How New Yorkers Deal With Art in Public (Kids Love It; Rich People, Not So Much)
How New Yorkers Deal With Art in Public (Kids Love It; Rich People, Not So Much)
Video maker Geraldo Mercado, diminutive in size, is a polarizing figure in the circles he travels. He’s sweet as pie, coquettish and flirty with everyone he meets—but never holds back his opinion, especially when he’s talking about art. “Absolutely everyone knows how to talk about aesthetics, but they don’t normally engage in that conversation. So, how do I get people to talk about this? Once you start presenting things to people, they’re actual able to speak about it and have a strong opinion and think about the media abstractly, the media they take in on a daily basis.”
Geraldo is a Puerto Rican-born, Boston-raised, Brooklyn-based artist—a biography of hyphens. You can see him nearly every week break a TV or down half a dozen beers at galleries and performance spaces in Bushwick (the drinking is a feature of his performance “because people think it’s art,” he told me). His latest work, “The Kewpie Series,” was part of the Art in Odd Places festival, which takes place every October, confronting the public with art along 14th Street, from Ave. C to the Hudson River. This year’s theme—“Model”—led Geraldo to the Kewpie doll, the creepy iconic doll of our collective nightmare. “I found this Kewpie doll at a Goodwill near my house,” Mercado said. “I shot some test footage of it… and the camera picked up its face in the face recognition feature. The camera recognized this weird little doll as being human.”
Geraldo also happened to be listening to a lot of shortwave number stations at the time. From these disparate sources, Geraldo created a dozen short videos featuring the Kewpie doll in a variety of profound paranoia-inducing states—flying in space, on a Tumblr replicating itself over and over, imposed on the faces of YouTube starlets in bikinis—and scored by the bleeps and bloops of shortwave number stations. The video played on a VHS in a VCR connected to a TV and powered by a car battery, all nestled into a granny cart which Geraldo, with his trademark red suspenders, punk T-shirt and mad-scientist scare of hair, pushed along the streets without any detectable irony. His eyes searched the crowd, contemplating passers, anticipating the opportunity to talk to anyone about what they’re seeing.