Artist Provocateur Brian Andrew Whiteley in Conversation with MC Stevens
Brian Andrew Whiteley in his studio with Domestic Terrorism Suits
2017
Brian Andrew Whiteley is the quintessential provocateur. A visual artist and curator based in New York, his prowess lies in his performance art acumen. His multimedia artistic practice spans sculpture and new media art. Whiteley works as an investigative performance artist and is best known for his large-scale, interactive projects meant to provoke and manipulate media observations. His practice deftly delves into pop culture, marketing, sexual fetishes, film satire, gender roles, and cultural stereotypes. Whiteley is also the founder of SATELLITE Art Show, which has taken Miami Art Week by storm since its initiation in 2015.
I met Whiteley at the closing panel discussion for Rebecca Goyette’s Ghost Bitch USA at Freight + Volume in 2016. Whiteley discussed their collaborative experience as well as his then-recent solo project, Trump Tombstone, which was placed in Central Park. The tombstone was an overnight media sensation, creating controversy and legal ramifications. Whiteley collaborated with Goyette with the launch of viral video, Golden Showers: A Sex Hex, at Volta New York 2017. I had the opportunity to visit Whiteley’s studio recently and discuss his multifaceted practice.
MC Stevens: Thank you for inviting me to your studio. The last piece of yours that I recall is that Trump pee pee tape at Volta this year… what was it called?
BAW: The Russian Dossier: A Sex Hex. It was based on the explosive Russian Dossier about Trump in a hotel room with Russian prostitutes and a lot of pee-pee. That was an interesting video to create.
AP: I heard that there was quite a bit of pee pee involved in the creation of the work.
BAW: Absolutely. Which is new terrain for me… when you’re going into a performance or video shoot like that, you know what’s about to happen, and you must say “yes”; the idea of saying “yes” and experiencing new things is paramount. That includes getting urinated on by several people at once.
AP: Let’s talk about your earlier works since you’ve been in New York. How long have you been living and working in the city?
BAW: I was born and raised in upstate New York and moved to the city eleven years ago. I’ve been pursuing art full-time since then and I think some of my most provocative, most resonant works started happening around that same time. I was bringing performance art out of the studio/gallery setting and bringing it into the public consciousness. My studio was near the Greenwood Cemetery and, at that time, there was a debate about public usage in the cemetery. I thought it was quite interesting and decided to start doing clown sightings there (by visiting as a clown). The idea was that Greenwood could be a celebratory space where even clowns should be allowed to express themselves: in a way, to re-imagine the cemetery. I repeatedly went there dressed as a clown, with balloons, and that’s when the internet went crazy with reports of a clown “haunting”. Then came the news crews, TV crews, camera crews, etc. This was before any of the “creepy clown” sightings that are now common, and before the “Fake News” hysteria of 2016/2017. My performance caused quite a stir and created a social discussion about the use of the space and created this kind of weird mystery about the cemetery. People still believe that the cemetery is haunted by a clown.
Greenwood Cemetery Clown Sighting
There’s something fascinating about that, and I think it’s partially ingrained on the human psyche. It’s this idea of the “other” as something strange or bizarre that has informed the different projects I’ve done. The effect of changing one’s appearance, whether by make-up or costuming, and doing something different in a public environment triggers people in a certain way and those responses are super interesting.
I did a performance piece where I was dressed in a full clown outfit years ago in Miami during art fair week. Strangely enough, the Real Housewives were filming and they came by and they wanted to film my performance too. The project was called Feed the Clown: I was the clown and you could feed me ice cream. You had to pay me three dollars and then you could hand feed me the ice cream. People were REALLY violent with this. They would just shove ice-cream down my throat; some even smacked me and beat me. They couldn’t see that there was a person behind the makeup.
AP: Aside from starting the creepy clown epidemic, what was the next substantial project outside the realm of the paranormal?
BAW: After that the 2016 election became my focal point.
AP: Everything changed.
BAW: Yeah, I hadn’t been radically political before — I had protested against George Bush and the Iraq War — but with the 2016 election and Trump it turned into this existential nightmare, especially seeing the effects of this as a full-blown adult with a family. It immediately sent me into activism. I decided to make a tombstone for Trump, something that would foreshadow what he would be remembered for. This was back early in his campaign, if you recall he was talking about Mexicans, Muslims, immigrants, kicking everybody out…
It was a combination of things but the overall result was feeling the urgency to react. The idea for the tombstone seemed like a fitting way to talk to Trump directly about the one thing he cares about most, himself. This is a guy who obviously loves to build giant towers and put his name on them in big gold letters. He’s an egomaniac, we all know that.
Brian Andrew Whiteley’s The Legacy Stone, AKA The Trump Tombstone, 2016
When I put the tombstone in to Central Park, close to his home, the message on the epitaph was “made America hate again,” based on what he was campaigning for. My lawyer advised me not to put a death date on it so it wasn’t misconstrued as a direct death threat. But that didn’t stop a Secret Service investigation and after about two months they tracked me down. They found me by going from tombstone shop to tombstone shop in NYC until they went to the one I had worked with to create the 400-pound tombstone. The shop owner coughed up my name, I mean they’ve never had the Secret Service questioning them before. They came to my house and interrogated me. I had to release fingerprints, mental health records, they had to speak with multiple family members, they asked me about what books I’m reading, if I’d ever been to political rallies or protests, had I ever been in close proximity to the president, did I own handguns or knives, did I know martial arts. It was an hour-long interrogation by gigantic Secret Service men who are the opposite of the giant buff dummy, they’re giant buff intellectuals, with guns. It’s super intimidating.
Luckily, I had a good lawyer, Ron Kuby, who helped me massage things with both the police and the Secret Service. He’s been a civil rights activist and a lawyer for people like artist Spencer Tunick.
My lawyer was fantastic and I was able, at the end of the day, to get everything reduced to a littering fine. So, I really, I really love NYC.
AP: The tombstone is simple and elegant. I’m sure he’ll pick something way bigger and gaudier for the real thing.
BAW: People critiqued me asking, “Why isn’t it giant and gold with naked European ladies all over it?” And I’m like, “Because that tombstone cost $2000 and weighs 400 pounds.” So, if you’re trying to put a guerrilla project into Central Park in the middle of the night, you have to move something that’s 400 pounds of dead weight. That’s as much as I could physically muster.
AP: I think it’s enough. It didn’t need to be extra Trump-like because you never know, you could always miss the mark trying to be that over-the-top.
BAW: I wasn’t trying to find Trump’s aesthetic, more trying to get a message across. If I went over the top to make it like he wanted, it wouldn’t have had the same message.
AP: Also, the installation being a regular tombstone makes people read it. If it was flashy and gold, no one would focus on the text.
BAW: Absolutely. This tombstone had been sitting in this tombstone shop since the 1970’s, and to me, it’s a simple aesthetic that reminded me of Trump’s Golden era, you know, the ’70s and early ’80s.
AP: Trump did sort of find a stylistic era and stay there.
BAW: Oh, he’s stuck there for sure.
Trump Tombstone 3D printed sculptures. Edition of 50
AP: I heard about the tombstone at the Ghost Bitch USA panel when you collaborated with Rebecca Goyette.
BAW: Rebecca and I have collaborated many times now. The first one we did when he was still campaigning. We did a “Trump/Palin” rally. This was when Sarah Palin was endorsing Trump. The performance was bananas.
AP: Was this a costume from the Missile Dick Chicks?
BAW: Yeah, Rebecca’s costume was based on that. She came out like a crazy Palin, shooting guns in the air and screaming. I was dressed as Trump and I was giving my Trumpian speech; this was at White Box Art Center in the Lower East Side. That was the first project we did together, and we had such a great time working with each other. Then we did another piece where Rebecca and a bunch of witches castrated me as Trump.
AP: Ouch! Was that a part of Ghost Bitch?
BAW: That was part of Ghost Bitch, yep.
AP: You were one of the Trumps?
BAW: Yes, I’m a relatively slender man so my Trump has evolved to have more body padding and more contorted facial expressions to really push the Trump character. By the time Rebecca and I did Golden Showers: A Sex Hex, for Volta, we worked with a cast of characters who identify across the whole identity spectrum. Male, female, trans, LBGTQ, cis, you name it, they all came to kind of shame Trump and queer Trump — that was Rebecca’s and my idea for this. The backdrop was the Russian dossier with Trump apparently in a hotel with Russian prostitutes. Our goal was to subvert that idea of him having Russian prostitutes pee on where Obama had slept. We were subverting it in ways where we had the prostitutes come in and destroy Trump. The video is super powerful, and includes a lot of real pee, mustard and Cheetos.
Rebecca Goyette and Brian Andrew Whiteley, Golden Showers: Sex Hex (2017). Courtesy of Rebecca Goyette and Brian Andrew Whiteley.
AP: There were a lot of yellows and oranges; I remember Rebecca wearing a yellow dress at the opening.
BAW: Yeah, she’s fantastic with costuming and the idea for this was that the costuming should mirror the pee, and I was the vessel for the pee as Trump.
AP: Can you tell me a bit about the filming?
BAW: This was filmed at a hotel in Bushwick that is literally a by-the-hour prostitute hotel. While we were setting up, we opened up the windows and there was a bunch of teenagers yelling “How much baby? You want to F this?” Like people go there to hook up, and we were setting up for a golden shower film shoot, so we knew this hotel was the right environment.
AP: Was there plastic sheeting or tarp used?
BAW: Yeah, a plastic tarp for sure. The cleanup was insane: Mustard on the walls, pee everywhere. I had to shower three times. It’s just one of those things. I think it’s interesting, aside from subverting Trump, as performers you meet somebody, you say “hi” and then you know that person, in the next hour, will be peeing on you. You must break down personal barriers in quick time.
AP: Did anybody like purposely aim for your face or your mouth?
BAW: I think the weirdest one was when Rebecca put on a strap-on penis that allowed her pee to shoot out, and she peed all over Trump’s business socks. So there’s this crossover between foot fetish and peeing and having it all happen with a woman peeing out of a plastic penis on to Trump’s business socks was, to me, a very high-level fetish.
AP: I haven’t yet viewed the video in its entirety.
BAW: You should watch it: It evolves and just keeps changing. It starts with Trump disgustingly eating pizza on a bed in his bathrobe and then making out with a Vladimir Putin poster. Then the women and the men and everyone else come in, the witches, and they gradually take over. It progresses slowly but towards the end it’s full-blown pee pee, Cheetos, mustard and some severe beatings.
AP: I think I caught the mustard: I recall yellow projectiles that were a little more opaque than urine.
BAW: It was violent. I woke up the next day and I was in serious pain. I had bruises all over me, I had been smacked, beaten. When you get into character, sometimes other performers, or people in general, don’t have a filter with their emotions, and there was so much anger and direct aggression towards the character of Trump that being that character is sometimes a little scary.
AP: Can you tell me about your current and upcoming projects?
BAW: What’s new for me…Clown’s Night Out II is the latest video art piece created. It is the second iteration of a highly self masturbatory series in which I gogo dance for myself via green screen. One of the characters is in full clown regalia. Kinda the idea, like, “what would a clown do when they were done entertaining?” Maybe hit a strip club and get a lap dance. In terms of other projects, I started the artist-run fair entitled SATELLITE which takes place in Miami during Art Basel. We’re taking over an abandoned hotel on the beach again this year. 40 rooms full of installations and performances, plus a pretty stacked music lineup. All that to be released shortly. That’s been pretty stressful this year, due to Hurricane Irma hitting South Florida, but we are so very excited for its third iteration. Gonna be pretty epic.
SATTELITE ART SHOW
December 7-10, 2017
The Ocean Terrace Hotel
7410 Ocean Terrace
Miami Beach, FL
