Mr. Peanut and the Imaginary Mayor

Dan Savage’s recent post on Slog announcing the possibility of his running for mayor of Seattle couldn’t help but evoke this image in my mind:

Mr. Peanut, artist Vincent Trasov, image by Bob Strazicich, from Megaphone: Vancouver’s Street Paper

I unexpectedly met the Mr. Peanut suit from Vincent Trasov and John Mitchell’s 1974 Vancouver mayoral campaign at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria about two years ago.  After moving from the deflated costume to a small screen showing black and white footage of a debate in which Mr. Peanut hand-wrote his responses (his entire campaign was executed in silence) I recall being struck by the immediacy of Mr. Peanut’s presence as a form of living art.  As Western Front Society’s website explains, William S. Burroughs endorsed Mr. Peanut with a most poignant statement:

“Since the inexorable logic of reality has created nothing but insoluble problems, it is now time for illusion to take over. And there can only be one illogical candidate: Mr. Peanut.” (via The Western Front)

Although Mr. Peanut ran his campaign in Canada, in retrospect, it is difficult to avoid seeing the work in light of the resignation of Richard Nixon and the surrounding events the same year.  Baudrillard identifies Watergate as a primary example of the final stage in the transformation from image to simulacrum in essay “Simulacra and Simulacrum.”  He notes,

“Watergate tend[s] towards scandal as as means to regenerate a moral and political principle, towards the imaginary as a means to regenerate a reality principle in distress.” (Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Second Edition 176)

The absurdity of a non-speaking commercial mascot (or pure simulacrum) running for a government office resonated with 3.4% of Vancouver’s voters during Mr. Peanut’s race.  However, I do not think a reality principle necessarily regenerated (in the United States, at least) between 1974 and the present.

There is a similarly absurd aspect to a mayoral election that lacks meaningful competition and representation, so perhaps a Gay Sex Scandal is less a simulacrum than the Watergate Scandal and a 24-hour monorail proposal relates more directly to the actualities of politics than Seattle’s other options.

You, You, and You

Three things that centralize the viewer this week in the arts sphere:

1. Walker on the Green: Artist-Designed Mini Golf

The Walker’s series of miniature golf course installations looks like a fantastic experience that can appeal to the general public in a way museums often strive for through their exhibitions. This year features a focus on “the senses”, which is an intriguing avenue to take something historically kitsch in order to give it a level of substance. In miniature golf, the senses seem to bear a distinct relationship to emotions, as both are felt through competition and, as adults, the nostalgia of childhood popular culture. Minneapolis does seem be a bit under-touristy in comparison to hosting the installations somewhere like Florida, where the audience and their expectations of putt-putt courses would differ significantly. However, I still find the prospect of exploring art through sports an interesting impetus, as both audiences of each of these disciplines frequently consider themselves distinct. Of course, in an ideal work of mini golf art, I would expect there to be an artist-designed set of rules for the hole, linking the piece more intimately to the artistic process through physical exertion.

2. You Complete Me at Western Bridge

You Complete Me considers the role of the viewer through participatory art. While others have already written about the exhibition, one contention I am uncertain about is found in the article “You Complete Me at Western Bridge Invites Visitors to Interact with the Art” by Gayle Clemans in The Seattle Times, which links the works in the show and the Dada movement while faulting the exhibition on the absence of pieces that reflect political and ideological components found in other participatory art works. The Dadaists certainly challenged passivity, but the wording of Clemans’s review suggests a relationship between You Complete Me and precisely what defined the Happenings of the 1960s, particularly those by Allan Kaprow. In Tom McDonough’s analysis of Allan Kaprow–Art as Life in the March 2008 issue of Art in America, he notes,

“Whatever Kaprow’s break with the postwar consensus (and the McCarthyite repression that guaranteed it), this social accord left its mark on Kaprow; there would be no ideology, no ‘politics,’ behind Happenings, and certainly no Marxism, which was to be categorized for its rigidity. Like the New Left he preceded, Kaprow embraced a down-to-earth, participatory, humane worldview that stopped well short of taking up an explicit ideological position.” (130)

While Dada clearly bears some relation to the work Kaprow began in the 60s, the rejection of ideology inherent to Happenings was, in part, what separated performance and participatory artists from their predecessors. This is the aspect of audience involvement I see most prominent in You Complete Me.

3. You, the Living at the Seattle International Film Festival

You, the Living is described on SIFF’s website as “A darkly comic symphony shot in 50 stunning segments devoted to the meaning (or meaninglessness) of daily human existence.” The aspect of the segments I found most interesting was the way the ordinary occurrences they portray only become comical with an audience. In typical daily life, the moments depicted in this film would be experienced by their participants by as frustrations or irritations, but before a living body of people watching, they become strangely, and lyrically, hysterical.