We begin this video in a graveyard.

We end the writing part of this in the same graveyard. You will not get it. But then, we don’t make jack shit for you. So what IS mainstream art.

The video (above) has no name. It has no stars. It has no creators. It is satire, but it is only satire to us. Satire is protected speech. It would not be satire to you because you do not know us, and even if you knew us, you would know of us, because the reality outside the context of performance is that we would never allow you to know us.

Why would we do that. What’s in it for us. To know you. We are aware of you. It is enough. Often, it is more than enough.

The satire is the pretense we are simply normal dudes. We look pretty normal. Pretty mainstream. Just guys and hoodies.

We know who we are, and we know what we are.

Rarely, the New York Times will do a cover piece on an edgy artist.

They are not aware of doing this, but they do attempt to know the artist by fitting him or her into the mainstream framework they understand.

Usually, they render something truly unusual into business as usual.

On the artist, Caveh Zahedi:

“But he’s so lonely,” says so much.

As someone who makes videos with (and about) at-risk boys, I wonder if I am creating at-risk artists instead, and transformation is unobtainable. The only hope I have doing edgy work is the appearance of more complex themes the boys themselves touch which gives us permission to see work such as Caveh Zahedi’s a voice in the wildness of art.

Art is one thing for the audience. Art is another thing to people making it. The audience is always repelled by this editorial thinking, but art is about what you can get away with.

Zahedi is teaching us that real art goes ironically beyond what you can get away with, and elevates artists to accept the challenge where art has its own voice, speaks for itself, and the artists who have created it are transformed into an audience, too.

This is what makes Zahedi’s work come alive in the face of a status quo of transgressions that would rein us in. We even put poetry on Twitter because being that naked filters reality, in much the same way Zahedi actually creates the filters we employ to recreate the next clip of a reality that makes illuminated sense as it trips down rabbit holes. Zahedi trips with us hand-in-hand even though he would have no idea we exist. Cultural awareness is not the point.

Surviving the rabbit holes is the point, the theme, and the inner dialogues we find there. This renders Zahedi an inspiration. We have set out to apply an ethos to sex work. We dig graves, too. Usually our own.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/magazine/caveh-zahedi-documentary-film.html#commentsContainer&permid=103387497:103387497

Tim Barrus

Tim Barrus Blog

Posts tagged with performance-art-new-york-times

Tim Barrus in the New York Times