The New York Post has an interview with the performance artist who calls himself "Capitalist Man." His gimmick is that he carries around a see-through briefcase, which he claims contains $500,000 in hundred-dollar bills, and he's trying to find someone willing to buy it for a million dollars.
The price tag, he says, is "$500,000 for the cash, $500,000 for the concept." Any interested buyer gets to examine the bills before purchase.
Capitalist Man says that if someone does buy his briefcase full of money, his profit will go entirely to charity. But so far, he has no takers.
This weekend in New York City, artist Pope.L organized a “group crawl" along a 1.5 mile route from Seravalli Playground in the West Village to Union Square. 140 people participated. Pope.L wasn't one of them. He "walked alongside the crawlers for the duration of the performance, offering support and chatting with viewers."
Over the years, however, Pope.L has personally done a lot of crawling... turning it into an artform. From his wikipedia page:
eRacism, a project that Pope.L began during the late 1970s, included over 40 endurance-based performances consisting of “crawls”, varying in length and duration. In one example titled Tompkins Square Crawl (1991) Pope.L dressed in a business suit and crawled through the gutter in Tompkins Square Park, New York, pushing a potted flower with one hand. Another example titled The Great White Way involved a crawl which stretched over 22 miles and took five years to complete. For this performance he donned a Superman outfit and strapped a skateboard to his back. The crawl stretched the entire 22 miles of Broadway, in New York City.
Finnish performance artist Pilvi Takala got permission to pose as a trainee for a month at the accounting firm Deloitte. What she wanted to find out was how people at the firm would react if she did absolutely nothing... if she just sat at an empty desk all day staring into space. Predictably, the office workers grew increasingly perplexed by her inactivity, as can be seen in the video below.
We see the trainee sitting at her workstation in the consultants' open-plan office space, or in the tax department library all day doing nothing. One of the videos shows her spending an entire day in an elevator. These acts or rather the absence of visible action slowly make the atmosphere around the trainee unbearable, forcing the colleagues to search for solutions and to come up with explanations for the situation...
What provokes people about this ‘non-doing’, aside from the strangeness, is the element of resistance. The non-doing person isn’t committed to any activity, so they have the potential for anything. It is non-doing that lacks a place in the general order of things, and thus it is a threat to order. It is easy to root out any ongoing anti-order activity, but the potential for anything is a continual stimulus without a solution.
I'm guessing her performance was inspired by Herman Melville's classic short story, Bartleby the Scrivener.
When San Diego performance artist Claudio Cano does her act, much of the audience isn’t aware that she’s actually performing, because her performance consists of dressing up as a Latina maid (whom she calls Rosa Hernandez) and sweeping or mopping the floor of art galleries. She notes that people in the galleries will often complain to the front desk about the maid cleaning while they're trying to look at the art, unaware that the "maid" is part of the art.
Cano also sometimes performs outside, where, in her maid outfit, she does stand out more. But even then, she notes, people rarely pay much heed to her, seeming to go out of their way to avoid her.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.