For the rest of the week, his life is in your hands.
Purchase student James O’Keefe has set up a temporary home in the installation space on the first floor of Fort Awesome. You may have seen the room, just next to the More Store, which has been used for a few installation pieces by VA students, but none have been quite as radical as this one.
O’Keefe has brought nothing but the clothes on his back and a large blue tarp with him into the room. He will, for one week, live solely on the kindness of strangers and the things they bring him.
Scattered over the dirty tarp are the meager bits and pieces of supplies visitors have brought him.
“I thought I was going to be in here not eating for a few days,” says O’Keefe, a junior sculpture major, gesturing to the hot tea, cereal, and water bottle he received when the Her Campus staff dropped in. He also has the remains of a Starbucks meal someone was kind enough to buy him.
In reality, he has been surprised with the kindness the Purchase community has offered him.
“This project is an exploration of generosity,” he says. He has previously done two other demonstrative installment pieces here at Purchase, and talks about famous installment art throughout history.
Joseph Beuys, in a 1974 performance piece called “I Like America and America Likes Me,” spent eight hours over three days in a room with a wild coyote. In 1996, Tracey Emin lived in a locked room in a gallery for 14 days, with nothing but a lot of empty canvases and art materials.
In light of these performances being a “reconciliation with nature” and a “reconciliation with painting,” O’Keefe considers this project his “reconciliation with people.”
O’Keefe describes himself as a cynic and says that this project has made him incapable of “being selfish at all.” As he risks his well being, O’Keefe says he will find out if he can trust people, and that this will be a serious learning experience for him.
“Nothing interesting happens unless someone goes and does something,” says O’Keefe.
He began his project this Tuesday, and will be out by Monday. He still has to be a student, go to classes and do his homework. But most of the time, he is in the freezing cold, unfinished room, which is where University Police Department officers found him after reading the sign he has posted on the glass of the exposed wall.
O’Keefe says he carefully worded his sign, having it say that he is “practically living” there. UPD wanted to know if he was sleeping there, which he said, of course, that he wasn’t because UPD would have a problem with that due to zoning rules.
The truth?
O’Keefe sleeps behind the hanging portion of his tarp that serves as a backdrop for his small living space.
“If nobody sees it, it doesn’t happen,” he says with a smirk.
The rain has brought his steady line of visitors to halt, he says. O’Keefe has also discovered that it is not hunger, but boredom, is his main enemy. He has his fingers crossed that when the rain lets up, the donations and company will return.