Woman Sits on a Toilet Naked For Two Days Straight in the Name of Art

Bushwick-based Lisa Levy, 59, put on a performance art exhibit at Christopher Stout Gallery on Saturday and Sunday to protest the “pretense and BS in the art world,” according to the Bushwick Daily.

“I was really pissed and aggravated about the pretense, competition and the amount of bullshit in the art world,” she told the Daily.

For five hours straight on each day, the self-proclaimed psychotherapist, artist, and comedian sat silently without clothes on a porcelain toilet in the gallery’s showroom. Spectators were encouraged to interact with her — except for touching — while sitting on another toilet across from her.

“I’m also tired of the bullshit trendy art dialogue about how the art world is driven by rich people who want shiny work and don’t care about meaning as well,” Levy wrote on her Facebook page before the exhibition. “But mostly, I think it will be weirdly fun to be naked in public.”

Levy’s exhibit, titled “The Artist is Humbly Present,” was a reference to Marina Abramović’s “The Artist Is Present,” her 2010 performance at the Museum of Modern Art wherein she sat silent and motionless for 736 hours, 30 minutes in the museum’s atrium while visitors sat one by one across from her.

“I was a huge fan of [Abramović’s] up until the MoMA show,” Levy told Artnet. “It’s her values that bother me. She’s so vain and so concerned with such superficial things.”

“[In this performance] I’m trying to present myself in the humblest way possible,” Levy told the Daily. “I think ego interferes with art making, it makes the artist self-conscious. The most direct way to make the artwork is the least egoic way possible.”