FArtist captures a Brooklyn studio that looks like a cross between a ransacked Toys R Us and a serial killer's hideout david henry nobody jr. He is planning the first investigation of his career. Suspended by a headless dummy hanging from the ceiling by its heels is a set of photographs taken at the turn of the century showing Nobody, then 30, and a former US president.
All snapshots are signed by Donald Trump in a gold pen (no one provided the pen). They will be the centerpiece of a future survey of New York by a New York artist. This was before selfies and filters. The photos are candid, unprofessional and taken by random strangers. No one likes stray elements, the sidelong glances of unknown heads wandering into the frame.
For the artist, they inspired a project that began as a joke of sorts. “What would happen if Trump were president?'' 24 years later, no one is still wondering if it's okay to laugh.
Born David Henry Brown, Jr., Nobody got his big break as a performance artist in New York in the late 1990s when he collaborated with British artist Dominic McGill. carpet roller. The pair wore black ties and rolled out the red carpet in a van to spots around Manhattan, including Trump Tower and the Plaza Hotel. Then they waited for crowds to gather and word to spread about what and who was coming. People will ask why you are standing there and what you are doing. No one commented, neither did Mr. McGill, but the rumors started anyway. Was it the Queen of Spain? Was it Trump? The idea was to “create failures that no one would come across in order to turn crowd members into temporary social critics.”
When the two talked about work, Trump's name often came up. None of them had jobs until Trump gained attention on the reality show “The Apprentice,” which is said to have laid the foundation for his presidential bid. But Trump was still appearing in cameos in movies everywhere, on TV and in the tabloids.
“The idea of meeting President Trump as many times as possible was kind of a running joke among me and my friends,” he says, making everyone laugh. “He was the cheapest guy ever. He had a huge impact on me. He always had this team around him and walked like this,” Nobody said, hunching his shoulders and walking Franken around the studio. he said crouching like Stein. “He's totally American kitsch. I thought he was a cheeseball. I didn't know he was a fascist yet. But behind the cheese is fascism.”
In 1999, no one was able to spend time with the future president of the United States six times. The first one was with magician David Blaine. “Buried alive” At Trump's mansion. Eventually, Trump began to recognize him. “You must be a big Trump fan,” Trump told him. “Oh yeah. The biggest one,” no one answered.
Trump had already been spreading rumors that he might run for president. “It seemed like a parody, so we thought we should make a real President Trump sign and show it to the public,” everyone said.
In early 2000, no one “campaigned” for Trump outside the New York Stock Exchange, but the performance was documented by street photographer and filmmaker Richard Sandler. No one was listening to music while he was chatting with the crowd. Filmmaker Michael Moore was making the video for Rage Against the Machine Sleep in the fire now. A person in the crowd waving a “Donald J. Trump for President 2000” sign is briefly seen as lead singer Zach de la Rocha sings, “And cover the rest with greed.” do not have. He was never credited by the band or Moore for his appearance. reddit forum And among them washington post Several years after the incident.
The people's reaction to his sign surprised him at the time – it proved prophetic. “There was a guy who said to me, “Yes! He intends to run the country like a business. ”Some people were obsessed with him. ”
As an artist, no one would argue that Trump's image was, and still is, appealing. “At the time, I was so into the whole Donald Trump thing that I wanted him to run. It seemed so ridiculous that if he did that, I would eventually I thought America might turn inward. But no, that never happened,” no one says. “The more ridiculous it becomes, the less we look within ourselves.”
No one's next project has ever proved more controversial or more prescient. Posing as Alex von Furstenberg, the son of fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, he barged into a celebrity party and attacked Bill and Hillary Clinton, Ivana Trump, Sean Combs, Sarah… He was photographed with Jessica Parker and others. He managed to maintain the fiction of what he calls “a wonderful nobody” for a year, and soon became fascinated by metastatic celebrity culture and its glamor.
“What I've noticed when I meet a famous person is that I have hallucinations because I've seen them thousands of times in mediated forms, such as videos and photographs,” he says. “It's almost like hallucinatory information.”
No one was interested in the celebrity itself. “They're generally very boring,” he says. But at the opening of Nobody's von Furstenberg show, he realized he had been tapped into a dark vein. This exhibition made the news and caused a scandal. At the beginning, someone threw a pie in his face and the lies and disinformation began to spread. “People thought I was a billionaire, and the whole crowd was fake, and the cameraman was fake. And then I realized I was looking into the heart of America, and it was just… It was a delusion.”
In some ways, everyone says that this time was simpler and less overwhelming. The stars he saw in real life could be glimpsed on TV, in movies, and in magazines, but he didn't always have access to the celebrities who now dominate our lives. “Back then, you went to the movie theater, you walked out of the theater, you walked around, and for a while your whole life was like the movie theater and the movie you just saw. But the Internet actually made it 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. We're doing it around the clock and we don't even realize how much it's affecting us.”
For a long time, the reaction to von Furstenberg's work overshadowed Trump's. “I didn't really think about it until he took office in 2016. Then I got a bunch of people calling me and saying, 'Oh my god, you were predicting the future. ’” he says. “And we did it before The Simpsons.” The Simpsons episode “Bart to the Future,” which references the Trump presidency, was released in March 2000, a few months after the Nobody project began. It was broadcast in May.
No one these days primarily creates portraits that are somewhere between video and photography. Giuseppe ArcimboldoCindy Sherman and Nickelodeon. In “Mental Marionette with Dancing Dogs,” a red-eyed, white-haired baby doll strapped to his head “plays” the drums and pulls a string of hot dogs attached to the artist. A Nobody wearing a wig is staring melancholy at the camera. They reached his nose. In “Hamburger Helper,” no one's black eyes stare out from a giant mitt made of ground meat. Food plays a big role in many jobs. Assorted milk, cereals, energy drinks and vegetables. Is that peanut butter? i hope so.
“The new work explores the key behavioral architectures that determine how life with a mobile phone determines how we are present and lived in real life, not just using a mobile phone. It's so much more than that. When I talk to young people now, they basically treat me like I'm on social media in real life. “I feel like I'm looking at it as an image and caption,” he says.
These works explore some of the same themes that pulsate through his earlier work, such as transformation, image and reality, how we project images of ourselves, and how we create images of others. We are dealing with Even the cheesiest images (literally, in Nobody's case) have power.
“This kind of cheap kitsch is very conservative. It's like a conservative person's art, and it has weird ethical and religious fantasies in it. Take Trump Tower, for example. That represents the American Dream for people. I'm not saying they're always wrong. I mean, I don't want them to think they're just mean leftists. It’s an incredibly powerful myth that he created, right?”
