony Cervino, the Corcoran's director of college exhibition, says Ichiuji approached him last year about doing the piece. She was questioning her nice house and nice swimming pool and relative comfort. "She was interested as an artist in where comfort becomes discomfort," Cervino says. "She wanted to find her point of personal sacrifice. . . . How far beyond our needs do we need to go before it's egregious or wasteful?"
 
 "As the project progressed, I decided that I would see how far I could simplify," Ichiuji wrote. "I wanted to face my biggest fears concerning isolation and poverty."
 
 Shaun English, a graphic designer for the nearby Red Cross, heard co-workers talking about the silent woman on the corner and he came to check it out. He's intrigued: "She's not exposing herself; it's more like sacrifice," he says.
 
 A jogger runs by. Then stops. She stares at Ichiuji. Her T-shirt says "Run Against Bush."
 
 "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.
 
 
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