Danica Phelps. Cost of Love, 2011
“Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces,” Hannah Arendt writes in The Human Condition.
Cost of Love is a series of 25 painted panels whose characteristic stripes resembling bar codes signify monetary expenses in the context of a failed relationship, which caused the artist to go into bankruptcy and forced her and her son to give up their house. After the end of the lawsuit with the artist´s longtime life partner, the verdict was recorded in a 25-paragraph document with 13,364 characters. The legal costs came to 350,000 dollars, or 26 dollars per character. The sober recording of the financial worth of the lawyer´s work conveys the absurdity of such a calculation, which is accompanied by a deep emotional crisis, helplessness, despair, and anger. The precariousness of work as an artist flows directly into the work of Danica Phelps. When the artist came to New York in the mid-1990s with 800 dollars, she was forced to come to grips with her financial situation. By drawing red and green stripes for expenses and income she portrays her own work as an artist conceptually as work that is directly dependent on sales and draws our attention to the sometimes irrational valuation of work and worth on the international art market as painterly abstraction.