DaDa at LongJohn Silver’s Seafood Shoppe
PHP: This actually raises another question. What you do is always meticulous, carefully thought out, has—I don’t know if I should say an æsthetic—a concept. But it’s also a political intervention and a political statement. I’m curious what originally drove you.
MB: I was always inspired by artists who were engaged in political action, whether historical or contemporary. When I was learning about art I was always much more enthusiastic about groups like the Dadaists than I was about, say, the Abstract Expressionists. I was interested in how creative people were engaging political realities that they were faced with. I think that dates back partially to growing up in the suburbs, where there was this monotonous, relentless uniformity that came from this sort of consumer society. For me play time was to go to the local strip mall down the road and shoplift. I mean really! Not that I needed to; it wasn’t like I didn’t get fed at home. It’s just that there was nothing else to do. To entertain yourself you had to be inventive. So we used to go to the Longjohn Silver’s Seafood Shoppe dressed as pirates and demand food, you know? Draw our plastic swords and sort of get violent in Longjohn Silver’s.
PHP: So you really have been doing this since you were a little kid.
MB: Yeah. I mean, that was how we would entertain ourselves: go to the mall, and one of us would get in a suitcase. The others would drag the suitcase through the mall, you know, and the person in the suitcase would make noises. Just stupid shit that at the time I didn’t realize actually was in a sense political and was rebellion.
But it was always æsthetic, too. It was always about creating a moment in which an audience was confronted with something that interrupted everyday life. So then when I started learning that there was this whole history of people doing it for much more developed purposes, with a more acute sense of purpose, I got really interested.
And my father was a Holocaust survivor. Both Andy’s and my grandfathers died in the Second World War, and I think we both grew up with our parents teaching us a certain amount of mistrust in authority and a questioning attitude about what was going on around us. It’s like “Don’t believe everything you hear.” And if a person in authority tells you to do something, think twice before you agree.
PHP: You mention the Dadaists. Of course the old saw about them is that they were reacting against this bourgeois culture of conformity. Is there still a certain amount of that conformity that we need to continue reacting to?
MB: I think a lot of people now are reacting against consumer culture. They’re reacting against the world dominance of capitalism as a way of organizing our culture. You know, the culture of capitalism is so pervasive, and it necessarily disregards certain forms of practice, like creative practice, because the things that make money are the things it supports. And it makes sense; it’s a machine that maximizes profit—at the expense sometimes of value, of traditional forms of gathering value and exchange that previous to capitalism were the way people communicated. So in a lot of ways we’re now in a moment where I think more than ever there’s this rebellion against that uniformity.
In some ways it’s quite complicated, because there isn’t any particular ideology that people are falling in behind. The political artists that I know identify in different ways. A few say “O.K., we’re anarchists,” and they go to the big anarchist conferences—as big as they are—and a few will identify as communists, but a lot just identify as being opposed to what we have now in favor of some kind of true democracy.
There are a lot of people who are working toward the same goals and don’t really have a place where their work is supported in a traditional art market but do have lots of places where their work is supported either through audiences or through granting agencies and things that aren’t really about a market but are more about maintaining a social mandate for art.
