The artist of street litter.

"This is America showing itself because it was never in you in the first place. So why am I upset that you're upending something..."

"... that was never in you in the first place? I'm not saying that we shouldn't be upset. We definitely should be upset. But why are we-- we can't be upset at people that it was never in them in the first place to even care about somebody else."

Said a black woman, heard in episode 857 of "This American Life," "Museum of Now."

She is commenting on the removal of the 2-block-long, 50-foot-tall words, "Black Lives Matter," that had been set in concrete in a street near the White House.

Prompted by the question, "Is this more honest, actually, that they actually are ripping this up?," we hear her struggling in real time to understand why the de-installation of the motto wasn't upsetting her or wasn't upsetting her that much.

One might say the original installation was propaganda and pandering. Jackhammering it out of there said something accidental and authentic.

"'Looking at a girl totally naked is not exciting,' said Éric Stefanut, the communications director for the French Naturist Federation."

"Naturists, he explained, see new people naked all the time. 'So,' he added, 'it’s boring.'... When everyone in a room is naked, no one person stands out — although there were many body types among the visitors on Friday. There were tattoos and pierced nipples, ribs and fleshy tummies, bald spots and wispy beards. Scrotums and breasts swung wide. Some had cesarean scars.... Lucca Linke, 31, said she had thought about trimming her body hair. But why bother? Her friend, Kaja Baumgart, 22, agreed. She had worried that other guests would notice her tampon string. But soon, she said, she relaxed. 'Everybody is acting like normal,' she said. 'I can also be acting like normal.'"

From "At This French Exhibition, Check Your Clothes at the Door/A museum in Marseille, France, has a show dedicated to the history of social nudity. On a few special nights, visitors strolled around naked, too" (NYT).

It's art — purportedly — to take what is very interesting and endeavor to make it boring.

People don't want to shout out their own name, but Kamala Harris seems to have thought it would be a cool way to demonstrate that "It's about all of us."

They were loudly chanting her name, and she instructed them to shout out their own name, the idea being, I think, to unleash a hilarious, heartwarming cacophony:

This might be the most awkward moment ever, the second-hand embarassment is real pic.twitter.com/ObaMKPR9c3

— TaraBull (@TaraBull808) October 29, 2024

But she got silence. She still pretended she'd received the desired response, and declared the conclusion to be derived from the demonstration that hadn't happened: "It's about all of us."

Apparently, individualism is not in vogue... or not something her people feel good about expressing loud and proud.

If I followed the method of the elite media and the Democratic Party, I would call it fascistic. The crowd showed that it only wanted to be unified behind the identity of the adored leader.

ADDED: I feel the strong need to republish a post I wrote in September 2018:

"Everybody’s constantly looking for the next job, and it’s incredibly cynical and transactional and, now, dysfunctional."

"I’ve been disappointed on the reality of that part of it. And it’s just also astonishing. I can’t understand why there’s people that are willing to spend tens of millions of their own money to try to hold that office. ’Cause then you can get there and be like, Hmm, look at the glamour: I’m sitting in a 500-square-feet apartment, and I’m on Grubhub and watching bad TV on Netflix or whatever. I like to ask all of my colleagues, Hey, is there some kind of secret society or like a social life or something glamorous? Even [Mitt] Romney, I mean, he’s incredibly wealthy, and he has a nice house, but I read that he sits on his nice chair and watches Netflix and eats salmon from his friend, and actually puts ketchup on it. So I haven’t met that one person that’s having that quintessential glamorous life. It’s been elusive for me, but it’s not one that would even appeal to me. I think people all think life is like 'The West Wing' or something, where it’s snappy dialogue. But a lot of it comes down to just really bad performance art."

Said John Fetterman, asked to explain why he doesn't consider himself a politician, in "The Interview/John Fetterman Fears Trump Is Stronger Than Ever" (NYT).

Here, you can watch the interview:

ADDED: The headline may make you think there's something valuable about Trump. I'll cherry-pick it for you:

Is she even asking for a box?

Trump has this at Truth Social:

No boxes or artificial lifts will be allowed to stand on during my upcoming debate with Comrade Kamala Harris. We had this out previously with former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg when he was in a debate, and he was not allowed a “lift.” It would be a form of cheating, and the Democrats cheat enough. “You are who you are,” it was determined!

Easy for him, the taller one, to say. How quickly you perceive the principle in formal equality when you are the one who comes out ahead and when you are a member of the group that, systematically, gets the real-world benefit.

But though I am ready to make arguments in favor of lining the heads up for television viewing, I'm not seeing that her people are asking for that. 

Why not try it?

Would you debate him on a box?
Would you debate with him on Fox?
Not on a box. And not on Fox.
Not in a house. Not with a mouse.
Not here or there.
Not anywhere.

And check out this art project:

"'Sculpture Tactile,' a white box, four and a half by one and a half feet, with a live model inside, and a single hole through which to reach her."

"When I visited, I reached in, past a black curtain, and was struck first by warmth, the stillness of the air suspended like an inhale. I submerged my arm past my elbow until all of a sudden I reached flesh: curves and warm skin. I felt the distinct edge of a forearm giving way to a wrist. How familiar, how sensual, how normal. After a beat I stopped trying to guess how she was sitting and gave into sensation, feeling this delicate creature I was honored to share a species with.... [Yve] Klein conceived the idea for 'Sculpture Tactile' in 1957. But the gallery’s co-owner, Dominique Lévy, who also curated the installation, said Klein feared the world was not ready for this show. He died of a heart attack at age 34.... When Lévy Gorvy Dayan refabricated the box as a complete work of art in 2014... 'You had all these very intellectual conversations about the role of performance,' Lévy said. 'Now, the reactions are much more visceral and emotional.'... Had we become more prudish? Most of the people I observed shuddered upon making contact with the model, instantly retracting their arms. Some shrieked, most winced...."

Writes Rachel Sherman, in "I Was a Nude Model for a Half Hour. Revelatory? Actually, Yes. Two shows — an art fair in Brooklyn and an Yves Klein exhibition uptown — ask if nude art can still inspire or shock. I joined in to find out" (NYT). 

ADDED: The article refers to "'Anthropometries of the Blue Epoch,' a short archival video."

"[T]he voyeuristic new 'Portal' street exhibit in the Flatiron District connecting New York City and Dublin with a 24/7 live video feed has already caused chaos..."

"... with mischief-makers on Ireland’s side flashing everything from their bare bums to swastikas and a photo of the Twin Towers in flames on 9/11.... [The] earnest utopian vision proved no match for the pub-lined Dublin thoroughfare, whose Guinness-glugging patrons were quickly drawn to the futuristic-looking exhibit like moths to a flame in videos circulating online. Within hours of the Dublin portal going live, a 'very drunk' woman in her 40s was led away by cops and arrested after 'grinding' her backside against the screen... Adam Nunan, a cruise ship audio engineer originally from Dublin and in New York while the ship is docked here, said, 'That doesn’t represent Ireland very well when you do that. That was everyone’s thoughts back home, there was a lot of people who didn’t want the portal to be built for that reason, that Americans might look at Irish people in the portal doing weird stuff....'"

From "NYC-Dublin live video art installation already bringing out the worst in people with lewd displays" (NY Post).

Earnest utopian vision? Why was this invitation to exhibitionism able to be promoted as utopian? And on what basis does the NY Post present the "utopian vision" as earnest? And why does the headline say "bringing out the worst in people" when the article is all about what's happening on the Irish end of the portal? 

"[T]he Ladies Lounge of Australia’s Museum of Old and New Art... a conceptual artwork, is decorated with Picassos and other expensive adornments..."

"... and is separated from the rest of the museum with opulent green curtains. A staff member is posted outside to prevent the entry of any visitor who does not identify as a woman, and guests can indulge in a $325 high tea service featuring fancy finger food.... The American artist behind the lounge, Kirsha Kaechele, who is married to the private museum’s owner, told the tribunal that the practice of requiring women to drink in ladies lounges rather than public bars only ended in parts of Australia in 1970 and that in practice, exclusion of women in public spaces continues.... But she said she 'got a rise' out of the discrimination complaint and was 'pretty excited' when she learned it had been filed over her work. 'It carries it out of the museum and into the real world.'... Kaechele attended the tribunal Tuesday flanked by 25 female supporters dressed in pointedly court-appropriate attire — think pearls, suits and stockings...."

From "She made an artwork that excluded men. A man sued for discrimination" (WaPo).

Here's the museum's website for the artwork. Sample text: "The lounge is a tremendously lavish space in our museum in which women can indulge in decadent nibbles, fancy tipples, and other ladylike pleasures.... [Y]ou are a participant in... the art itself, part of a living installation."

I wonder if the lawsuit, too, is part of the art itself, the living installation. 

You'd think just having a $325 high tea service would be enough to keep the men out. The product itself is exclusionary — exclusionary of everyone who doesn't love stuff like that. But they had a guard to actively exclude any man, and that made a point: See how you feel when the tables are turned? But the point is only made at the men who are not stereotypical men, the men not put off by the service of $325 high tea.

"'Imponderabilia'... requires two nude performers to stand opposite each other in a slim doorway that visitors are encouraged to squeeze through to enter an adjoining gallery."

"According to his lawsuit, [the performer John] Bonafede was sexually assaulted seven times by five museum visitors.... Mr. Bonafede said in legal filings... that MoMA officials 'turned a blind eye' to the assaults and created a hostile work environment where performers were expected to submit to the actions of unruly audience members.... [T]he exhibition was grueling for many performers. Some participants reported fainting in the galleries.... Others complained that guests were inappropriately touching their bodies and making rude remarks about their appearances.... If visitors were uncomfortable passing between a naked man and woman, they were allowed to walk through another entryway to the left and skip the experience...."

From "MoMA Sued by Artist Who Performed Nude in Marina Abramovic Work/The artist, John Bonafede, says museum officials failed to prevent visitors from sexually assaulting performers in the 2010 show" (NYT).

"The appointed billboard was above a Sunglass Hut, just a few paces from an Armed Forces recruiting station. Times Square was doing its Times Square thing..."

"... total sensory overload. Capitalism on cocaine. It was 8:15 p.m. I waited. Was this actually going to happen or was it some kind of conceptual art prank? And who even is Yoko Ono?

Writes Sebastian Smee in "No matter what the haters say, Yoko Ono was always about peace. Now her message is on a Times Square billboard" (WaPo). The billboard is pink and just says "Imagine Peace."

Answering his question "who even is Yoko Ono?," Smee continues:

Ono had a gift for “event scores” that were by turns mundane, poetic and (poetically) impossible.... [for example] “Disappearing Piece,” which simply commands: “Boil water” (the piece ends when the water completely evaporates) and “Clock Piece,” which instructs: “Make all the clocks in the world fast by/ two seconds without letting anyone know/ about it.”

You can easily imagine one that says: “Sit next to John Lennon throughout the recording sessions for a Beatles album. Do nothing — except when you scream.” Or one that says, simply: “Imagine Peace.”...

Smee discusses Ono's "Cut Piece," from 1964, which I embedded on this blog 11 days ago, here. Ono sits silently and quietly while members of the audience do what she's instructed: Pick up scissors and cut pieces of her clothing away. My embedding had to do with some current fashion that looked as if someone had taken scissors to a woman's ordinary clothes and left them disturbingly lopped off. Smee connects it to her long history of peace activism:

"'The Larry Project,' neurotic and tender by turns, evolved into a much more emotional, all-encompassing undertaking — in which the absent Larry, whom Ms. Upson never met..."

"... expanded into the artist’s muse, her lover, her persecutor and, ultimately, her doppelgänger. By the end, no clean distinction was left between artist and subject; the two had become doubles. One drawing in the Hammer Museum show bore the words 'I am more he than he is.' The project ended in 2011 with a performance at a Los Angeles gallery at which she dragged a charcoal-and-wax mannequin of Larry on the walls and floor inside a plywood cube until the effigy disintegrated, symbolically turning Larry’s body into dust."

 
"Kaari Upson, California Artist of Desire and Disturbance, Dies at 51/Known for her resin sculptures and her disquieting videos, she was one of the most significant artists to emerge from the vibrant 21st-century Los Angeles art scene" (NYT). (Upson died of breast cancer.)

A contemporaneous artist obituary: "Chuck Close, Artist of Outsized Reality, Dies at 81/He found success with his large-scale Photorealist portraits, becoming one of the leading artists of his generation. Late in life he faced allegations of sexual harassment" (NYT):

In the 1970s, he began to translate his photographic sources into pixelated images, filling in the individual cells of a grid with distinct marks, colors and tones that would cohere into photographic images when viewed from a distance....  His pragmatic, problem-solving approach would serve Mr. Close well in the second half of his career. In New York, on Dec. 7, 1988, he was felled by what turned out to be a collapsed spinal artery, which initially left him paralyzed from the neck down. In the ensuing months of rehabilitation, he began to regain movement in his arms, and he was able to sit up and paint using brushes strapped to his hand. He not only returned to painting with unimpaired ambition but also began producing what many would view as the best work of his career.... Up close, the new paintings seemed to swarm with woozy, almost psychedelic energy, while from a distance the image would emerge in all its photographic exactness.

As for the allegations of sexual harassment, a doctor is quoted attributing his actions to Alzheimer's disease: "He was very disinhibited and did inappropriate things, which were part of his underlying medical condition. Frontotemporal dementia affects executive function. It’s like a patient having a lobotomy — it destroys that part of the brain that governs behavior and inhibits base instincts."

"Mr. Midgette, his hair painted and powdered silver-white and his face covered with pale makeup, passed himself off as Warhol at several colleges with Warhol’s blessing..."

"... fielding questions after showings of Warhol films.... Mr. Midgette pulled off his impersonation at a time when Warhol’s reputation had begun to spread beyond New York City but when, to most of America, he was still more of a vague concept than a recognizable personality.... 'The one thing I knew about Andy was, you could answer any question any way you liked and it would be fine,' he said... 'It might not have been the same thing he would say, but it would make as much sense... It made me realize how, in life, people just presume a lot of things.... Just because you’ve met Andy twice, does it mean you remember exactly how he looked, and how he would look under different circumstances? If you’re being told it’s Andy and everyone else is accepting it, you’ll go along with that. It shows you how people just aren’t very curious about what’s in front of them.'"

From "Allen Midgette, an Ersatz Andy Warhol, Dies at 82/In a prank, or perhaps a piece of performance art, Mr. Midgette pretended to be the famed artist on a lecture tour in 1967" (NYT).

Andy Warhol said, "He was better than I am.... He was what the people expected. They liked him better than they would have me."

When are you such a thing that a fake you would be more you than you? We have one solid answer: Andy Warhol.

"So he hauled a new generator into his S.U.V., strapped $800 worth of wood onto the vehicle’s roof and drove down into one of the city’s ravines in the middle of the night..."

"... to build... a wooden box — 7 feet 9 inches by 3 feet 9 inches — sealed with a vapor barrier and stuffed with enough insulation that, by his careful calculation, would keep it warm on nights when the thermometer dipped as low as minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit. He put in one window for light, and attached smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. Later, he taped a note to the side that read, 'Anyone is welcome to stay here.' Since then, Mr. Seivwright (pronounced Seeve-right), 28, has built about 100 similar shelters with a crew of 40 volunteers and more than $200,000 in donations. He has hauled them to parks across Toronto where homeless encampments have slumped into place — jarring reminders of the pandemic’s perversely uneven effects. The city’s bureaucrats called them illegal and unsafe, and stapled trespass and eviction notices to many, informing their residents that the city had rented out hotel rooms for them. They served Mr. Seivwright with an injunction, ordering him to stop putting the structures on city-owned land." 

From "The Carpenter Who Built Tiny Homes for Toronto’s Homeless/Khaleel Seivwright built himself a wooden shanty while living on a West Coast commune. Then he started building similar lodgings for homeless people in Toronto to survive the winter" (NYT).

The box is not much larger than a coffin (which tends to be 7.17 feet by 2.5 feet), but people prefer them even when they know "the city had rented out hotel rooms for them." A city can't allow a shantytown — far below its standards of habitability — to grow up its in its parks. But Seivwright is nevertheless celebrated.

I can see how building these squalid boxes and depositing them around town works as protest art, speaking loudly to the people of Toronto about the poor and desperate people who live in their midst. The city is providing hotel rooms, but if these people are in hotel rooms, the housed citizens of Toronto won't need to agonize about them.

To be in the box is to be inside but outside, seen but unseen. To be in a hotel room is to be thoroughly inside and unseen. That's what the city prefers. I don't think the article explains why it is what the homeless prefer.

(To comment, you can email me here.)

FROM THE EMAIL: Owen writes: 

Sorry, this guy sounds whack. These boxes are not Habitats for Humans but a kind of litter. There’s a reason why cities have governments, poor and stupid and cruel as they may be; and it’s to help manage the risks to health and safety that come with our common lives. Your analysis takes some account of the “City” as if it were a bumbling bureaucracy —easy to mock, that. But what about the *citizens* of the city? The suffering nameless individuals who pay the taxes, try to mind their ways and be decent to each other, try to build lives and raise families, try to *use the (few, crowded, worn) amenities* of the city? Who now find the homeless occupying their parks, cadging and foraging and leaving a trail of trouble, encouraged now by characters like this to repurpose the precious open space into flop-houses and latrines? Do the citizens not get a voice in this little hippie happening?

I think citizens are getting fed up with this. Not just in Toronto, either.

I was just saying that it's been decades since anyone has been outraged by "'modern art' in the form of paintings that have messy-looking drips and scrawls and blotches."

Here, in this post linking to a old-time-y review of painting done by an Abstract Expressionist who emerged in the 1950s. I wrote, "There are things in art that can still shock people, but it would need to involve hurting a living creature or destroying something of value, not merely the chaotic application of paint to a canvas."

And look what we have today. A painter did one of the big messy-looking scrawls-and-blotches things that everyone has completely absorbed as ordinary art, something that wasn't even the slightest bit newsworthy but that is in a public place and capable of being presented to the news media as valued at $500,000. 

And then along come some people who painted on top of it, so it's the "destroying something of value" that I was talking about. It's not the artist smashing a $1 million ancient vase, but some people other than the artist coming along and painting on top of the artist's mundane exercise in Abstract Expressionism. The artist could not get us heated up about his painting — mere painting. But when you talk about destruction... well, you know that you can count on us to get excited. So maybe one of the last remaining methods of engaging our outrage has been successfully deployed.

But, you may want to tell me, the artist didn't do it. Some stupid people came along and decided on their own to paint on a painting. But did you read the news story? "Young couple mistakenly vandalizes $440,000 painting in South Korea/The work was done in 2016 by American graffiti artist JonOne" (ABC News). Key passage: 

The decision to display performance equipment in front of JonOne's work goes back to 2016. JonOne completed the artwork in question during a graffiti museum show, "The Great Graffiti,'' in Seoul Arts Center at the time. When the piece was complete, it was displayed along with the props used by the artist, in the same way the display is on now. 

"The paint and brushes used by the artist comprise a complete set with the graffiti canvas work," said [Kang Wook, the CEO of Contents Creator of Culture, co-organizer of the exhibition]. He explained that the props were part of the exhibition to help highlight the history of the artist's work.

The displayed "performance equipment" was jars of paint and paint brushes scattered on the floor at the base of the painting, giving the impression of a work in progress and susceptible to the interpretation that the viewer is invited to use the equipment and participate in performance art by adding to the painting. 

Now, is that what the artist intended? There was no sign telling people to paint on the painting. That would be like something in a children's museum, and I doubt if anyone would write a news article about it. It would be cutesy and communal. Everyone's an artist, and all art is a joint project. Not outrageous. No destruction. Only construction. So creative.

But if you put the paint and brushes out there as a sculptural still life, and leave it to members of the public to maybe decide on their own to do the children's museum thing and paint over the painting, then you can sell it to the press as destruction. A painting was painted over!! And now you've got your outrage. You've got your publicity. The name JonOne is well-known for 15 minutes.

It's not the strict adherence to a plan... it's also the strict avoidance of trying to do it very well — 4 decades of rigorous anti-perfectionism.

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ADDED: Here's the New Yorker article. Excerpt: "Her strain of snapshot conceptualism, profoundly personal and eminently personable, could have been overwhelmed with minutiae or weighed down by retrospective insight. Instead, with its light touch and searching, unsmiling star, the book breathes with open-ended nuance."

"Sachsalber... sought to literally find a needle hidden in a haystack by the museum’s curators, taking a common idiom at face value and enacting it as a work."

"In the end, Sachsalber was successful in locating the needle.... ... Sachsalber undertook a project called Hands, for which he and his father attempted to complete a 13,200-piece puzzle of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. ... Sachsalber produced 222 drawings based on Galerie Bruno Bischofberger ads that appeared on the back of Artforum. Other performances involved eating a poisonous mushroom and spending 24 hours in a room with a cow."

From "Sven Sachsalber, Prankish Artist on the Verge of Fame, Dies at 33" (ArtNews). It doesn't say how the young man died. 

I don't know what kind of person you are, but some of you may wonder if he died from one of his performances — we can see that he was "involved" in eating a poisonous mushroom — and others of you may muse that life itself is an art performance if you step back and look. I believe — please do not comment to confirm this belief (I don't want to know) — that most of you simply disrespect performance art and are tempted to comment that you see no great loss to the world in the death of Sachsalber.

"Women can choose to knock each other down or build each other up. I choose the latter."

Said Ivanka Trump, ironically knocking the artist Jennifer Rubell, who'd made a performance piece called "Ivanka Vacuuming." 

 

Rubell said: "I truly did not intend the piece to be only a critique of her. I thought it was just as indicting of the viewer and all of us in our perception of her. I invited her to see the show. I was so naïve — I thought she would think it was kind of funny." 

That happened in 2019, but I didn't notice at the time. I'm seeing it today in a NYT piece called "As Their D.C. Days Dwindle, Ivanka and Jared Look for a New Beginning/The end of President Trump’s time in office leaves his daughter Ivanka Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, looking for a new home — but they appear to have plans in New Jersey."

Here's a WaPo article from February 2019, "The performance piece ‘Ivanka Vacuuming’ seems to irk the first daughter even more than ‘fake news’": 

Sunrise enigma.

It was an austere sunrise:



But right at my vantage point, I found this:



Nice performance art!

Vivid street theater in a NYC free-speech zone.

#RefundThePolice
pic.twitter.com/QHNfiJRH9l

— Eddie Zipperer (@EddieZipperer) July 18, 2020