fear boxes: art critic's perspective

from the nytimes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/18/arts/design/18FEAR.html?8hpib

tasty quote:

"The kid is clueless, basically," a police official said on Monday,
demonstrating remarkable acumen as an art critic.


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By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

By strange coincidence, New York City's crime rate was reported
yesterday to be the lowest among the 25 largest cities in the United
States, New York ranking 197th among 216 cities with at least 100,000
residents. This puts the city below squeaky-clean Provo, Utah, but
(thank goodness) still above Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.

At the same time it turned out that those 37 black boxes with the
word "Fear" on them, which mysteriously turned up attached to girders
and walls in the Union Square subway station last Wednesday, were, as
you may have guessed from the start, an art project. The boxes, which
spread panic and caused the police to shut the station for hours and
call in the bomb squad, turn out to be the work of Clinton Boisvert,
a 25-year-old freshman at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, who
surrendered Monday to the Manhattan district attorney's office, which
intends to prosecute him on charges of reckless endangerment.

So now it is left to hapless, fledgling art students, fresh from
Michigan, to keep up the city's gritty reputation for crime. At least
New York can still take pride, as the nation's cultural capital, that
even our misdemeanors are works of art. Take that, Rancho Cucamonga.

First things first. Clinton, what an idiotic project. As the saying
goes, art this bad ought to be a crime. "The kid is clueless,
basically," a police official said on Monday, demonstrating
remarkable acumen as an art critic. The state of public and political
art has now declined to the point that plenty of people who follow it
simply presumed last week that what happened at Union Square must be
a work of art, not a fake bomb by a terrorist or a threat by a union
member contemplating a transit strike. In the 1960's, people might
have guessed it was a loony labor activist; in the Son of Sam 70's, a
loony loner. Yesterday's loony loner is today's Conceptual artist.

Mr. Boisvert couldn't be reached for comment yesterday. His lawyer
has told him not to talk to the press for a while. Trying to imagine
what he intended, I can only guess that he might say the boxes
bearing "fear" were meant to make tangible, as sculpture, what New
Yorkers have felt since 9/11 - to give physical form to prevalent
emotion. But that's art mumbo jumbo. By provoking fear, the work
trafficked in emotional violence. Carried to an extreme, violence as
art leads to the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen's notorious remark,
which he tried desperately to retract, that the attack on the World
Trade Center was "the greatest work of art that is possible in the
whole cosmos."

Mr. Boisvert's inspiration was evidently Keith Haring, who made his
reputation in the 1980's drawing happy, cartoonish dancing figures
and barking dogs in chalk on the black paper pasted on unused
advertising spaces in subway stations. He was a graffiti artist,
which made him a harmless, beloved petty criminal. He did not leave
dangerous-looking black boxes in crowded public places. Mr. Boisvert
is an admirer of his, Barbara Schwartz, one of his teachers, told me
yesterday. She stressed that his project wasn't meant to be a prank.
She insisted that he was a very serious young man. The work was
intended to get people talking, she said.

Well, it did. She said she had no idea he was planning it. Her
assignment for the freshman foundation sculpture class was to make a
site-specific work, part of the curriculum for years. A couple of
students in the class shot films on subways. Mr. Boisvert had said he
was going to paint Fed Ex boxes black and arrange them in a room in
the school. Ms. Schwartz had reserved a room for him, she said, but
he mentioned nothing about "fear." He said he wanted a dance floor.
She thought he was planning a performance.

Clearly, he changed his mind after he spoke with her. "It was my last
class of the semester and everyone was presenting what they had done,
and his was the last project before the break at 2 o'clock that
afternoon," Ms. Schwartz said. "He put out snapshots he had taken
around the subway station. He said he had taken the boxes to Union
Square that morning and placed them in plain view of everyone. He
said he had painted the word `Fear' on them.

"We were all saying, `Wow, how interesting,' but I looked at him when
it dawned on me. I said, `Clinton, you didn't leave them there, did
you?' One of the other students then said the trains were no longer
stopping at Union Square and two others said there was a bomb threat.
I said, `Oh my God, do you think this has something to do with your
project?' He looked stricken. He never imagined what would happen."

Ms. Schwartz consulted her superiors at the school. Mr. Boisvert
consulted a lawyer.

He spent a night waiting in a holding cell for arraignment. His work
thereby became performance art. The history of modernism is littered
with artists whose outrageous provocations have made headlines; only
an elite few have made it into jail. Mr. Boisvert joins that company.

A night in the slammer probably caused him at least as much fear as
he caused straphangers.
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