I am watching a group of about 50 people meet up in a park, they are all dressed “business casual” in the way that someone who is going to an interview and hasn’t been employed in awhile would be. The clothes don’t look like they fit right, but maybe that’s just me projecting because I know what happens next. This video is playing on a continuous loop (in a dark cement gallery space that makes me feel as though I’m watching big brother in “1984″) and I’ve already seen the middle.
The people disperse to different sections of Wall Street by 7 am. It becomes clear that while everyone has a similar agenda–to get naked–each person has a different part to enact. Some are yoga instructors, some waitresses/waiters, hotdog vendors, prostitutes, street cleaners, and still others appear to be innocuous business persons tied to the steady stream of information wafting from their Blackberries. The participants go about their acted business and then suddenly, remove an item of clothing. Some may stop for a minute and sweep, sell, or talk on the phone, before removing another item. As an isolated incident it would seem like an “ordinary” individual had spontaneously combusted into madness. Passers by either ignore the nudist, or take a picture on their camera phones. By 7:05 the performance is over and the police arrest three people.
The date of the recording is August 1, 2011, on September 17 of the same year the Occupy Wall Street Movement will have begun in Zuccotti Park. At the time of this writing It’s only 135 days later.
There are many topical political reasons for asking a group of 50 people to remove their clothes on Wall Street but I’m going to argue the most romantic one.
The story of Jan Elliot, also known as the artist’s, Zefrey Throwell’s, mom, is a story I think most of us can relate to. Jan was a High School Guidance Counselor, to hear Zeffrey tell it, the job she held didn’t necessarily match her hippy-like spirit, but she took a “straight” job in order to put away money and provide for her family. When she reached her Sixties she was able to retire but soon after retirement she lost most of her hard-won savings in the financial meltdown of 2008. Jan watched banks get bailed out and Wall Street executives get bonuses while she had to re-enter a workforce that no longer wanted to hire her, even with years worth of experience.
Many of us are caught in a system that requires us to sit and do boring, mind-numbing things for at least eight hours a day. We do these things to keep a roof over our heads, food in the fridge, and safe for the day when we can finally quit working. If we follow the rules, we are suppose to get something back, not have the rug removed out from under us.
All of us buy into a system, in some way or another, that uses what amounts to slave labor (Foxconn) to produce the items that we are “required” to have to keep up with the lifestyle we must maintain to keep the job that we don’t really want. I will argue that no matter if you love your job or not, there isn’t a person in the world who hasn’t wished to be absolutely free of our societal system.
Yes. Fifty persons who accurately represent the actual professions of those employed on Wall Street getting naked (as seen in Ocularpation) is a great metaphor for the need for transparency on the financial dealings of the institution of Wall Street but I think the truth of the beauty of this performance lies in the words of Aileen Carson, a health aide who was quoted in the New York Times article on “Ocularpation”:
‘ “Is it a statement?” asked Aileen Carson, a health aide who stopped to take in the scene. “What are they trying to say?” Whatever it was, she liked it. “They had the boldness to do it, which I admire,” she said, surveying the bodies. “It looked to me that they’re free.” ‘
Forty-Seven people got outside the system a little bit on August 1, 2011, they shook things up, they seemed to have fun doing it. Three people were arrested.
Precedents worth mentioning
On August 24th, 1967 Abbie Hoffman, along with Fifth-teen “free spirits”, armed with three hundred dollars in dollar bill increments, entered the visitors’ entrance to the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) at 20 Broad Street. Hoffman had called ahead and asked for a tour under the pseudonym “George Metesky” (New York’s “Mad Bomber” from the 1950s).
The group went up to the visitors’ gallery, two stories above the busy trading floor, where they encountered a horde of reporters and cameras who had somehow been tipped-off to the event. The group began throwing the one dollar bills over the railing, laughing the entire time. The floor of the stock exchange erupted. For a moment the exchange stopped cold as stock brokers scrambled for real dollar bills.
The artist Yayoi Kusama, mostly known for her all-encompassing and often hallucinogenic polka-dot installations, staged a series of happenings across Manhattan from 1968-1969. These happenings involved Kusama working with groups of naked men and women covered in polka dots and and dancing in the streets. The events were staged in front of iconic New York City institutions by way of protesting the Vietnam War. One of these institutions was the New York Stock Exchange. The NYSE happening came equipped with this manifesto: “Burn Wall Street. Wall Street men must become farmers and fishermen. Wall Street men must stop all this fake ‘business’…The money made with this stock is enabling the war to continue…OBLITERATE WALL STREET MEN WITH POLKA*DOTS ON THEIR NAKED BODIES. BE IN…BE NAKED, NAKED, NAKED.”
Besides the video, on view at Klemens Gasser and Tanja Grunert, Inc there is a gift -shop of sorts. Several spray-painted gold items that reference the professions of the people employed on Wall Street as enacted in “Ocularpation” are for sale along with several mixed-media paintings that depict some of the events of “Ocularpation” under white paint smears.
It is hard not to look at the display of gold-covered Smart Phones without thinking of Paolo Pedercini‘s recent brush with Apple over theMolleindustria app, “Phone Story” that depicts the horrors of the consumer electronics supply chain, from child labor in the Coltan mines of DR Congo, to suicidal workers in factory-prisons and the mounds of e-waste shipped all over the developing world.
This mental connection is no accident, all of the gold-covered “props” were made in China (with the exception of a plastic hotdog made in Turkey), and it is important to note that they are only gold-covered–a heavy metaphor for the condition of the American Dream.
All of the metaphors in “Ocularpation” are a bit weighted, the mixed-media paintings are screen-printed onto sewn-together trader jackets and the white smears serve to indicate how the press white-washes over coverage of important political events in favor of discussing the next “American Idol”. While this over-handedness makes me groan a little, I call this area the gift-shop for a reason. These are not great works of art for sale but rather a piece of the next project Zefrey Throwell is planning. These are the mugs you don’t want for supporting public television. I suggest you buy one if you can afford it (regular Chelsea gallery prices at upwards of thousands of dollars) but not for any aesthetic reason.
For information on the next Zefrey Throwell projects please visit zefrey.com.
Correction: An earlier version of this story credited The Yes Man with designing “Phone Story”, this has been changed to credit the actual designer, Paolo Pedercini.
SHOW REVIEWED: Zefrey Throwell “Ocularpation: Wall Street” at Gasser-Grunet
Video Still of “Ocularpation: Wall Street” by Steven Day
The event (recorded)
I am watching a group of about 50 people meet up in a park, they are all dressed “business casual” in the way that someone who is going to an interview and hasn’t been employed in awhile would be. The clothes don’t look like they fit right, but maybe that’s just me projecting because I know what happens next. This video is playing on a continuous loop (in a dark cement gallery space that makes me feel as though I’m watching big brother in “1984″) and I’ve already seen the middle.
The people disperse to different sections of Wall Street by 7 am. It becomes clear that while everyone has a similar agenda–to get naked–each person has a different part to enact. Some are yoga instructors, some waitresses/waiters, hotdog vendors, prostitutes, street cleaners, and still others appear to be innocuous business persons tied to the steady stream of information wafting from their Blackberries. The participants go about their acted business and then suddenly, remove an item of clothing. Some may stop for a minute and sweep, sell, or talk on the phone, before removing another item. As an isolated incident it would seem like an “ordinary” individual had spontaneously combusted into madness. Passers by either ignore the nudist, or take a picture on their camera phones. By 7:05 the performance is over and the police arrest three people.
The date of the recording is August 1, 2011, on September 17 of the same year the Occupy Wall Street Movement will have begun in Zuccotti Park. At the time of this writing It’s only 135 days later.
There are many topical political reasons for asking a group of 50 people to remove their clothes on Wall Street but I’m going to argue the most romantic one.
The story of Jan Elliot, also known as the artist’s, Zefrey Throwell’s, mom, is a story I think most of us can relate to. Jan was a High School Guidance Counselor, to hear Zeffrey tell it, the job she held didn’t necessarily match her hippy-like spirit, but she took a “straight” job in order to put away money and provide for her family. When she reached her Sixties she was able to retire but soon after retirement she lost most of her hard-won savings in the financial meltdown of 2008. Jan watched banks get bailed out and Wall Street executives get bonuses while she had to re-enter a workforce that no longer wanted to hire her, even with years worth of experience.
Many of us are caught in a system that requires us to sit and do boring, mind-numbing things for at least eight hours a day. We do these things to keep a roof over our heads, food in the fridge, and safe for the day when we can finally quit working. If we follow the rules, we are suppose to get something back, not have the rug removed out from under us.
All of us buy into a system, in some way or another, that uses what amounts to slave labor (Foxconn) to produce the items that we are “required” to have to keep up with the lifestyle we must maintain to keep the job that we don’t really want. I will argue that no matter if you love your job or not, there isn’t a person in the world who hasn’t wished to be absolutely free of our societal system.
Yes. Fifty persons who accurately represent the actual professions of those employed on Wall Street getting naked (as seen in Ocularpation) is a great metaphor for the need for transparency on the financial dealings of the institution of Wall Street but I think the truth of the beauty of this performance lies in the words of Aileen Carson, a health aide who was quoted in the New York Times article on “Ocularpation”:
‘ “Is it a statement?” asked Aileen Carson, a health aide who stopped to take in the scene. “What are they trying to say?” Whatever it was, she liked it. “They had the boldness to do it, which I admire,” she said, surveying the bodies. “It looked to me that they’re free.” ‘
Forty-Seven people got outside the system a little bit on August 1, 2011, they shook things up, they seemed to have fun doing it. Three people were arrested.
Precedents worth mentioning
On August 24th, 1967 Abbie Hoffman, along with Fifth-teen “free spirits”, armed with three hundred dollars in dollar bill increments, entered the visitors’ entrance to the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) at 20 Broad Street. Hoffman had called ahead and asked for a tour under the pseudonym “George Metesky” (New York’s “Mad Bomber” from the 1950s).
The group went up to the visitors’ gallery, two stories above the busy trading floor, where they encountered a horde of reporters and cameras who had somehow been tipped-off to the event. The group began throwing the one dollar bills over the railing, laughing the entire time. The floor of the stock exchange erupted. For a moment the exchange stopped cold as stock brokers scrambled for real dollar bills.
(Read “Museum of the Streets” by Abbie Hoffman for a first-person account.)
The artist Yayoi Kusama, mostly known for her all-encompassing and often hallucinogenic polka-dot installations, staged a series of happenings across Manhattan from 1968-1969. These happenings involved Kusama working with groups of naked men and women covered in polka dots and and dancing in the streets. The events were staged in front of iconic New York City institutions by way of protesting the Vietnam War. One of these institutions was the New York Stock Exchange. The NYSE happening came equipped with this manifesto: “Burn Wall Street. Wall Street men must become farmers and fishermen. Wall Street men must stop all this fake ‘business’…The money made with this stock is enabling the war to continue…OBLITERATE WALL STREET MEN WITH POLKA*DOTS ON THEIR NAKED BODIES. BE IN…BE NAKED, NAKED, NAKED.”
(Read more here and here)
And now, back to Foxconn
Besides the video, on view at Klemens Gasser and Tanja Grunert, Inc there is a gift -shop of sorts. Several spray-painted gold items that reference the professions of the people employed on Wall Street as enacted in “Ocularpation” are for sale along with several mixed-media paintings that depict some of the events of “Ocularpation” under white paint smears.
It is hard not to look at the display of gold-covered Smart Phones without thinking of Paolo Pedercini‘s recent brush with Apple over the Molleindustria app, “Phone Story” that depicts the horrors of the consumer electronics supply chain, from child labor in the Coltan mines of DR Congo, to suicidal workers in factory-prisons and the mounds of e-waste shipped all over the developing world.
This mental connection is no accident, all of the gold-covered “props” were made in China (with the exception of a plastic hotdog made in Turkey), and it is important to note that they are only gold-covered–a heavy metaphor for the condition of the American Dream.
All of the metaphors in “Ocularpation” are a bit weighted, the mixed-media paintings are screen-printed onto sewn-together trader jackets and the white smears serve to indicate how the press white-washes over coverage of important political events in favor of discussing the next “American Idol”. While this over-handedness makes me groan a little, I call this area the gift-shop for a reason. These are not great works of art for sale but rather a piece of the next project Zefrey Throwell is planning. These are the mugs you don’t want for supporting public television. I suggest you buy one if you can afford it (regular Chelsea gallery prices at upwards of thousands of dollars) but not for any aesthetic reason.
For information on the next Zefrey Throwell projects please visit zefrey.com.
Correction: An earlier version of this story credited The Yes Man with designing “Phone Story”, this has been changed to credit the actual designer, Paolo Pedercini.