credits: Settlement Heart

Fever

It is catchy.

Yazmany Arboleda’s The Assassination of Barack Obama & The Assassination of Hilary Clinton returned yesterday for a 24 hour showing in a metal and cement storefront across from the NY Times Building on 40th street.

I was early to the opening. Maybe a dozen people stood around inside and upstairs, climbing stairs flanked by a big black cock. A DJ played songs. We drank juice.

Yazmany was thrilled. The Secret Service had come for him the day before while he was setting up the exhibit, masking all the art in brown butcher paper and taking him downtown to sit in a room where they asked him questions about his childhood, how many assault weapons he owned.

credits: Settlement Heart

Arboleda

Yazmany is small and fast. Colombian. Pretty teeth and eyes. Active hands. He does not have any weapons.

“I told them it was about the assassination of CHARACTER,” said Yazmany. “It was wild. They held me for hours.” (Read his blog).

From the beginning, when The Assassinations were pulled from two Chelsea galleries after extensive legal pressure, the art as been about the media’s coup of Clinton and Obama’s personalities. The banal racial and sexist insights unsaid, but which lurk just beneath Katie Couric’s smirk, one thing on her mind: How big is Barack Obama’s cock?

Eventually we went to stand in front of the storefront where letters in the window read, “The __________ of Barack Obama & The ____________ of Hilary Clinton,” the Secret Service having their way with all mention of “assassination.” Something was going on at the NY Times building. A great crowd had assembled at the end of the block, scattered police lights, yellow tape.

credits: Settlement Heart

Prevailing Winds

Storefront on 40th Street.

From where we stood at the end of the block we could only see the crowd, heads back, mouths agape, tourists and New Yorkers watching some great unfolding way up on the Times’ facade. We could not see what they were looking at. We did not move to try and see what they were looking at.

The crowd itself was the event. The coverage of the event has become the event. Yazmany understands this very well and people will come to see how well he understands it very soon.

Apparently someone was climbing the NY Times building. Apparently he was the second person to do it that day.

How strange and fitting for both of these men that they moved away and away, up and up, away from the crowd and coverage they were causing, diminishing into the sky and metal, eventually lost to all eyes, taken away so that only the coverage remained, man, the spark, gone into the brightness of our modern day-for-night.