Sean Fletcher and Isabel Reichert

Sean Fletcher (born May 13, 1970) and Isabel Reichert (born November 30, 1967) are a collaborative artist couple working in conceptual art and performance art. They have also created physical works of art in video, photography, print, and sound, though always with a conceptual focus.

Life and work

Sean Fletcher studied at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Isabel Reichert studied in Saarbrueken, Germany at the Hochschule der Bildenden Kuenste Saar. Both relocated to San Francisco in 1995 and met while completing their graduate work at the San Francisco Art Institute. Fletcher and Reichert began collaborating shortly after they met.

The couple's relationship is an integral part of their art-making practice and they frequently include their debates, arguments and even marital disputes in the work. The artists claim that their IDeaS are mainly derived from their own arguments and marital disputes.

In one of their first collaborations, Therapy (1998), the artists hired a couples' counselor to carry out a therapy session in an effort to mend the relationship between the artists and their audience. Bait (2000) was a performance conducted on the online bartering site EBay. For this piece the artists auctioned the rights to name their first-born child in EBay’s ART category.

In Selling Yourself and Not Your Art (2003) the artists hired an instructor from the Dale Carnegie School of Sales and Management (Dale Carnegie Training) to co-present a seminar on how to be a "successful artist". The seminar posited notions of artistic integrity against the common practices of corporate America by presenting the audience—comprised mostly of artists—with the sort of "sales techniques" usually taught to members of the business world.

In their video Proceedings (2004), Fletcher and Reichert argue in real-time the evidence presented in the double [...] trial of Scott Peterson. In Paparazzi Photographs (2006) the artists hired a professional paparazzi photographer to follow them around for a day, while they staged several ordinary-looking situations such as lounging on the beach, ordering fast food at a drive-thru window and jogging in the park.

In the work, Death & Taxes, Inc. (2006), Fletcher and Reichert privatized their lives for a year and operated under the fiscal constraints of an official subchapter S corporation (called Death & Taxes, Inc.). A fifteen-member board of directors assumed the fiduciary role of deciding how the artists should juggle their expenditures and continue to justify their unprofitable artwork to the IRS.

In a recent work, a play titled Performance Art in Front of an Audience Ought to be Entertaining, Fletcher and Reichert try to recreate an argument between artists Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta. .

See Also

Michael Paul Oman-Reagan

__NOTOC__ Michael Paul Oman-Reagan (born 1976) is an American post-minimal conceptual artist and...

Disinformation (art and music project)

Disinformation vs Strange Attractor perform "National Grid", live at Cargo, Hoxton, London, 17 Feb...

Daniel Flahiff

Daniel Flahiff (b. 1966 in Los Angeles, California) is an American artist and filmmaker best known...

Walter Cianciusi

Walter Cianciusi is an Italian contemporary composer. He was born in Tagliacozzo (AQ), Italy in...

Fluxus poetry

Fluxus poetry is normally created during a performance, an essential difference with visual poetry....