Take a Penny, Leave a Penny
“This isn’t done out of a sense of charity,” Fries insists. “It’s part of my art practice…. How could someone say this isn’t performance art when as soon as a bag comes in I put it away?”
Just as it must have been in the late 1960s when nomadic swap-shops peppered the nooks and crannies of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, finding The Free Store is easy. Across the freeway from the University of Illinois at Chicago’s main campus, Gallery 400, with its glowing grid of windows, is the tallest and most conspicuous structure on the block where South Peoria dead-ends.
The oversize television in the gallery’s lobby is spectacularly large and a scant couple of feet from the front doors. It brightly displays a slick slideshow promoting the installation, a Digger-style give-away shop. At Gallery 400, there are no guards or clerks to take payment, issue a gallery pass, or even check for a UIC student I.D. Access to The Free Store is, in other words, free.
The origins, whether art-student or street-lunatic, of the plastic baby doll face with a swastika scrawled across its forehead are anyone’s guess.
Once inside, however, The Free Store is decidedly difficult. The installation is a study in things both perplexing and complicated, not least of which are its self-proclaimed wranglers Melinda Fries, Salem Collo-Julin, and married couple Zena Sakowski and Rob Kelly, curiously dubbed “Biggest Fags Ever.” Sakowski and Fries are genial and forthcoming, with a casual air that is hardly reflected in the installation itself, which is at first too overwhelmingly busy to look at.
No solace is found by directing one’s attention to each item in the exhibit at a time, either. The varied and often incomprehensible nature of The Free Store‘s goods is certainly migraine-inducing. Some of the gallimaufry predictably reflects a large collegiate influence: bric-a-brac like acne wash, glow sticks, a deck of playing cards, and suspect-looking, small aluminum tins. On closer inspection, however, the breadth of objects for the taking at this freeshop cannot be explained by student contributions alone: among the miscellany are also pill-organizers, an industrial-size container of turkey gravy powder, hospital-issue slippers, an entire box of business cards, and a lovingly inscribed 2004 Christmas card complete with uncensored Chicago-area phone numbers. The origins, whether art-student or street-lunatic, of the plastic baby doll face with a swastika scrawled across its forehead are anyone’s guess.
Of course, these items, and this particular “free store,” can only exist on this day, during these few hours. The exhibit necessarily changes over the course of each day, and most of its wares are like sand on a beach, moved this way and that by its frenzied tide of visitors, many items disappearing for good. “Ninety-five percent of this stuff was not here when we opened,” Fries says.
While she’s been putting on free stores for years, at six weeks, this one is Fries’ longest-running and most exhausting. At least two of the four artists are always on-hand to answer the phones, see to the installation’s visitors, and not least of all accept and organize new contributions. People often drop bags of clothes and other items outside the The Free Store‘s doors overnight, resulting in a small mountain to be reviewed and sorted each morning. While the experience is demanding (“It’s great exercise, I’m telling you, man,” Sakowski says), both artists insist their physical presence is “absolutely integral” to the success of the installation. The Free Store is described as performance art; and while the mundane details of running the shop could easily be handed off to a few of the group’s enthusiastic fan-volunteers, they must be performed by the artists themselves.
