Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - The Fake in the Crowd (False Alarm! part iv)

Episode Date: May 21, 2018

  The power of the fake person, multiplied! Curator Karen Patterson puts a fake outsider artist in the museum and artist David Levine puts on a museum show about the fake crowd. We hear from a 1937 radio play that featured both Orson Welles and the first fake crowd ever broadcast on the radio. And backstage on our Radiotopia live tour, your host turns to fellow ‘topes Roman Mars and Helen Zaltzman for help deciphering an unexpected laugh.  PLUS!!!! The long awaited return of ToE’s original extra: Peter Choyce.  

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called A Fake in the Crowd. I've just returned home from the Radiotopia Live East Coast tour. I performed a piece on AI and deep learning with my AI plant. The plant I've talked about here on the show. The AI plant that I've been training to understand the relationship between the real and the fake. Every night on stage, I would ask it to show me how to fake it till you make it. And every night, the crowd would laugh. But here's the thing. This line isn't funny. The audience laughter totally stressed me out.

Halfway through the tour, backstage at the Lincoln Theater in Washington, D.C., my Radiotopia comrade, Roman Mars, tried to calm me down. In a crowd, irony is funny.

You always let them laugh. So I embraced the laughter. But I still had a question. Were these laughs real or fake? I turned to one of the funniest members of the Radiotopia family, Helen Zaltzman, host of The Illusionist, to help me make sense of this mystery. I think if you can extract a truth from a falsehood,

then you get a laugh, because people laugh when they recognize things. So I suppose it is making the false look like the epitome of true. Which is also, I suppose, how a lot of political messes are made. Which one's more funny? Which one's more funny which one's more funny uh humor often relies on a kind of interplay between truth and falsehood and not knowing quite which way you're supposed to interpret what you're saying whether you're supposed to interpret it as literal or non-literal and at the moment people's brains are so scrambled they can't decide and therefore

they don't know whether or not to laugh. And because they've been hurt and betrayed before in recent years, they might be opting for not laugh as a safer option. The only funny thing now is Daxons dressed as fire engines chasing each other around on YouTube videos. I just can't trust any other thing. You're going to have to attend that French clown school. Helen's so good running the podcast help desk, I asked her about my other dilemma, the one at the heart of this new series I'm doing on The Theory of Everything.

Do I need to retool the show? Do I need to stop making programs with both fiction and non-fictional elements? What the fuck does the crowd really want? I mean, how do you feel if you just say true things? Do you feel like it's a real breach of your principles? It's not a great breach of my principles. I think I'd just be bored. Why is the truth so boring? Well, I think you could say that this is definitely a moment in time when the truth has become more exciting. Yeah, but is the truth more exciting because it contains more falsehood?

Ladies and gentlemen, this broadcast comes to you from the city. We are here on the Central Plaza. We are well off to the eastward edge. The crowd is enormous. There might be 10,000. There might be more. The whole square is faces. This is the opening of a radio drama that went out live from the Park Avenue Armory in New York City on March 4th, 1937. The radio play is called Fall of the City. It was written by the poet Archibald MacLeish, and the role of the radio announcer is played by Orson Wells. The announcer is reporting live from the city's town square. The crowd is awaiting the arrival of a conquering dictator in his army.

This is the first time a fake crowd is being used on the radio. Now they are rising. Now the whole plaza is rising. Fathers are lifting their small children. The boom fans on the platform are motionless. There's no sound but the shuffle of shoe leather. Now even the shoes are still... In order to create the acoustical atmosphere of a large city square, the young radio engineer Irving Rice hired a group of 200 college drama students to play the crowd of 10,000. Here's how he did it.

At a cue in the script, the crowd was given a signal to cheer. When the persons around the microphone stopped cheering, the recordings of their own voices were then brought in. These sounds took about three seconds to reach the microphone. And with careful timing of both onstage sounds and offstage recordings, the aural effect, as interpreted by the listeners, sound exactly like the cheers of a great crowd echoing in the distance. At the end of the play, we see through Orson Welles' eyes the true face of the conquering dictator. Yes, yes, he's there on the end of the street in the shadow. We see him. He looks huge, a head taller than anyone. Broad as a brass door.

A hard hero. Heavy of heel on the brick. Clanking with metal. The helm closed on his head. The eye holes hollow. He's coming. He's clear of the shadow. The sun takes him.

They cover their faces with fingers. They cower before him. They fall. They sprawl on the stone. He's alone where he's walking. He marches with rattle of metal. He tramples his shadow. He mounts by the pyramid. Stamps on the stair. He's alone where he's walking. He marches with rattle of metal. He tramples his shadow. He mounts by the pyramid, stamps on the stairway, turns. His arm rises. His visor is opening. There's no one. There's no one at all. No one. The helmet is hollow. The metal is empty. The armor is empty. I tell you, there's no one at all there. There's The clothes have no emperor. It is rising. His arm's rising. They're watching his arm as it rises. They stir. They cry. They cry out.

They are shouting. They are shouting with happiness. This was 1937. Archibald MacLeish hoped to warn America about the totalitarian forces on the march in Europe. MacLeish's next play, Air Raid, was also a warning about the civilian costs of total war. Like Fall of the City, it's set in an unnamed metropolis, under attack from enemy aircraft. Air Raid, by Archibald MacLeish.

Air Raid went out on October 26, 1938. It was broadcast from a rooftop, mixing genuine sounds of New York City with air raid sirens, machine guns, explosions, and screams. The police fielded calls from frightened New Yorkers who could see the radio engineers acting out the air raid from their windows. They could also see there was no real attack. Orson Welles doesn't perform in Air Raid, but we do have a photo of him visiting the rehearsal. He was curious about the mechanics. Four days later, on October 30th, his new radio play made its debut,

a broadcast called War of the Worlds. It's possible that Florence arrived into Wisconsin around 1927. Karen Patterson is a curator at the Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and she's telling me about the artist Florence Hazard. It's believed that she arrived to Wisconsin from France after serving as a nurse during World War I and really wanted to escape France and to start a new life. Karen's just put together a new show that collects some of Florence Hazard's paintings, art objects, and previously unknown ephemera. There's archives, there's works of art, there's dolls from the WPA.

And so really this exhibition is piecing together all those components of Florence's life and knitting it together in a cohesive story. When do they put it together that everything is real except Florence? I don't know when that moment happens. I think that's really up to the person to piece it together. Sometimes they'll walk through and see this evidence and they want to believe.

They want to believe in Florence. They want to believe that there was a beautiful woman that immigrated from France to Milwaukee and worked in this city for 20 years and then disappeared. They also want to believe that the John Michael Kohler Art Center discovered her. And how do you answer when people ask you what's real? Because I'm a curator, you know, with a capital C, and I have this kind of loaded title. People really look at me suspiciously.

And they say, you know, I spent a long time in that exhibition. Like they're really waiting for me, the final person to say, you know, that wasn't true, right? They really need me to say that. So even when I'm describing to you about Florence, I'm using words like it's possible or it's likely or I imagine that Florence did this and that and whatnot. I learned that technique from Iris Hausler. Iris Hausler is the real artist who created the fake artist Florence Hazard. So I kind of peppered the exhibition with a little bit of like, and then Iris made the work kind of thing. There's every once in a while there's hints to Iris's practice.

Were you sad that you had to do that? Yeah, of course. I mean, of course. Yes, I was really sad that I had to kind of reveal Iris, but at the same time, I am here because of Iris. Iris Hausler has been constructing exhibits about the lives of fake people since the 1980s. But her fake artist series begins in Toronto with Joseph Wagenbach in 2006. She created over a hundred sculptures, rented a house, and presented herself as the official Wagenbach archivist. The show opened to massive acclaim, but when the Toronto media outed her as a hoaxer, locals erupted with anger. But that didn't stop Iris Hausler.

She's still creating fake artists and real art. Last year, Karen took a trip to Toronto for a studio visit. What I was drawn to is how she spends so much time creating a story with objects and artworks that there's no way you wouldn't believe it. It's just so intricate. And I also really liked how she brought in all these collaborators from different experts from different fields to tell this story. And I thought, whoa, that's so tricky. I love it. And she's so mischievous. And I was just feeling the need to feel mischievous. And I was wondering if a museum is ready for mischief. Karen Patterson is actually the curator who commissioned the series I did last year on Wisconsin art environments,

real amazing places like Fred Smith's Concrete Park and Dr. Evermore's Forevertron. The Kohler Arts Center and Foundation, the institution she works at, has made a name for itself as a champion of creative individuals and creative practices that in most cases are unrecognized and marginalized by the official art world. I am totally blown away by what she's pulled off. An exhibition on a fake outsider artist. I really want to put the artist at the center of the conversation. Put the creative process at the center of the conversation. Put the creative process at the center of the conversation and just kind of eschew any idea about categories or privilege or authority. Like, let's just listen to what the

artists believe and what they're up to and see if that can give us some clues as to where we're at as a human race and not necessarily where we're at in the art world. And you needed to find a fake artist to do this. Of course. I mean, that's the beauty of being unhinged, right? Like that's just like a little bit of a great perspective. Sometimes the reality is not giving us the answers. That's the kind of tenacity that artists have, that they're not going to rest with what they see every day. They're going to conjure another reality to make it so that we can see ourselves. The monologue, hard to describe, is the kind of interior monologue of a fake person

who's gotten isolated from their fake crowd. That's artist David Levine telling me about the fictional person he created for his new show at the Brooklyn Museum called Some of the People All of the Time. Over the course of the show, this fictional person will be portrayed by a number of actors of different ages, genders, and ethnicities, performing a 45-minute monologue six to eight times a day. Somehow they've gone into some sort of fugue state and came out of it isolated in this museum gallery in a white jumpsuit. And they don't know who they are, and they don't know how

they got there, and they don't know how to get out. And very slowly their memories start coming back. And you get a sense of this whole biography of somebody who basically lived their entire life renting themselves out. They come in in this white jumpsuit looking like custodial crew and they have a long conversation about an artwork on the wall with anyone who'll listen. But then they realize they're obviously not convincing anybody. They say, okay, I'm not really a maintenance worker. I'm an artist. But I interviewed a lot of maintenance workers for this piece. Just kidding. I didn't interview any. I'm just making it up. I took some classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade. Just kidding. I'm not even an artist. I'm actually

a re-performer hired by an artist for a reenactment of Miro Lederman-Ukulele's maintenance art. Just kidding. It's not even art. I'm a scab. Non-union labor masquerading as art. David Levine is a legal fiction. Kidding. Actually, I am art. I'm animatronic and extremely expensive. Actually, I'm a hologram. I'm made of light. Actually, I'm made of space. Actually, I'm made of worms. Actually, I'm an actor, transposed from the theater to the space of the gallery. I work a lot with affect. David Levine's exhibition kicks off with a lecture on the history of the fake crowd. Wednesday night, May 23rd, 7pm at the Brooklyn Museum.

Let's see if we can fill the seats with real DOE people. Here's a short excerpt from the lecture. The accusation of the fake crowd has been around as long as the concept of the real crowd. As soon as acclimation became a measure of power or influence or commitment, the opposition found it necessary to delegitimize that commitment, usually by reference to incentive, as in, they're only getting paid, or by reference to coercion, as in, they're only clapping because they have to. Witness, for example, the Emperor Nero's Augustiani, an elite corps of 5,000 soldiers trained to cheer on his musical performances. Nero is said to be the first to

hire a crowd, but we know this mainly through Suetonius and Tacitus, two virulently anti-Neronian historians who had their own reasons to question the sincerity of his support. This is what I mean when I say the accusation has been around as long as the crowd itself. Of course, in some cases we can be sure that the fake crowd phenomenon is real. For instance, the CLAC in 19th century Paris, a mafia of professional clappers who could make or break a theatrical production. They consisted of professional clappers who could make or break a theatrical production. They consisted of professional clappers, professional laughers, professional criers, and professional booers.

We know that applause, laughter, and tears can be infectious. The clack, of course, lived on in the 20th century in the laugh track. And we know there are today real crowd rental agencies. There's Rent-A-Crowd in the UK, Crowds for Rent in the Southwest, and of course, Crowds on Demand, your home for protests, rallies, advocacy, audiences, PR stunts and political events,

services available nationwide. And I just want to say, as an aside, you can find some real nuggets on the Crowds on Demand website, including blocking new union restrictions. Crowds on Demand was hired by multiple large non-union firms to push back against new regulations in a deeply labor-friendly state. We successfully lobbied the legislature and labor commission to push back proposed labor regulations. We created two organizations with associated websites, one conservative site focused on the impact unions have on drastically increasing government spending, and one liberal one focused on the rationally discriminatory and sexist policies of many unions.

We provided phone bankers and constituent lobby visits associated with the two organizations to lobby conservative and liberal lawmakers and policymakers respectively. Within two months, the proposed regulations were off the table. These agencies, as promised, supply crowds for anything. There's the self-promotion experience offered by Crowds for Rent. This package is designed for the person who always wanted to experience hundreds of people chanting their name at any location or event. Life doesn't get any better than having a large crowd of people chanting your name and exclaiming to the world what a great person you are.

This package can be customized to be a flash mob or simply a crowd with signs chanting whatever you desire. There's no request that is too great for us to accommodate. Followers can be customized to be a flash mob or simply a crowd with signs chanting whatever you desire. There's no request that is too great for us to accommodate. Followers can be bought from companies like Devumi or from art projects like Constant Delart's 2014 100,000 followers for everyone, where he gave away followers to artist friends of his, making them look hotter than they were. And the art version really clarifies the paradoxes behind all this. Whether it's protesters, ralliers, or spectators, the destabilizing thing about fake crowds is that they're not there for the right reasons.

But when you think about it, what are the right reasons? What does the right reasons even mean? And why does being there for the right reasons matter so much? What would disinterested participation even be? Is something like that even possible? Today, fake crowds gather mostly on the internet, comment boards, social media platforms, and podcast review sites. But after talking with David, I realized that the biggest fake crowds have no longer made it necessary to have analog fake people, given the proliferation of fake identities and all the problems that virtual crowds can cause. And I think one thing that's really odd is that the inconvenience, the more important actual physical testimony to commitment becomes. And the more important actual physical testimony to commitment becomes, of course, the more important it becomes to be able to fake that too.

So I think that accounts for the proliferation of these kind of things because no one trusts comment sections anymore, right? Like I got all my friends to comment, to like big up my last Amazon book. So what would really mean something would be people turning up at a city council meeting. Therefore, it becomes much more important that you'd be able to supply those people. City officials say this man stood out.

This case is clearly common sense. Because for three minutes, he told the city council what he later admits was a lie. So I'm just a concerned citizen coming up here and speaking to you. But he's not. He's a self-described struggling actor from Beverly Hills who goes by the name of Prince Jordan Tyson.

And he now believes he was involved in a secretive new industry where actors are hired to try and sway public officials. In this case, a construction project in Camarillo. He asked us to be boisterous. Now, if you give the grant, guess who's responsible? Some of those lines, he says, were scripted by this guy. Recent UCLA graduate Adam Swart and his business Crowds on Demand,

which will stage rallies and demonstrations for almost any candidate or cause. How many city council meetings have you done? Lots. Adam says he has worked with dozens of campaigns for state officials and even 2016 presidential candidates, but he won't name any names. If I told you, then nobody would hire us in the future. All those guys in L.A. that I would show those I was running with, they're all dead.

If I stayed in L.A., I would be dead. I think I made the right decisions. Even the meth was a.A., I would be dead. I think I made the right decisions. Even the meth was a good decision when I come to think about it. How was doing meth a good decision?

I had to get rid of a few teens. So, it's been about four years since we've last talked. What are you up to these days?

No, no, no, no. You don't get any information out of me. What are you, the IRS? Are you doing any acting? Honey, life is a fucking act. I mean, picking up this phone was an act. I'm acting right now.

You think I'm going to be real for you? How much do I get out of this? Well, the reason I ask is I'm doing a show on fake crowds. And when I learned that, you know, where you are in Tennessee, there's like tons of this political crowd stuff, I got curious. Perhaps good old Peter Choice is doing this sort of thing.

Dude, I was working for Central Casting. I'm not working as a crisis actor. I'm talking fake political protester, not fake shooting victim. Are you telling me there are jobs for that? If you're just a crisis actor that's like maybe $100 a day. You don't get paid much.

You stand around and maybe they use you. They don't. Come on. Go online if you don't believe me. Well, to be honest, if this was real, I'd have a harder time believing you not cashing in on this. No, Peter Joyce is not cashing in on this. Peter Joyce is a man of profound ethics. But I know there are plenty of people that will do it. Like when Trump, the day that Trump announces candidacy, I knew a lot

of people that were getting paid $50 for two hours to stand there and pretend that they were Trump supporters. Crowds on Demand. That's actually the company I was going to call you about. Crowds on Demand was the first one I remember, yeah. In about 2010 they started in L.A., but they're everywhere. But here's where

it gets really absurd. Remember when things kind of got bad for me in L.A., I ended up doing audience work, like laughing and stuff, paid laughing.

It wasn't central casting. It was beinamovie.com. They don't even pay you. This is what your pay is. You could win a prize, win a television set. They have a lot of that in Knoxville. They are now getting people to volunteer for no money. This is what's going on in America now.

If you have no skills, if you're a bad person and a bad actor, then there's a whole new world right now for you. But wait, who are the bad actors then? Okay, you come to me for the truth, and I'll tell you. You have this natural progression. First, it's legitimate operations like Simple Cash and could actually pay you. Then it turns into BeInAMovie.com, which take away all those jobs because people will do it for free. Then you get crowds on demand where you don't have people with no values, no integrity

will just do anything for money. And don't you see what's coming next? It's going to be, let's make the world a worse place to live.com where they'll just go do it for free. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called The Fake in the Crowd. This installment was produced by me, Benjamin Walker, with Andrew Calloway. It featured David Levine, Karen Patterson, Helen Saltzman, Roman Mars, and Peter Choice. For more information, visit the show page at

theoryofeverythingpodcast.com The Theory of Everything is also a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm Radiotopia.fm Radiotopia. From PRX.