In Conversation with David Henry Brown Jnr (for 'NakedButSafe' Magazine, 2015)
Can we begin with one of your earliest performances, ‘Man and Mice’, from 1995? Where was this staged, and what happened?
Man and Mice was performed in Manhattan in 1995 over two evenings in a meat locker on Gansevort Street. The show was called Keep Refrigerated, referencing the freezing cold lofts and illegal commercial spaces we all lived in at the time. The artists in the event and the audience were largely part of the Williamsburg underground performance art scene now called Immersionists. This piece represents my contribution in this community of artists. As such, Man and Mice was a community-based action-oriented work that did not buttress or reference art history. Instead, as an Immersionist piece, it was carried out within our own enormously creative underground world. I performed Man and Mice for five hours on each night. The image was adapted from Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver awakens in miniature world and is tied down to the landscape by tiny people known as Lilliputians. I was the nude Gulliver held to the
land with hundreds of pieces of string and tiny wooden stakes. The landscape undulated much in the manner of the childhood miniatures I made for my model train sets and war scenes for my toy soldiers. The trees were made with pieces of Broccoli. There was a lake between my legs. One hundred white mice (the ‘Lilliputians’) roamed freely over my body and the landscape. I was covered in tiny ladders and bridges, which the mice used (and ate). My body was embedded into the landscape. A 12-inch tall Plexiglas wall surrounded the whole piece.
How did the spectators react to the spectacle?
The work integrated three layers of reality all in one performance. There was my nude body lying in an extremely vulnerable position; the mice who were cute, yet terrifying to watch crawling on someone; and there was the human audience. A German woman the first night would not stop screaming over and over, in broken English, “The artist must suffer for his art!” The Plexiglas wall around the piece kept the mice in but allowed the people to touch me or interact with the mice. It was an extremely riveting experience and many people stayed the whole night long. Humans voluntarily watched over the action and each other, creating their own rules, like a separate society. One guy kept putting mice on my balls, but I really did not move or flinch very much. I went into a deep trance-like state. I became totally aware of the mice. They became an extraneous nervous system connected to my consciousness. When a giant Human leaned over me and lit a match to light his cigarette, the mass of mice shuddered from the explosion and so did I.
The events you staged with British artist Dominic McGill under the alias of ‘Standard and Poor’ (1995-98), exposed a method to get the public to actively participate in questioning why they needed celebrity. Could you speak about the nature of these events and what transpired?
The name ‘Standard and Poor’ is taken from Standard and Poor’s, which is an indexing company that rates the value of stocks and bonds. Our performances explored the supposed ‘standards’ of self-worth in consumerist culture – the social myths forced upon the public by corporations and their advertising. We created humorous and engaging performance situations, which we presented to the public as real. These were all outside of the art museum or gallery context, so that the non-art world spectators would unconsciously inform the creative process. There was no mention of art, not ever, while performing these works. We began with a series of experiments in 1995, which culminated with our most sophisticated social sculpture: Red Carpet Rollers.
Carpet Rollers started out as an experiment in 1996 in front of Trump Tower in New York City. We showed up at the grand entrance, posing as a company hired to roll out the red carpet for some mysterious VIP’s arrival. We wore tuxedos and white gloves and held a 36-foot roll of red carpet. We had no idea what would transpire! We would tell security and the police that we had a Fax from our boss ‘Jack’ telling us to show up. As we waited expectantly with the carpet rolled up near the door, a large crowd of onlookers formed. After one hour it became a massive 500-person spectacle and there was total chaos when no VIPs arrived. At the end of our first experiment, we slinked off with our carpet knowing that we had hit something big. Then we teamed up with documentary video artist Richard Sandler – we knew we were working with a consummate pro. When we would get a raw tape from him it was already organised into a brilliant in-camera edited work of art. We started advertising as an actual company. We made business cards. We got a few ‘roll out the red carpet’ jobs by advertising in a Long Island coupon mailer and through word-of-mouth. There are two video pieces that show us at surprise birthday parties. In these works you see the relationship between family structure and celebrity. The carpet becomes a stage for family dynamic. The honoured celebrant plays the celebrity while the rest of family and friends become the fans. At the same time, these pieces perpetuate the myth of the company that rolls out the red carpet.
When the media stepped in it must have seemed like a self-fulfilling prophecy?
We were approached by CNN for a piece that aired in late 1997. We taped another Red Carpet roll no show in front of Trump Tower. The camera crew inadvertently hyped the situation even further and a pretty hilarious piece emerged. The reporter, Jeannie Mose is surrounded by a large group of spectators demanding an explanation. They thought the Spice Girls or Donald Trump was supposed to show up. The piece aired in late 1997. One of our final and best works was a red carpet roll in which no one shows up at the former Plaza Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. In this piece the edit shows the buildup of a large crowd, but with a specific emphasis on Richard Sandler’s brilliant capture of the crowd’s reaction. Richard probed the viewers’ imaginations as they project their ideas on who will show up, a mapping of desire. As the situation collapses and time is wasted away, the crowd becomes angry and critical at the idea of celebrity. One woman who acts totally star struck in the beginning, by the end yells “Why should I care about this person if this person doesn’t care about me?” The Red Carpet Rollers video documentation was shown as a solo show in a small gallery in Williamsburg and also in a group show at PS One. One review at the time described it as “a disturbingly accurate portrayal of our time.” Many have observed how the idea of waiting for nothing next to the Red Carpet is like the play Waiting For Godot. For me the work brutally exposes the hollowness of our time, the emptiness of Celebrity - a standard by which we are forced to compare ourselves. At the same time the work demonstrates great hope. It radically proposes that in the right behavioral conditions, social criticism is instinctual and intuitive in humans. It shows that we can empower ourselves to throw off the shackles of corporatist repression.
In your Von Fűrstenburg project, from 2000, you further explored notions of celebrity-worship. But in a neat reversal you expose the fact that celebrities and VIPs are no different from the rest of us in their worship of the famous. For a whole year you pretended to be Alex Von Fűrstenburg [who is actually a real person] and you gatecrashed many celebrity parties and VIP functions. The project is documented by sixty photographs of ‘Alex’ standing with various celebrities: the Clintons; Puff Daddy; Ivana Trump etc.
I wanted to become a celebrity fanatic as a performance piece and spent four months standing outside various VIP events only to go home cold, sometimes drenched, and always disappointed. I read the Gossip pages of The Daily News and the New York Post every day and began to track information on VIP whereabouts. The Media was always saying how wonderful it was to be at these parties: that you really should be there, that you would be a better person if you were there. If it was indeed all so great, why not show up myself? I was also obsessed with the idea of being a total Fantastic Nobody who must adore celebrities in order to experience feelings. I was interested in how celebrities functioned as substitute family members. The idea of being a celebrity-stalker is taken from pop culture. There are actually people whose singular obsession is to meet celebrities and get photos of themselves with them. That’s what they do their whole lives. I had met a few including one that was well known, Gary Lee Boas. There was also the famous creepy case of the guy who impersonated a Rockefeller in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I was sampling this behavioral trope, although my story would unfold in surprising ways. I bought a cheap $20 vintage conservative-looking suit. One night in the summer I was headed to a VIP event at a club called Chaos on Houston St and it occurred to me that I needed a name to actually get inside the soiree. Alex Von Fűrstenburg came to mind. It was a name that was well known. When I introduced myself at the door I was immediately ushered in and served champagne. I met my target, Barry White, quickly and he said he was thrilled to meet me. I handed my 35 mm Rollei point-and-shoot to a stranger and a beautiful yet random photo was taken.
What was the general attitude of the celebrities to ‘Alex’? Were they all happy to be seen with him?
Most of the celebrities I met were rather cordial and taken aback that they were meeting a Von Fűrstenburg. Ivana Trump was very excited to meet me and introduced me to her boyfriend and few of her other friends at the party. Puff Daddy put his arm around me and said “You the man, Alex!” I swear that Sara Jessica Parker grabbed my butt when we posed for a photo, although in the moment I was never sure if it was her or someone else. I started out not giving a rat’s ass about famous people. As the project progressed I allowed it, like all my work, to totally take over my mind and direct my behavior. I was becoming Alex. I became truly obsessed and my friends were worried. I became good friends and colleagues with soon to be famous artist Mark Lombardi. He told me “When you stare into the abyss, remember, the abyss stares into you.”
Ah yes, that great quote from Nietzsche!
As I went deeper into it a few experiences really took me to a different plane altogether. I read in the Gossips that Hillary Clinton would be celebrating her 53rd birthday party at a fundraiser at the Ford Center in midtown Manhattan. I was a party-crasher professional at this point but I was naturally a bit hesitant to believe that I could meet Hillary and President Bill Clinton. At the Ford Center there was a very secure super-VIP entrance and a less secure one for the rest of the partygoers. I chose the easier of the two. After hanging back and observing the flow of things for thirty minutes I walked up to the nicest looking security guard and said “Hello. I’m Alex Von Fűrstenburg, I went outside for a cigarette and forgot my ticket stub,” He said: “No problem, please proceed to the metal detector.” I passed through this and could not believe that I was inside. I went to the cheap seats on the upper level of the theatre where I was able to see where the Clintons were located. At the Intermission of the show, I rushed downstairs and pushed to get closer. The vicinity of the Clintons was like being in a mosh pit of hysteria. The secret service guys pushed me away at first but then somehow I was let into the innermost circle. I quickly met Hillary and Bill Clinton. I told them I was a Von Fűrstenburg. They said that they were both pleased to meet me. I handed my camera to a nearby stranger. I was brazen enough to put my arm around Bill. I promptly scrammed out of there in an ecstatic but also a paranoid state. I had just crashed a party to meet the frickin’ President and first Lady! I was totally spun. I had the photos developed right away and they were amazing.
What happened when the real Alex Von Fűrstenburg met the pretender – it must have been quite a charged moment?
I met the real Alex while in character as Alex at Diane Von Fűrstenburg’s house on West 12th Street. Yes, for me it was rather charged. I told Alex that I had been mistaken for him often in the last year and that some of the photos had even appeared in magazines. He said, “Well, cool to meet you, sounds pretty weird.” I asked him if we could get a photo of us together just to “complete the coincidence”, which he did. This photo is legendary in my Von Furstenberg print edition.
Was your eventual exposure as an imposter an essential part of the performance?
Yes, of course outing the project was part of the work! A young gallery called Roebling Hall offered me a solo show of the project for October of 2000. I found investors to help me produce the large photo edition of sixty images. That summer I organised a massive PR blitz. I first outed the project to a writer at The New York Observer. He actually came out with me while I was Alex. The article was pretty big and was featured on the front page of the newspaper. It was published about a week before the opening. In the meantime rumours were circulating about the show and ABC Television approached me. The camera crew actually filmed at the opening of my solo show, making the whole event totally surreal. I met the real Alex well after the show and thanked him for being pretty cool about the whole thing. I think that he understood that what I did was an amazing work of art.
The character you adopted for that project rather reminds me of Robert DeNiro’s character, Rupert Pupkin, in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1983), who lives inside a fantasy bubble in which he is a great star. He has no idea how much of a non-starter he is. Do you think there is a parallel?
For sure there is a parallel! But I wasn’t really thinking about that film. I did eventually think about the Movie Being There, with Peter Sellers. Alex is desperately trying to fit in by mimicking. I thought about Seller’s character after the project and how he is constantly imitating his surroundings, especially images on television. During the project I channeled Timothy Leary’s advice “Always stay in your own movie”. I was also definitely channeling the great reality artist Andy Kaufman.
Your project ‘Stalking Donald Trump’ brilliantly unpicks the cult of celebrity and notions of patriarchy. You stalked Trump for a year, gatecrashing numerous VIP functions where he was appearing, and having yourself photographed with the man at each one. But it developed into a deeper and more complex art event when Trump ramped up his campaign to become President.
I met Trump five times while stalking him in 1999. He started to spread rumours in the media that he was going to run for president. I designed a Trump for President 2000 poster, before any campaign signs even existed, in order to fulfill the rumour and feed the flames of the chaos. I campaigned on Trump’s behalf, with video artist Richard Sandler documenting as the next level of involvement with the performance. One time we went around near Wall Street on a really bleak winter day and interviewed prospective Trump followers. It just so happened that the band Rage Against The Machine and Michael Moore were video shooting an illegal concert on the steps of the Stock Exchange. I was spontaneously included in the video - you can find a quick cut of me with my Trump sign in the ‘Sleep Now In The Fire’ music video on YouTube. I joined Trump’s Exploratory Committee as a supporter and have a letter of thanks from ‘The Don’ himself. I also was invited to his casino, The Taj Mahal, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to attend a Pro Trump Rally. I went with my video camera and videoed interviews with Trump fans. This became the video I edited called ‘The 8th Wonder’. I met Trump in person at the Casino and had him autograph all five of my 8x10s photos in a gold paint marker. He said, “You must be a HUGE Trump fan.” He gave me his contact info and said I could drop him a line anytime I needed help. Years later I asked Donald for help with raising money for a creative project, but my calls were never returned.
The video documentation for the Trump piece is at times rather disturbing; the Trump followers seem almost to be experiencing a kind of religious ecstasy.
I know this because I have personally experienced this religious ecstasy while stalking Trump. When one looks behind the construction of this you see that they are in awe of their oppressor. When you meet a celebrity like Trump in person your mind totally reels and you hallucinate. This is because you have seen their image like 100,000 times before meeting them in person. You are brainwashed. Your mind will struggle to conform the living image to the one you have learned beforehand, in other words you will fucking trip out. It is a strange as hell moment, especially with Trump because he is a pretty weird guy and his hair seems to defy physics. My work about Trump was way ahead of its time, totally prescient to what is happening with the Republican psychopaths right now. I could see Trump as ‘reality performance art’ at the time and he would go on to become reality TV star. I was seeing into the future of America. He has now snowballed into a religious figure for the confused and misinformed right wing here in the USA. I still am interested in Trump as a potent symbol, even though I disagree with what he says.
Your piece ‘Host’ was the documentation of your six-month’s employment at Madame Tussaud’s wax museum on 42nd St (for which you faked a resumé and references in order to get the job). You have said it was a place where reality is ‘hallucinated’ and fractured.
On my first visit to Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum I could easily see that it was a readymade theatre full of great sets and performers. I thought it was an interesting model of a corporatised/commoditized reality. It was dark and repressive and totally Orwellian. It was a hallucinatory look into the future, before reality TV and before the Internet had developed very much. I thought it paralleled Guy De Bord’s Society of The Spectacle - i.e. actual socialising is replaced by mediated representation of socialising. I changed my hair and parted it in the middle and grew a moustache in order to alter my appearance and stay incognito for the project. I wanted to look at the phenomena of celebrity from the side of the working class, and in terms of being just another cog in the spectacle. The job of a Host was to assist and guide visitors through the museum. I created my daily performance situations based upon how I was reacting to the job. I noticed that many of the other Hosts were struggling actors or comedians and I began to riff off what I would see them doing at work. It was rather common to be mistaken by the guests for a wax figure. There was even an actual wax figure of an employee in the museum. A few other Hosts and I started intentionally acting like wax figures in order to freak out the guests. We were responding to the death-like feel of the wax figures by mimicking the deadness. The lifelessness of the wax figures projected into their surroundings and made everyone seem dead. You had to create methods of withstanding this all day in order to not go insane and having your soul sucked out.
Could you elaborate on some of your public interventions at the museum?
Guests were allowed to take as many photos and videos as they wanted in the Wax Museum. I invited my camera people to come to the museum while I was at work. They blended right in. I don’t think anyone who I worked with in the Museum realised what I was doing for the entire six months. I bought my first Nextel flip phone so that I could communicate with my camera people. I developed a cheesy, desperate and very sarcastic Host character so as to draw out reactions from the guests; the video artist Richard Sandler would interview them and capture great snippets. Photographer Susanna Wimmer worked with me to develop a beautiful set of prints, which document how I would play with the guests and pose for photos with the wax figures with them. We looked for people who resembled the wax figures, emphasising the uncanny mimicry between the wax figures and the guests drawn to them. Susanna also documented me scaring the crap out of the guests by posing as a wax dummy. I became a super motivated employee - the kind that is really annoying to work with - so that the other workers would criticise and complain about me. I took the corporate logo of Madame Tussaud’s and in Downtown Brooklyn had it turned into a custom silver pendant. I wore it on a silver chain as a conversation piece. I intentionally gave out the address of the management to guests who wrote in glowing letters about what a great guy I was. These often included photos they took of us together. The letters were pinned-up at work, behind glass, on the employee bulletin board.
The job at the wax museum was, by your account, harsh, and you have stated: "When the working class is given no forum to criticise the workplace they will resort to sabotage - I would regard sabotage in the workplace as critical creativity". Could you expand on this thought?
I think this goes with my premise that criticism is intuitive in human beings. As Hosts we sabotaged the job by acting like wax figures and carrying out other forms of sarcasm on the guests. We hated the guests and the Wax Museum. We had to wear miserable and silly ‘Jester’outfits. We had to listen to the same horrible soundtracks looped over and over in the themed rooms. Everything we did was under surveillance. When workers are unable to communicate their discontent, they will act out. I was trying to create a framework for this acting-out and channel it into a critique of what the wax museum symbolised. The wax museum was a spirit-deadening model of the corporatist worldview, everything for the 1% and only a distracting spectacle for the rest.
DHBJR, the punk rock-inspired clothing company you formed in 2001, began as I understand it, almost by chance, in response to a vintage shirt, which you modified for yourself, that featured a plummeting jet plane? Could you put this into context? One commentator brilliantly suggested that the range of clothing that you produced positioned you as a kind of Martha Stewart anti-Christ.
Yes, well, the character DHBJR was formed when one night about a month after September 11th in New York. I took a striped shirt and appliquéd the shape of a Jet Plane in a clashing stripy fabric onto the shirt. The plane was pointed downward, as if crashing. The patterns created a clashing but attractive dissonance. I went out to a dance club that was playing the latest Electro and was accosted all night long by young people who wanted to know where they could get that shirt. This was rather surprising in New York’s post 9/11 darkness where everyone greatly feared the image of a jet plane. Everything was all fucked up and there was a lot of drugs and partying going on. It felt like you might die anytime, so why not do what ever the fuck you wanted? I pretty much woke up the next day and decided that a DHBJR fashion line would be my next body of work. I shaved my head into a Mohawk and started making my own DHBJR clothes in order to change my whole look and my whole lifestyle. The art world largely turned their back on the work because they did not believe fashion could be art. But it was not the individual garments that were the art - it was the idea of propagating the work and jet plane image into the public via fashion that was the art. I wanted to process September 11th and to criticise America’s escalating reaction to the event. I wanted to make wearable discontent. I thought fashion to be an unpredictable response and medium to use because it was extremely refreshing and exciting and totally new to me. I always had a great eye for strange and interesting fabrics and vintage garments, now I could really harness this skill in a creative and critical way. September 11th created an existential meltdown of the West. Although I never believed in the system in the first place, my whole mental picture of the world was as destroyed
as the Towers. I arose out of these ashes and began making more pieces. I worked on business suits and other conservative attire. I took on the preppy brands that I grew up with like Brooks Brothers, JCrew, Izod and Ralph Lauren. I infiltrated the garments and twisted them with displaced and disembodied tailoring, and of course plenty of Jet Planes flying all over them. The work gained momentum and the collection was picked up by a young store in Williamsburg called Isa. From there, much more sales, press and an award came. I was making a modest living from the work. I designed a t-shirt spinning machine and made my own Jet spin art t-shirts. I usually had some in my backpack and was ready to sell one in any instant - Mr. Entrepreneur!
And I understand that you succumbed to the lure of the lifestyle for a while?
As I slipped deeper into the character of DHBJR, I became more and more the stereotypical young and crazy designer, going out all night and sniffing more and more cocaine and taking loads of Ecstasy. I thought this was all part of the project. I made new friends and dated crazy, hot-as-hell models. By the spring of 2003 I had moved towards becoming a ‘Martha Stewart Anti-Christ’ by designing more for the home. I created a beautiful series of rugs called ‘The Skins Of White Man’ which are made of sweaters cut in half, and appliquéd in a symmetrical and splayed out manner on business suit fabric.
The mirror really shattered with the drugs in March of 2003. I had gone way too far. Burnt out and strung out, I walked out of the project with my life a wreck and health barely intact. I had said what I needed to say with the work, but had totally lost my shit in the process.
‘The Fantastic Nobodies’ is an art-collective you formed with four other artists. In 2004 you staged a two-month social experiment that sought to respond to political events of the period. Descriptions and footage of what transpired suggest that it was a radical departure from the expected arts-workshop scenario. At times it almost seemed to approach Viennese Actionism. Was it as anarchistic as it sounds?
I came up with the name for the first show: Fantastic Nobodies. It expressed what was happening at the time. There was a lot going on that led to the first show. My sister gave me a Polaroid camera for Christmas 2003 and I started documenting all the strange costumes and performances that my friends and I were creating. We were leaving town and going camping a lot. All of the trips turned into performances for each other, often including masks and costumes. A great creative explosion was happening and I was moving rapidly away from the Art World.
In January of 2004 I went to Berlin for the first time with two guys that would be part of the Nobodies. It was a mind-blowing experience. We were in character the whole time. When we got back a really intense artist we knew, Brock Enright, was video-recording a live 720 hour performance situation in his grimy studio. It went on 24 hours a day for a month. It was really fucking freaky at times. One artist smashed a pig’s head, splattering a group of visiting NYU students. Anything could happen. We all spent plenty of time there and it left quite an impression.
It must have felt liberating that all this occurred outside of the established gallery system?
At the time, it made me realise that art needed to move away from society to get freer and deeper. We needed to create our own island of weirdness, our own framework for life to flow into our work. My friends were on the same trip. We wanted to withdraw from a society busy cheerleading for a sick and unjust series of wars in the Middle East. We wanted to probe our psyches and let our inner art-freak flags fly. We became our own Cult, dedicated to our own hybrid form of situational performance. An architect friend offered me a 3000 square-foot space on North 9th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for free, for two months. I invited Brock and the guys that would become the collective to collaborate on a two-month art happening. This inaugural show was totally nihilistic and extremely transgressive. Going to this psychic place and functioning required participants to drop their egos. In its absence, the participant’s ids roamed freely. We worked day and night in a delirious ‘Stream of Consciousness’. Irrational sculptures and paintings created by some were destroyed by others. One guy cooked up two pounds of bacon just to give the place a homey smell. People began sleeping and living in the space. I made a huge bed with bicycle handle bars mounted on the headboard. People had sex in the bed.
There seems to have been a conscious breakdown or subversion of ‘reality’ and a questioning of the intrinsic ‘worth’ of an art object?
As with all the Nobodies collaborations there was extreme intermixing of art and life; this became our trademark. It was hard to identify the boundary between art and life and we sabotaged each other constantly to make it even more confusing. We dressed up in hilarious costumes and paraded around Williamsburg—at once bewildering the public while drawing them into the space. Within the Nobodies, there was a lot of fighting and conflict about the show’s identity. After a few weeks of not editing anything, we decided to divide the space. Each artist had a substantial presentation area/ and wall and the other side was given to a collective mural that had no end. It was continually created and destroyed. We decided to have a series of group events. We had an opening party performance ‘situation’ for the show with live music by the Nobodies and other freaks. In another event, Fantastic Nobody Steve Johnson hosted a drawing class where the Nobodies posed in nude and shocking positions as live models while a group of fifteen or so participants drew what they were seeing. We prompted visitors to interact with the ongoing scenario. Some of the guests got naked and posed as models. It was all filthy and dismal in my memory, kind of like the book Lord of The Flies at times, but the creativity was very rewarding.
Was it a long-lasting project?
The Fantastic Nobodies continued evolving for another ten years. I shot up-close and personal guerilla videos of us working. With the Polaroid I continued to document the mixing of art and life, while being in and out of different character identities. Everyday was Halloween. We would walk into bars and start rearranging the furniture, or alter the lighting at a house party. We streaked in public. One year we had a live gas-powered chainsaw (with the chain removed). One guy went around dressed as Jason from Friday The 13th. I watched as two undercover cops pulled their guns on him and said “Put down the fuckin’ chainsaw, take off that fuckin’ mask”. I couldn’t stop laughing the whole time. We also attracted more serious art-world shows. We created a one-month continuous Picnic Installation and performance at Jack The Pelican Gallery in Williamsburg in 2006. We went international in 2008 and the whole collective spent the summer in Berlin. We produced ‘The Living Frame’, a month-long performance happening inside a giant golden picture frame built into the gallery wall. The inside of the frame housed a stage where anything could happen. It became an experiment: How low could we go? How badly would we dare to suck and still communicate the work? We drew members of the public off the street into The Living Frame. That summer we collaborated with our friends, Berlin based electronic musicians Modeselektor. We performed onstage with them at the Fusion Festival and the Melt Festival in the countryside of Germany in front of 10,000 people. We performed in a music video in collaboration with Modeselektor and Pfadfinderei, a motion media and VJ collective, in our The Living Frame installation. The music video called Art &Cash has over 630,000 hits on Youtube. The Nobodies continued showing back in America with The Living Frame in a storefront space in Williamsburg and also at the prestigious Margulies Foundation Warehouse in Miami, Florida, both in 2009. In 2011 and 2012 we did a series of performance situations with Andrew Edlin Gallery and also at Whitebox, both in Manhattan. Most notable of all this was The Glass Table Performance in which we created an ‘anything goes’ work of art on a massive glass table with a video camera underneath pointed up at the glass. We worked, obscured behind a black curtain, while the audience watched a live video feed projected on the wall. Objects, props, paint, food and bodies and lighting created a visual orgy of creativity all spontaneously composed by the collective. A live soundtrack of non-vocal music created a tempo and work rhythm.
When did you pretend to be Banksy? How did that project unfold?
I posed as Banksy while he was here in New York during his ‘Residency’ in October of 2013. There was so much hype about trying to find the real Banksy that I decided to become him. I wore a black hoody with the name BANKSY written in large letters on it. I wore a cheap wig and a fake moustache and cheap dark sunglasses. I spoke in a muffled and terribly done English accent. I went out to the locations of his daily street art works dressed in my Banksy attire and caused confusion. I did a few other appearances and performances as Banksy. I met New York art critic Jerry Saltz at PS1 as Banksy. He told me that he hated my work. I swear to god I must have really irked the guy because he started publishing a huge anti-Banksy smear campaign immediately after that day. I have hardly any interest in street art but I was fascinated by how the phenomenon crosses into performance art. I was really interested in how people in public projected onto me their own imaginary ideas about Banksy, a celebrity whose face is unknown! The reaction was pretty irrational. Women were smitten and swooned, even though I looked like a creep. People asked me to pose for photos. Cops did lots of double takes, but they didn’t know what to do. Even when people acted certain I was not he, I sensed their hidden uncertainty. The piece ended on the perfect day, I went around as Banksy on Halloween - what a riot it was! I outed the project with AnimalNY magazine. There are a couple of my videos on YouTube. I have often been asked if what I did was officially sanctioned by Banksy. I will say that although I do know people who know him, at this time I can neither confirm nor deny an association with Banksy.
David Henry Brown Jnr with the totally unsuspecting New York art critic Jerry Saltz
In your work you regularly adopt other personae, so that notions of ‘self’ are fluid or dissolved. Does this only happen when you are staging performances for art pieces, or do you find yourself performing ‘interventions’ in your everyday life as studies for potential future pieces?
The boundaries between my art and my life are not clear-cut. From the beginning it has been my intention to break down that wall. Through my sustained experimentation in art I have shifted the light on how I see life. When you engage life from a certain vantage point life will react to your vision. I do catch myself unconsciously reenacting some of my characters in odd moments of day-to-day existence. The intermixing of life and art is an engine for creativity. I use my personal problems to my creative advantage as much as possible. My characters are my life. I’m into multifaceted characters. I don’t believe that there is one self in the psyche and personality. I see humans as part of a continuum of energy. I think the persona is like a Rubik’s cube, that it configures itself to its surroundings. We are more shapeshifters than static objects. More facets equal more imagination. I can only portray myself as so many different things out of a deep understanding of who I am. I never entirely let go of me. I just let the mask do the work; it will rearrange the order of reality around me and force me to create in the moment.
Your performances have garnered some major media attention over the years. Do you think that this exposure becomes another essential element of the performances? As the artist, how would you define your relationship with the media?
As much as I’ve criticised the media (the press), I have also been totally hypocritical and exploited the shit out of it! I think for some projects the press helps to perpetuate the narrative of the work into society. One example comes to mind: In the Vonfurstenberg project I actually editioned a print of the article that was run by The Globe as a work of art. The whole article is very exaggerated by the Globe writer and they even badly retouched my hairline with Photoshop. It was too hilarious to pass up! The media’s response to my work can inform the creative process sometimes. I also have a relationship with producing my own media. In the earlier 1990s we never really considered the recording of the performance or action to be part of the work. It was just for the experience. The documentation was secondary. You had to be there. By the later ‘90s the recording was much more considered. In Red Carpet Rollers the cameraperson became a vicarious live performer. In Alex Vonfurstenberg the project automatically produces its own media. The project samples a system of behavior that intentionally produces photos with celebrities. In the Fantastic Nobodies, we sometimes used a live video feed in our formal shows so we could simultaneously create and observe how the action appears, right on a screen, live. The recording of a moment and a real moment blur with my artistic development over the last 20 years.
Your recent image-based works – which you call Resemblage - are a fascinatingly grotesque exploration of the media and the self, in which you humorously subvert clichéd imagery of fashion, advertising and celebrity by cutting, creasing and folding them and introducing yourself into the pictures. The results are bizarre and surreal; equally comical and horrifying. They seem to allude to elements of identity theory and the fractured self. What are some of your thoughts behind this project?
I’m super excited about this new work. Resemblage is a term I coined to encompass the words resemble and collage. It involves physically putting objects or paint or imagery onto the body so that a resemblance (or call and response) occurs between the self and the iconography. It’s a dialogue between the consumerist landscape of the present and the body, and especially the face. I am continuing with the idea of inhabiting images but spinning it into social media. I am still making masks. I am sometimes taking printed images from magazines and books and twisting them into a physical mask through ripping, tearing, cutting, folding and sculpting. I am exploring the idea of how the mind assimilates everything it looks at into its own self-image. I create an imitation between the imagery and myself, I try to become the advertisement, but it doesn’t really work - thus the humour and the bizarreness. My flesh cannot rationally conform to the demands of the ‘machine’. This is the world I see through. This is what we are forced to see. I do not take it passively. To me Donald Trump looks like a character in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. I inhabit the image to show how I see it. I learned to breakdown the dogma or rules that I built up in the ‘90s by collaborating with the Fantastic Nobodies in the 2000s. The new Resemblage work is primordial, childlike and playful. I challenge the shit out of myself but enjoy the hell out of it. I could do it every day for a long time. I cannot predict its future direction and feel. This is a quality I find to be totally liberating. It is young and rebellious against my words. I don’t want to put too much of a mould around the new work as of yet. It doesn’t follow the rules of my statements anyhow! I work out of my studio, which looks like a crazy lab for art making. I work with readily available Lo-Fi materials. The ongoing work is posted usually as soon as it’s done on Instagram. I also produce very high quality editioned prints of these Resemblage pieces, which are for sale. Follow me at: davidhenrynobodyjr.
Throughout your work there seems to be a desire to subvert existing paradigms in order to reveal hidden truths. Would you say that there is something of a Dadaist approach in the way you go about this? How much does the success of the work depend upon its underground status?
Yes Dada could be the great, great, great grandmother of my work, I suppose. Although the ideas of Dada have passed through a bunch of generations of artists, I really do not think about Dada very much anymore. I hope that I am onto something new. I have no interest in repeating the past. I set out to change art and I will not stop until I’m done for good. The world of today is radically different than the world that bequeathed Duchamp and Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara. I like to think that I don’t look directly to art history for inspiration anymore. I look to the present situation. My father is trained in Operations Research. I think this mentality is a big influence on my interest in social systems. I automatically understand systems-thinking and I instictively look for loopholes to subvert it. This started out as me being a class clown as a kid and proceeded to a very rebellious young man, and finally into a maturing artist. I don’t even know what ‘underground’ means anymore. I have been involved in a whole bunch of different, pretty fucking out there undergrounds in the past. My new work on Instagram cannot be in an underground, because anyone can access the work. The Internet has changed everything.
Our culture is image-obsessed. We seem to be doomed to an ever-diminishing spiral of media-driven ‘instruction’ for the way we live our lives. Do you have any thoughts on the effects of late-capitalism on the individual?
My thoughts on the effects of late capitalism on the individual are in my work. I hope I will leave behind a compelling alternative Operator’s Manual for how to live, through my work and collaborations. I’m not trying to make literal guidelines but rather I want my work to be a catalyst for the imagination, a way to see through these structures.
Today’s art is packaged, sanitised and commodified more than ever before in history. Do you think there is any escape from this? How do you view the role of the artist in the present climate?
A friend gave me a t-shirt recently that says ‘Stay Weird’. I think this means actually ‘stay human’. We are now surrounded by - and thus inevitably compare our lives to - that which is portrayed by computers and machines. For a creative artist the only escape is long-term persistence and resistance in one’s humanness. Only then can you make what you want when you want. Artists confuse ‘not giving a shit’ with being free. I can see this confusion in the huge glut of terrible abstract paintings being made these days. I see most of the young artists desperately trying to mimic overly clichéd very, very academic ideas of art making. It looks totally oppressive in its vibe. It’s pretty shocking in a not so good way. I don’t have anything against selling and I love to sell my work! But it looks all too commercial, too fast. I would like to see many more artists attempting to challenge what art can be instead of mimicking what is has been already. For me, I see that we are living in a time when you can fabricate a fake persona online very easily. It’s like a whole new horizon for the notion of identity and a cool as shit challenge for my work. I think it posits lots of questions about who we really are. This is what I am seeing. I try to take the ugly questions, create understanding, and laugh at it all. I aim to take oppressive structures and turn them into mind-expanding playfulness. I think this is my role in the current climate.
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