Art

Ten dollars an hour is nothing to laugh at these days. It's what Megan Robb was making before she was laid off from her job at an architectural firm. Unemployed, she applied for a new gig that requires considerably less effort on the job -- sleeping in an upcoming participatory art installation at the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

"My brother told me about it as a joke because he thought it was weird," said Robb, 24. "But I'm not doing anything else. I enjoy sleeping, art and money."

Each day through June 28, a woman will take a sleeping pill -- highly encouraged, but for legal reasons not technically required--and lie down in a bed in the exhibition space. She will be paid $10 an hour to stay asleep from noon to 6 p.m. as noisy visitors, unrestrained by any sort of barrier or rope, look on and try not to touch her.

"I'm almost surprised when people do not touch a human being in a gallery," said Massimiliano Gioni, director of special exhibitions. "There's a tension created."

Chinese artist Chu Yun, 33, creates what he calls a human sculpture by inducing sleep. He staged the work in London in 2006 at the Frieze Art Fair, an exhibition that also featured a woman with Down syndrome sitting in a chair. Reviews of the installation were mixed, but an Italian gallery owner who saw Yun's piece bought the rights to reproduce it for £12,000, sleepers not included.

The New Museum posted an ad online in January to find women aged 18 to 40 willing to sleep in public and was inundated with eager replies. The respondents included a girl grumbling about how a recent breakup with her boyfriend left her able to do nothing but sleep anyway (not invited to audition), a narcoleptic (invited, and will take her own medication) and Miss Coney Island (invited, by virtue of her gorgeous head shot).

More than 170 women responded to the ad with their pictures, said Jarrett Gregory, a curatorial assistant. About 50 were asked to audition at the museum. "Some people seemed like they had better motivations," Gregory said. "Some were more exhibitionist. It's just sleeping. It's not a performance. It's not people pretending to sleep."

Yun is in Beijing and will not be here to direct his installation at the New Museum. He is declining all interviews about this project and has weighed in on participant selection only via email. The main criteria for a callback: diversity and health insurance, to cover the suggested sleep medication, Gregory said. At a recent audition, it also appeared that most of the women were especially young, well-heeled and pretty.

Nadia Menco, a Columbian student with perfect brown ringlets and a smile straight out of a toothpaste commercial, has theatrical ambitions. "I'm an actress, but sleeping in a bed for six hours is very strange," Menco, 27, said. "It's difficult. I don't know if I'll have to change my position or take a break."

Gregory assured Menco that since she will be asleep, her acting skills and ability to hold a position for hours at a time are superfluous.

"I'm curious about what it does to your sense of privacy," said Carlijn Urlings, a freelance journalist from Rotterdam, Holland, who hopes to turn her clock upside-down and sleep at the museum every day for a week straight.

"You don't let just anyone watch you sleep," Urlings, 33, said. "And what if you're totally boring? That would be worse than anything."

Silke Haas, 36, a blue-eyed blonde from Berlin, is a correspondent for a German affiliate of CBS and hopes to parlay her experience into a satirical broadcast. "It'll be about what weird stuff you can do in the States," she said. "Like, 'look at that, they even pay for sleeping!' "

The debate over sleep as art is no newer than the concept. In 1963, Andy Warhol filmed his lover, John Giorno, sleeping nude for five hours, and the resulting work, "Sleep," has been called everything from a masterpiece to a stunt. John Lennon and Yoko Ono staged two week-long "Bed-Ins" for peace during the Vietnam War, spawning countless reinterpretations and satires in the decades since.

As a display of total passivity, Yun's installation is an interesting reversal of that image of being in bed to express political resistance, said Gioni.

"It's one step removed from the 1960s and 70s performance art when the artist was always the hero," he said. "Performance today is much more delegated. It's about control, complicity, and in some cases, exploitation."

British artist Cornelia Parker showed the actress Tilda Swinton sleeping in a vitrine in 1995, and last fall the Guggenheim allowed guests to sleep overnight in an installation called "Revolving Hotel Room."

The women who will sleep at the New Museum all say they are excited about the experience -- so long as they don't regain consciousness during any part of it. Urlings will stay up all night to induce sufficient exhaustion. Haas plans to bring earplugs and test-drive some sleep aids on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

The installation is part of an exhibition called "The Generational: Younger Than Jesus," featuring fifty international artists born after 1976 -- all part of a generation the media often portrays as hyperactive and hyperinformed, Gioni said.

Yun's sleeping women, in all their pharmaceutically-induced passivity, may subvert that image for a few hours at a time, even if the first thing they do upon waking is check their iPhones.