Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Performance Peace (reprise)

Episode Date: September 12, 2022

911 final reprise. George Bush celebrates the anniversary of 911 with some new ‘dark’ paintings. Your host marks the occasion with some high stakes performance art. Plus un-learned art lessons from the $150,000 banana.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Performance Peace. A couple of weeks ago, I was walking in Soho when I came across a commotion. The police were wrestling a man in paint-splattered black clothing outside of what looked like an art gallery. Two other guys, also dressed in black, were standing on the sidewalk, filming the whole thing. What's going on? I asked.

That's the George Burgess Gallery, one of the guys replied. They're selling Hunter Biden's paintings, the second guy added. And so our buddy wrote Daddy War Crimes on the wall. Because Hunter Biden here is helping the laundromat for his papa. That's why Daddy War Crimes was the words on the wall. Our buddy's kind of famous, the first guy said. What's his name, I asked. Rod Webber?

Doesn't ring a bell, I replied, as the cops tossed Rod Webber into their police car. Well, he also goes by the name Epstein Didn't Kill Himself. I replied as the cops tossed Rod Webber into their police car. Well, he also goes by the name Epstein Didn't Kill Himself. I gasped. I do know that guy. Art Basel, Miami, December 2019. The last time the world's ultra-rich and powerful gathered together in person before COVID shut everything down. Rod Webber, Mr. Epstein didn't kill himself. He was there.

Art Basel, Miami, is the most important and most prestigious art fair in the world. This is the fair that keeps most of the big-name artists and galleries in business. Every December, the wealthy, the super wealthy, and the insanely wealthy descend upon the Miami Convention Center to shop for art. The dealers at Art Basel Miami call opening night the running of the billionaires. Every December, billionaires run amok on the floor of the Miami Convention Center, competing with each other to buy the most expensive and talked about art pieces for sale. We just can't seem to peel our eyes away. In 2019, there was only one piece that mattered.

A banana. A banana duct-taped to a wall. It's mocking the art world. That's what Maurizio Catalan does. Maurizio Catalan, the artist, called his banana duct tape to the wall, Comedian, and it sold on opening night. Actually, Perrotin, Catalan's gallery, sold three editions and two artist proofs of Comedian on opening night. Two of the editions and the artist proofs sold within minutes for $120,000 each. So Perrotin upped the price of the remaining edition. That one sold a few minutes later for $150,000.

News of the banana and its sale price spread like wildfire. The following day, the Perrotin booth was mobbed with Mona Lisa-sized crowds who came to Instagram and TikTok the banana. Around 2 o'clock, a man took the banana down from the wall, peeled it, and put it in his mouth. 150,000. That's good. This, too, was Instagram and TikTok. My name is David Datuna. I'm artist too.

I'm a performance artist and this is my another performance. David Datuna, the banana eater, said the comedian called out to him to respond. We respect Mauricio, but it's art performance, hungry artist. Art is about the question mark, he later added. Thank you, very good. Art is about the question mark, he later added. With my performance, I put my question mark after Catalan's question mark. This is how artists talk with each other. We talk by art. This was his art, and this was my performance.

This was not vandalism, he insisted. See you after jail, guys. Technically, this was true. The Perrotin Gallery wasn't selling a banana duct-taped to a wall, but rather the concept of a banana duct-taped to a wall. The only physical material involved was a certificate of authenticity and a 14-page instruction booklet that explained how to install and maintain the comedian. According to the instructions, the banana was to be replaced every seven to ten days, and it was to be duct-taped to the wall 175 centimeters off the ground. In the end, the gallery decided not to press charges against David de Tuna.

But they didn't duct tape another banana to the wall either. The following morning, they explained their decision on Instagram. Apologies to everyone who will not be able to participate in Comedian, they wrote. The crowds are just too big, and they are endangering the other works of art in the vicinity. But all day, Sunday, December 8th, the Perrotin booth was once again mobbed with crowds of people who came to Instagram and TikTok, the banana-less wall. This is when Rod Webber showed up. And using red lipstick smeared on his face, he wrote, Epstein didn't kill himself, on the blank wall.

Somebody's standing on the wall, so you're going to have to double-time it. Can I introduce myself? This, too, was photographed in Instagram. Break it up, you are. You have to really... D-24, the banana booth. By December 2019, Epstein didn't kill himself

had become a rallying cry for conspiracy theorists of all political persuasions. QAnoners, anarchists, socialists, and Proud Boys all got behind this meme because they all believe that our world is run by elites

that can kill a man even if he's locked up in a federal jail cell. It's unclear if Rod Webber personally believed Epstein didn't kill himself, but he most certainly believed in the meme. A month before Art Basel Miami, he went to New Hampshire. And he tried to get on the presidential primary ballot as Rod Epstein didn't kill himself Weber.

My name is Epstein didn't kill himself Weber. Rod Weber is also a performance artist. And he insisted that he'd come to the Perrotin booth to add another question mark to the question mark that David de Tuna had added to Catalan's work the day before.

Well, I mean, you've kind of set precedent here. Yes, we have, but it's not an open free fall. Oh, it's not? No. You didn't press charges on David, right? At this time, security got involved. Do you have some identification on you, sir? I doubt it.

Who are you? Unless you have a security. Rod Epstein didn't kill himself. Weber spent the night in jail. Back in 2019, I was totally fascinated with this story. I downloaded all the Instagram posts and TikTok videos I could find. I read all the interviews with both David DeTuna and Rod Epstein Didn't Kill Himself Weber. The banana affair seemed like the perfect framing for an episode on performance art. But then, well,

I got distracted. Over the holidays, another story caught my attention. Some virus bubbling up in China. I don't think I gave the banana another thought. Until a couple of weeks ago, when I found myself standing across the street from Mr. Epstein Didn't Kill himself, himself. I stood there, deep in contemplation, as the police car drove away. Rod Epstein didn't kill himself, Weber's buddies chased after it. And then, someone else who'd also witnessed this confrontation rolled up. It was an older man pushing a shopping cart. You all got the wrong gallery, he said. Who, me? I snapped. I'm not with those guys. Well, then they got the wrong gallery. Sure, the sign says GB, he said, pointing at the George's Burgess Gallery sign. but the George Bush show, that's in another gallery down the street. What, I asked, George Bush show? George Bush is going to present his new paintings for the 20th anniversary of

September 11th in the spot where the Vilberkin luxury swimwear shop used to be. Come on, I said laughing. Then he pulled out a sheaf of papers from his shopping cart and handed it to be. Come on, I said laughing. Then he pulled out a sheaf of papers from his shopping cart and handed it to me. The cover page was marked top secret, and it had the gold presidential seal of George W. Bush on it. I flipped through the pages. It was an exhibition checklist, six to seven pages of high-res, medium-sized thumbnails of oil paintings. I recognized Bush's clunky figuring and drab palette, but not the subject matter. These images were explosive. Death, destruction, sadness, loss, fear, and terror. George Bush made these? I asked. Look, he said, pointing to the image of George Bush standing on a pile of rubble holding a bullhorn. Underneath was the title,

Self-Portrait as God's Messenger. Many of the images contained scenes of unspeakable violence and gore. One was titled Flight 93. It depicted the inside of an airplane. A few passengers consoled a woman holding a decapitated child. In the aisle, another group of passengers stood ready to march on two dark-skinned men armed with knives, standing guard in front of the cockpit. Where did you get this? I stammered in disbelief. From the trash outside the empty Vilberkun store. Someone must have thrown it out by accident. But I've been watching the place, and they are definitely turning it into an art gallery. They keep hauling in all these packages, painting size packages. Okay, but how do you know they're bringing in these paintings, I asked. He jabbed his finger on one of the thumbnails.

I saw this one. It wasn't wrapped up. The canvas was shaped like an eyeball. It was an image of the twin towers collapsing onto a crowd of firemen, policemen, and civilians decked out in business attire. The title was The Evil Eye of Mullah Omar. I saw this one. I saw them bring this one inside. When? I asked. This morning. I flipped back to the front page of the document. There were a number of contact emails and phone numbers. Can I buy this from you? I asked. Sure, a hundred dollars, he replied. His shopping cart was filled with swimwear and chopsticks, boxes and boxes of chopsticks. Okay, I said. wait here. I just need to go to the ATM.

I ran across the street into the bodega. I took $100 out of the ATM. But when I came out, the man was gone. There was no trace of him or his shopping cart. I walked down West Broadway to where the Vilberken store used to be. The windows were covered with brown paper and ancient advertisements for luxury Speedos. I knocked on the door. No one answered. I stood around for an hour, unsure of what to do, hoping the man with the shopping cart would return. But he never did. And so I went home. On 9-11, I was sleeping when my girlfriend phoned to tell me a plane had just hit one of the World Trade Towers. I went back to sleep, but she phoned again a few minutes later and said another plane just hit the other tower. I got out of bed and turned on the radio.

The only thing anyone seemed to know for sure was the planes had both departed from Boston. Perhaps, I thought, it was a group of crazy Red Sox fans. I know that sounds absurd, but back then I lived in Boston, and Bostonians were always talking about how much they wanted to kill the Yankees. Back then, I knew as much about baseball rivalry as I knew about terrorism and Al-Qaeda. After a while, my friend Chris came over, and we went downstairs to the People's Republic. The bartender turned the TV on for us, but he didn't seem to care much about what was

going on. I believe we spent the entire day in that bar, watching the towers fall again and again. When I woke up on Wednesday, I decided to document this historic moment. I had a radio show at the time. It was called Your Radio Nightlight, and over the next few days, I tried to capture the fear, the paranoia, and the craziness for my show the following Sunday. I even took a trip to Boston's Logan Airport to investigate my theory about the Red Sox fans.

But the security guards refused to let me into the terminal. In the end, I secretly recorded my conversations with a number of my friends in order to get their true feelings about 9-11. I called the episode Hijacked. I'd never done that before, and I've never done it again. My friend Tim didn't speak to me for over a year. For me, 9-11 was much more than a rude awakening. 9-11 opened up my eyes and forever changed how I saw my country,

its history, and its future. And after 9-11, it was easy to see that George Bush was dead set on refreshing the American tree of cruelty. He launched two wars. He ordered American soldiers to torture and enemy combatants to be locked up forever without due process. George Bush gave vast new powers to America's spies and corporations. Thanks to George Bush, Americans lost their rights to privacy and their labor protections. And the American people were totally on board with all this cruelty. We cheered on the wars, the Patriot Act, the compassionate conservatism, the transformation of employees into independent contractors.

But most of all, we cheered for the enhanced interrogations. I'm still convinced that without the Abu Ghraib photos of American soldiers torturing their prisoners, George Bush would have lost his re-election bid in 2004. But he won. He won big. George Bush soundly defeated the reality-based community. It's so much easier to talk about this today. Thanks to Donald Trump, millions of Americans now intuitively and viscerally understand that America has become, and always was, the cruelty-based community.

But in the aftermath of 9-11, this truth was much harder to communicate. George Bush also used 9-11 to weaponize patriotism. So all criticism was anti-American, traitorous. Even the rejection of techno-optimism was blasphemy. The Bush years were extremely, extremely difficult for me. This is why I took a pilgrimage to the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009. I went not to watch the swearing in, but rather the swearing out. I'll never forget standing there in the crowd in the freezing cold, screaming with joy as Bush's helicopter soared off into the distance. Ever since that day, I've been harboring a delusion. A delusion that George Bush would one day be held accountable for his crimes.

And when it was announced that the U.S.'s exit from Afghanistan would coincide with the 20th anniversary of 9-11, my delusions intensified. But the coverage of the Afghan pullout brought me back to my senses. Many of the reports never even mentioned George Bush. At first, I imagined him driving around on his Texas ranch, shooting rifles up into the air and whooping triumphantly. He did it. He escaped the judgment of history. Surely Bush was ecstatic. But then, a week ago, as I was staking out the former Vilberkin luxury swimwear store, watching men in black hauling large canvas-sized packages into the space, I realized I was wrong.

George Bush is a heartless and petty man. He's incapable of seeing his erasure from the story of America's disastrous 2 trillion 20-year misadventure in Afghanistan as a blessing or a gift. For George Bush, this deletion is the ultimate insult. Why else would he choose to mount a show of his 9-11 paintings in a pop-up gallery near Ground Zero? He's angry that we no longer remember his cruelty. He wants to make sure we never forget again. It was a hacker who first tipped the world off to George Bush's artistic ambitions. In February 2013, Marcel Lehel, the original Guccifer, hacked into George Bush's sister Dorothy's AOL account. He discovered an email from the former president with 13 image attachments.

George Bush was proudly showing off his first paintings with his extended family. Guccifer, in turn, shared these paintings with the world. Mean girl bloggers and muckraking critics had a field day. Bush's renderings of dogs and cats were roundly mocked. If this had never happened, George Bush most certainly would have moved on to another post-presidential hobby, Crochet. Skeet shooting. But the cruel ridicule motivated him to stick with it. He hired a slew of art instructors and hunkered down in his studio. There's a Rembrandt trapped in this body. Your job is to liberate him,

Bush shouted at Gail Norfleet, one of his first teachers. It was Cedric Huckabee, another early instructor, who came up with the idea for Bush's first big series, Portraits of Wounded Warriors. Portraits of wounded former soldiers Bush had met during mountain bike rides and open golf outings organized by the Bush Institute. In 2017, Bush debuted Portraits of Courage, a traveling art exhibit and book containing 66 oil portraits and a four-panel mural.

Four years after the hacking, George Bush dared the world to laugh at him again. Portraits of Courage got tons of press coverage, but serious art critics barely glanced at the paintings. Bush was miffed. No one seemed to notice the most courageous and most wounded warrior at the center of his whole thing. For his next project, George Bush decided to up the stakes. He decided to go for woke. He decided to paint immigrants. He spent three years painting 43 portraits of famous and ordinary people who had all immigrated to America.

Again, he organized a traveling art exhibit and a book called Out of Many, One. Bush's plans for the exhibition and the book release were totally upended by the coronavirus. There were no parties and no gala dinners. Like many artists, George Bush was heartbroken that his new work had to compete for attention with a global pandemic that was killing hundreds of thousands of Americans with no end in sight. He invited a number of prestigious art critics to visit his studio so he could show off his paintings and talk about them. But once again, the critics didn't engage. The only bookings he got were for network TV, the morning shows, and the weekend morning shows.

In the video for CBS's Sunday Morning, you can see that George Bush is unhappy. You can totally see that he's frustrated and confused as to why his woke posturing isn't resonating. The portraits that you have done are beautiful. Thank you. But how does it change policy? It doesn't, but it's a part of hopefully creating a better understanding about the role of immigrants in our society. Mine is just a small voice in what I hope is a chorus of people saying,

let's see if we can't solve the problem. But there was something in that CBS Sunday morning interview that resonated with me. In the studio, tucked in the corner behind a giant portrait of a man of indeterminate ethnicity, I saw the corner of another canvas. A distinctly rounded corner. The corner of an eyeball-shaped canvas. When news of David de Tuna's Art Basel Miami art performance broke, a number of critics suspected that the stunt had been coordinated. This wasn't true.

The two men didn't even know each other. But it's understandable why this interpretation spread. Maurizio Catalan duct-taped a banana to a wall and David de Tuna took it down and ate it. De Tuna's performance expanded the aesthetic aura of Comedienne. It brought more attention and more value to the work of art. In the future, when museums like the Guggenheim, who now own one of the editions, displays Comedian, they'll need to employ multiple security guards to ensure no one else eats their precious banana. Now, even though the wall Rod Epstein Didn't Kill Himself Weber attacked was bananalous,

his lipstick traces were still a threat to the artwork's aesthetic aura. Rod Epstein Didn't Kill Himself Webber's performance threatened to connect the comedian with a coarse and nasty meme. Rod Epstein Didn't Kill Himself Webber's art performance threatened to devalue the very concept of a $150,000 banana duct taped to a wall. But in order to truly understand why Rod Epstein didn't kill himself, Weber went to jail while David DeTuna did not, well, dear listener, we must re-examine these two performance pieces. We must take a closer look. Rod Epstein didn't kill himself, Weber

accused Art Basel Miami of having him arrested because they rejected the political message of his art. This is not true. Even if Rod Epstein didn't kill himself, Weber had scribbled the lyrics to the famous Louis Prima song. Yes, we have no bananas today on the Perrotin wall. He still would have spent the night in prison. Rod Epstein didn't kill himself. Weber went to jail because of his presentation. When you watch the video of David the Tuna eating the banana, the first thing you notice is how calm he is. There are no sudden movements. He doesn't even speak with his mouth full. He looks like an art professor, the kind of art professor who guest lectures at top tier universities and design schools. But when you watch the video of Rod Epstein didn't kill himself Weber, writing Epstein didn't kill himself on the blank wall,

the first thing you notice is the red lipstick smeared all over his face and his hands. He moves with the jerky gait of a dangerous person. He looks like the kind of guy who asks you for spare change and then berates you for having a flat ass when you say, sorry man, I don't have any cash. But the most problematic aspect of Rod Epstein Didn't Kill Himself Webber's presentation is the beard. He's got one of those thick, scraggly, pubic hairstyle

beards sprouting from his chin. The red lipstick makes it look totally revolting. Art Basel Miami had no choice but to haul him away. The 20th anniversary of 9-11 was fast approaching. It was time for me to act. I had to destroy George Bush's paintings before he unveiled them to the world. And I had to destroy their auras as well. Disposing of the paintings would be easy. On eBay, I found this antique clown seltzer bottle, and I filled it with a bright red viscous ink.

I would hose those paintings down and bleed them to death. Dealing with the auras was going to be more difficult. This is why I decided to storm the pop-up art gallery dressed as Rod Epstein Didn't Kill Himself, Weber. On Amazon, I bought a black t-shirt, a black baseball cap, and a black sanitary mask, all emblazoned with the phrase, Epstein Didn't Kill himself. I made my very own pubic hair beard and attached it to the inside of my Epstein didn't kill himself mask. Thanks to COVID, I had confidence that I could pull this disguise off. I also constructed a performance cam. Using a chiropractic neck brace and a selfie stick, I built a holster for my phone.

I was able to set the angle just right. My new beard would feature prominently in every shot. Not even the concept of George Bush's 9-11 paintings could survive my performance. On Tuesday, September 7th, I put on my costume and took a cab to the former Vilberkun store in Soho. The windows were still taped up, but this time the door was slightly ajar. I took out my clown seltzer bottle, adjusted my fake beard and mask, yanked open the door, and ran inside. It was a pop-up. Bras, bustiers, and balconettes hung from the ceiling for sale.

Mirrors of all shapes and sizes covered the walls. They even had an eyeball-shaped mirror. Fuck me, I shouted. A saleswoman wearing a busty corset mistook my fuck me as an outburst directed at her, and she started screaming for help. No, no, no, don't scream, I cried, pulling down my mask. This is performance art. But then my beard, my pubic hair beard came loose. The saleswoman climbed up onto her desk. She was shrieking now, pointing at the fake beard on the floor

Totally hysteric I doused the fake beard with the clown seltzer bottle The saleswoman fainted I caught her just before she tumbled into the giant puddle of red ink Then, a well-dressed couple came in from the street What's going on here? What happened to the Vilberkin store? They closed, I replied, as I eased the saleswoman into her chair. This is a performance art space now. The couple harrumphed and walked out.

I was right behind them. And as I raced down West Broadway, shedding my Epstein-didn't-kill-himself mask and hat and t-shirt, I could hear, in the distance, the distinct sound of a shopping cart and laughter. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Performance Peace. This episode was written and produced by me, Benjamin Walker. Special thanks to Andrew Calloway and Mathilde Biot. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.