SMITHSONIAN'S HOMELESS EXHIBIT OFFERS A TASTE OF MEAN STREETS

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, February 15, 1992                   TAG: 9202150174
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: E-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: LIZ TUCCI ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium
SMITHSONIAN'S HOMELESS EXHIBIT OFFERS A TASTE OF MEAN STREETS
For those who have seen enough of the Monets and the First Ladies' gowns, the Smithsonian Institution extends an opportunity to walk the rough and frightening world of the homeless.
On Friday the Smithsonian's Experimental Gallery opened "Etiquette of the Undercaste," which depicts a descent into street life through the voices of the homeless and a maze that leads the visitor - called the "performer" - from birth to a drug-addicted mother to a drunken dream on a park bench.
Smithsonian Secretary Robert McC. Adams says not everyone will like the "rather harsh" profanity in the exhibit or appreciate its avant-garde approach. But Adams said the institution needs to step into untested waters.
"Museums were thought to be storehouses of idealized mansions," he said, but now are struggling to define a new relationship to the contemporary world.
The exhibit, privately funded with about $15,000, itself seems to have no guidelines, asking the visitor to imagine death and rebirth, clamber through darkness and punch a hanging manikin.
The journey begins when the visitor lies down on what appears to be a morgue drawer. The drawer slides into a darkness that erupts in ambulance sirens and operating room lights; through a blur of voices, the visitor learns this is a deathbed.
Then the trek to homelessness begins: from an unlucky spin of a roulette wheel that leads to a drug-addicted birth to locked doors marked "middle class" and "upper class," the visitor makes few choices.
But the visitor is asked to touch, feel, roll, slide, listen to coarse language and even lie on a bed and hear the sounds of intercourse.
Chris Hardman, who developed the project for Antenna Theater of Sausalito, Calif., said he doesn't want to offend the visitor, but he does want the visitor to respond to the terror and pain he tries to evoke.

"Etiquette of the Undercaste" will be on display through April 15 at the Experimental Gallery in the Smithsonian's Arts and Industries Building. Admission is free.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB