Photo by Jake Dobkin
Another day, another ridiculous performance art piece brought to our attention by the New York Times. Today, we're introduced to Tania Bruguera, a Guggenheim-fellowed artist who has taken it upon herself to spend a year living like an illegal immigrant in Queens, setting up shop in a cramped apartment in Corona where her real-life illegal immigrant roommates "just don't get it."
Bruguera, whose previous stunts include eating dirt and serving trayfuls of cocaine to gallery guests, says she "wanted to have the anxiety" of being poor and isolated, so she cut off her assistants in Cuba and France and vowed to live in abject poverty for a whole year. Then she received a $85,000 grant from the nonprofit Creative Time and the Queens Museum of Art to set up an advocacy group/art project called Immigrant Movement International, operating out of a former beauty supply store. Bruguera has been shocked at the requests she gets from the immigrants who do find her services: “They don’t want any art at all,” she said. "They want very concrete and mundane things," like English classes, jobs, and legal help. Imagine that!
We're not opposed to immigrant advocacy groups that actually provide tangible, practical services (like this one or this one). But Bruguera's stunt calls to mind another frivolous couchsurfing-centric performance art stunt that the Times wrote up a few weeks back, and it's sort of destroying our faith in art. What ever happened to the glory days of that giant yellow bear?
