(no subject)
Every day, just as we expected from the start, several hundred people pull up to the pumps wanting gasoline, despite the sign that towers over the street, declaring "Gasoline not sold here" in foot-high letters to all who have eyes-just underneath the even larger and more colorful sign announcing what we do sell, namely "CANOLA OIL". It's hard being an installation art project.
To be sure, we expected confusion, disbelief, annoyance, and even rage from the "customers", but I believe we all expected to take a dismissive attitude toward it. After all, our goal was to shake people up. But I am surprised at how annoying it is, and how early in a twelve-hour shift emotional fatigue sets in. I'm not sure words can express. The worst part is my secret realization that the customers have every right to be angry. If the pumps, the lights, the towering sign, all those symbols we set out to deconstruct, have any meaning to them, then from their perspective we are lying to them by using those symbols to mean something else. Well, we all knew we'd be lying to people when we showed up. I just hadn't experienced how gut-angry it makes people.
It would be easy to become resentful of M. H., who came down to experience the installation for about fifteen minutes on the first day and hasn't returned since. I believe it's enough for him to know that the canola oil station exists, to see it in the papers, and to give the occasional hopelessly esoteric interview about it. This is his personality. Once he has breathed life into the project, it is no longer relevant to him. The project is particularly interesting to me, though: I can't tell if it has any purpose anymore. I had come to think of this whole project as a social statement. It's disappointing to realize it's just some Andy-Kaufman-esque psych-out. That sort of thing always appealed to me before, but this time I have a deflated, why-am-i-here feeling that I can't shake. It's quite the existential dilemma. And it gets worse.
The last thing I could ever have expected is for people to pull up in homemade, canola-oil-powered vehicles and buy ten or twenty gallons of our oil, quite seriously, for fuel. We've had four different people do this now. It gives me the feeling I'm living on a different planet than I thought I was. I clean their windshields, dutifully maintaining the charade. I then hop in my gasoline-powered Honda Civic and go buy more plastic bottles of canola oil from the Shop 'n Save so we don't run out.
And as I'm doing this, I think: I have unconsciously conceived of this project, all along, as doing art to people, planting an elbow firmly in the ribs of the sheep who never think much about the gas their car consumes or the real cost of what they're burning. Now I find there are people using my project to "do art" to me. The tables are turned. Their project encompasses ours completely. Whether the media knows or not, whether the other grad students working with me on this even care or not, I know we have lost some unspoken game of relevance. By turning our collective fantasy into reality, they have punctured it. Great art is transformative. I am transformed.