Some things were just not meant to happen

1 October, 2012 Occupy Wall Street, Zuccotti Park, NYC

In two separate instances this week all of the art that was to be exhibited on the 21st at Munch Gallery has been lost or stolen. I had entrusted the box to the care of a friend who had left it with his apartment building front office, folded and wrapped. In breaking the news to me of its loss he had sent a text to my phone asking for an early morning meeting at Union Square. Upon my arrival his first words to me were, "So how do you feel about the bad news?" "What bad news?", I asked. "The news that your box was thrown out by my building staff", he responded.

I took a minute and went to sit down on the granite steps to the park. Rushing through my head were all the possible ramifications of this event - without the box, does any of the work at all make sense in a gallery setting? How was it that I could save this piece from the riot police during the Zuccotti Park raid in November of last year, only to lose it to sheer negligence in a Gramercy Park apartment building? Why wasn't the package marked? Why didn't building staff know of its importance? WTF? I was furious with the friend and dumbfounded by his total lack of responsibility in the matter.

Answers to too many questions would lay pending the next day events. A piece of history was gone. And too many other opportunities with it.

The next day I spent the better part of the day on the computer doing general office work and trying to make a plan B for the gallery show. It wouldn't matter.

I had left my mobile studio with the Occupiers at Union Square, a place where it had been safe and watched over since our arrival in March of this year. Apparently, a rain had fallen in the early evening and Occupiers had packed up and moved their tables to dry shelter. My mobile studio, containing the remainder of the artwork was left behind and not to be found when I returned to the park. It remains lost along with the original box and may be decorating a city landfill somewhere. Nicely I hope.

This week also another friend reminded me of the myth of Sisyphus, the mythological Greek character who was doomed to pushing a boulder uphill only to see it roll back down again, over and over and over again. "The struggle itself ... Is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus as happy", wrote Albert Camus. These past 10 months with Occupy and 4 different boxes, all lost to one end or another, compares to the myth of Sisyphus. Maybe it's time to think truly out of my box and find a more productive way to spend my time.

The Art Police - Up to Their Old Tricks, as Always

A cardboard summons

Back at Union Square for just less than two weeks Occupy had found a more resilient and friendly park for Occupation but the NYPD kept odd stride in enforcing whatever laws they could just make up with the help of the Federal Parks Department - rangers that actually have jurisdiction in the actual park and not the sidewalk surrounding. With an age-old Occupy hobby of making snarky signs, Occupiers found themselves battling with police (figuratively of course) over cardboard. Yes. Cardboard.  New rule says you can't have any cardboard on the ground - cardboard signs that is. Never mind that other park people, let's say chess players and other artists can have cardboard as part of their displays - it's the Occupiers who can't have any cardboard. And since I was wearing an Occupy t-shirt, and painting funny cardboard signs, that meant me.

Expensive speech

And so, in line with too many artists from the past, I found myself with a summons for 'unlawful vending' ($250), a charge that shouldn't stick because artists are not technically vendors and instead are just exercising their first amendment rights to free speech - be it artistic speech - yet we are able to take donations for the work. But that's not how the boys in green (Federal Park Rangers) want to see it. And so the routine went like this: One ranger came by and told me that all art needed to be 12" off the ground, and I said, "I can do that" - so I got some boxes and put the 'art' on the boxes. Then another ranger came by and said the 12" wasn't good enough, that the work must be on a table. And so I said, "I can do that", and proceeded to fashion the boxes into the shape of a table. A cardboard table. "Whoop Whoop!" That's the sound of the siren on the ranger-mobile. This time ranger Charlemagne was on the street adjacent to the sidewalk where art can be shown and motioning for me to come to his truck. Once there he tells me that 'table' meant a portable table with folding legs and assures me that he can produce documentation to support the claim. I argue that the cardboard legs of my table fold, but that of course, gets me absolutely nowhere.

Looking at the ticket above you'll see that the ranger had a choice of fines to assess, from $25 to $250. He chose $250. Bad cardboard, bad cardboard. And so on May 15th I will go to the court and argue the charge. Other artists at the park assure me that it will be dropped on the grounds of my art being a protest and that my medium specifically is cardboard. We'll see. In whatever case, I will waste 1/2 a day and if the officer shows up, he will be paid an overtime rate for his trouble. I, of course, will be paid nothing + the nothing I got for setting my display up in the first place. This is the price we all pay for living in a police state, a state where law enforcement can illegally enforce any law they dream up (whilst being paid a living wage) and the citizens must pay to defend themselves against the state.

Enter Robert Lederman. "Lederman is perhaps best known as the artist who painted hundreds of satirical portraits of NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Giuliani had Lederman falsely arrested, but never once convicted, more than 40 times between 1994 and 2000. The Giuliani portraits appeared thousands of times in the media during the Giuliani era and were a constant subject of controversy during those years. Lederman was featured in the documentary It’s Giuliani Time. His successful lawsuits made it legal to sell art on the street without a license, in NYC Parks without a permit and to protest without a permit on the steps of the U.S. Capitol."

As the officer was giving me my ticket I asked him if he was aware that there was a jobs crisis in America these days (probably the most notable underlying reason for the Occupy movement) and that he was stopping me from making even a street artist living. No response. I then told him that he could go home assuredly that night and tell his children how he had made America a better country that day. No response. Of course.

No doubt a host of headhunters and possible work contacts will be reading this post and wondering what this guy is up to doing street art activism (I spent the week sending out work queries) - and to them I say this: "You want to inspire the troops? You want your staff, or clients, to see what survival and creativity and persistence of freedom of speech and commerce looks like in real terms - in street-cred terms?" Show them a picture of me sitting on the ground painting, surrounded by 20 officers. That photo will get the company a whole lot more respect than a nice picture of me in a suit doing a Powerpoint presentation - no matter how damn good I might look in the suit.

Occupy Wall Street Returns to Union Square

Photo: Julia Reinhart

Welcome drummers and clowns and street performers of all varieties - and yes, real activists and protesters too. And with the six month anniversary for OWS on March 17th at Zuccotti park, Occupy was back in business - until the cops kicked them out again on that Saturday night. The Raw Story covers things here with police violence marking the otherwise peaceful protests and bringing back to mind the government oppression of the last days at Zuccotti Park. And so after a full day on the 17th I left at midnight, only to see the protesters physically removed later on TimCast's livestream and an OWS move to Union Square. 

Capt. Ray Lewis

Monday I arrived at Union Square to a more than festive atmosphere. It was like the police had given OWS a gift - a new park to haunt. Befuddled park rangers and police tried their best to deal with a morning crowd, much more spirited than they might have been used to, but somehow in their eyes, you could see they were just waiting for word from above to drop the hammer yet one more time on the Occupy movement. Captain Ray Lewis, a retired Philadelphia police officer was there, just as he had been at Zuccotti, and a whole new generation of New Yorkers seemed to delight in the idea that the fun had finally reached their neighborhood. Occupy was back. At least in spirit.

Throughout the week, police presence had increased and on Tuesday night, the ritual of barricading the place, a Zuccotti staple of American freedom, had returned. But this time, it was the police barricading themselves into a small portion of the park and forcing the protesters onto the sidewalk, a legal sleeping area in NYC, to look back on the cops and taunt them from the outside. A video of protesters "Cop fishing" with a donut shows the Occupy movement has still not lost its sense of humour. Later in the week, I designed the logo above, based on the idea that people were trying to Trademark the Occupy Wall Street concept but didn't have a logo. I thought this solved the problem nicely - to sort of occupy the legal concept of owning intellectual property. It seems things will just get more interesting as this American spring gets under way.