Naked Shorting

I admit, I’m always at something of a loss when I try to figure out how performance artists actually make a living, as opposed to just generating press and gasping gaping (or gaping gasping) from us provincials. Other than Karen Finley and the cucumber – now that I get as a money-maker. I mean, who wouldn’t want to put down their hard-earned bucks to witness such a bold performance?

I suppose, like most of those involved in things-creative, performance artists just keep their day jobs. Take Bob, the locksmith-lottery ticket guy on Washington Street, from whom I bought 35 keys today – the front door of the building that harbors the Writers’ Room of Boston was changed out, and we need to rekey all of our members (ah, the joys of being the president-by-default of a teenie-tiny non-profit).

Bob started out life as a musician, and graduated from the Berklee School of Music. To put himself through college, he bought out a locksmith, and the rest is history. For almost 40 years, his day job has been selling keys, lottery tickets, and cigarettes.

By the way, I tested every one of those 35 keys, and they all worked. So Bob’s now my go-to when I need a key. He’s already my go-to for lottery tickets, but those don’t seem to work so well. I barely ever get one number to match. But the next Power Ball prize is $160M, and I’m feeling lucky – and for that kind of payout, I can get past how humiliating it’s going to be when I win and am exposed as the kind of sucker who actually buys an occasional lottery ticket, even though I know the odds. I look at it as a couple of days of “what if” fantasizing – in my head performance artistry, as it were.

Not that Bob’s a performance artist – that I know of – but having another job is what creative types do, and I suspect that’s true for the crew that just got arrested for some naked shorting on Wall Street the other day. (Source: WSJ Online.)

Zefrey Throwell – am I the only one asking whether Zefrey’s parents actually named him Zefrey, as opposed to something more pedestrian like, say, Jeffrey? Kind of like what someone might ask if I called myself Zaureen, no? Or maybe they were hippies – was the organizer for a:

5-minute piece, which he said was a social critique of Wall Street and involved dozens of volunteers acting out the motions of people at work. He said it was a rehearsed performance "with the very specific aim of public education."

I’m all for social critiques of Wall Street, not to mention political and economic ones. I mean, I do understand that The Street is necessary, plays a critical function, keeps capital markets moving, etc. And I’m not going to be demonizing, or dimonizing, all Wall Street denizens. But what can I say? I’m not partial to cigar-smoking, braces-wearing (as in braces-suspenders, not braces-orthodontia), blue-shirts-with-white-collars and cuff-links kind of Gordon Gekko-ish guys. Who – win-win – tend to return the favor.

The performance piece involved 50 folks portraying the different types found on Wall Street started at 7 a.m. and resulted in the arrest of three of the participants - according to The New Times these were two men and a women who were playing a stock trader, a janitor and a dog-walker. Throwell, who portrayed a hot dog vendor wasn’t one of those busted. But his intent was never to:

…provoke any confrontation with the police.

"I have much bigger fish to fry, that being the financial institutions of the U.S. and the world," he said.

The Times was better (and presumably more sympathetic than the WSJ) about those bigger fish to fry. The piece was:

…“an educational attempt,” [Throwell] said, “to lend more transparency to Wall Street, a street which is so damn mysterious.” Drawing on the common fear of appearing in public naked, he hoped to create “an absurdist Freudian nightmare” of nude employment: “Wall Street, exposed,” as he put it.

Throwell had done a one-man version of this piece in the San Francisco financial district a few years back, when he was:

…eking out a living in a cubicle for the first time, as a customs broker in San Francisco: “One of the most Kafkaesque jobs I’ve ever had,” he said, “like entering the void for eight hours at a time. It was horrible. I’d never been enslaved by labor before.”

I know how he feels, as I felt exactly the same way when I worked at Wang Labs in the late 1980’s. In fact, I had Raymond Carver’s poem, “Kafka’s Watch”, pinned to my cubicle wall there. I don’t have the poem in front of me at the mo’, but there was a great line in which Kafka, after a couple of hours toiling at the insurance company, “shakes the watch in disbelief.”

Been there, done that.

Throwell no longer toils in the cubicle. In addition to his (I suspect unpaid) work as a performance artist, he’s a photographer and filmmaker, and runs a tiny 6’ x 2’ x 2’ gallery in the bowels of Rockefeller Center. But it sounds like his heart’s in performance artistry:

For “New York City Paints Better Than Me,” he donned a white jumpsuit and crawled the streets, becoming a canvas for a composition of trash and slime.

The Wall Street project – dubbed Ocularpation – was staffed by fellow performance artists, and members of a nudist group.

Though Mr. Throwell hoped that the public would connect the nude Wall Street workers with the economy, most did not make that leap. Faced with a woman stripping off her bra and panties as she talked into a headset about ordering a case of Champagne for her boss, or with a man, all his bits dangling, leading an invisible aerobics class on the sidewalk, passers-by simply whipped out their camera phones.

Yes, to be a performance artist is to be misunderstood.

But thank god for those camera phones!

We may not all be performance artistes, but, dammit, we’re all photographers now, aren’t we?