Artist Had Been Sleeping in Trash Bags as Part of Installation; Collection Deemed “Successful”
NYC Department of Sanitation Accidentally Collects a Performance Artist; He Calls It “The Best Piece I’ve Done”
Read more satire at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
NEW YORK — The New York City Department of Sanitation accidentally collected performance artist and Cooper Union graduate Duncan Farr, 29, during a Thursday morning collection run in the East Village after Farr, who had been sleeping inside sealed black trash bags on Ninth Street as part of a durational installation called “Refuse/Refuse,” was placed on the truck by two sanitation workers who said they had “honestly seen weirder.”
Farr was deposited at the DSNY garage on East 12th Street at 5:47 a.m. He emerged from the bags at 6:02 a.m., announced himself as a performance artist, and asked if anyone had documented the journey. A sanitation worker named Tony had, on his phone, as a precaution. Farr immediately requested the footage and described the incident as “exactly what the piece needed, conceptually.”
The Installation
Refuse/Refuse — the title is a bilingual pun on the noun and the verb, which Farr explains in a 600-word artist’s statement — was conceived as a meditation on “urban invisibility, waste capitalism, and the body’s relationship to systems of disposal.” Farr had planned to remain in the bags on Ninth Street from 11:00 p.m. Wednesday to 6:00 a.m. Thursday, then emerge and document public reaction.
The sanitation collection, which runs at 5:30 a.m. on Thursdays, was not accounted for in the piece’s timeline. Farr acknowledges this was “a significant oversight” but maintains that the collection’s occurrence has “elevated the work from commentary to participation,” a reframe that his gallerist, reached by phone, described as “very Duncan.”
DSNY’s Position
A spokesperson for the NYC Department of Sanitation said workers had followed standard procedure and that the department was “grateful no one was harmed,” a statement that implies a level of equanimity about the incident that speaks well of an agency that collects 12,000 tons of refuse daily across New York City and has, statistically, encountered stranger things than a performance artist.
The workers involved have not been disciplined. Tony said he “knew something was off” but that the bags “were tied correctly and placed on the kerb,” which is the definition of ready for collection.
Critical Response
The piece has attracted attention from the art community, most of it positive, some of it skeptical. Hyperallergic, which covers contemporary art in New York with a sharp eye for both the significant and the absurd, published a piece describing the incident as “accidental institutional critique” and noting that being collected by the city’s waste system is “a more direct engagement with municipal infrastructure than most MFA programmes achieve.”
A gallerist in Chelsea offered Farr a show. He is interested but wants to sleep in the bags one more time first, this time on purpose, this time with the sanitation schedule accounted for, which several critics say will produce a more controlled but necessarily less interesting piece.
Refuse, refused, re-collected: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Farr’s complete installation at https://prat.uk/.
The Institutional Critique Question
The art world’s enthusiasm for Duncan Farr’s accidental collection is complicated by the fact that the piece, in its original form, was not particularly interesting as institutional critique. Sleeping in bags on a New York street is a commentary on urban invisibility that has been made, in various forms, by artists and activists for decades. The collection by the DSNY is interesting precisely because it was unplanned — because the city’s waste removal system, designed to process material efficiently without discriminating between art and refuse, processed Farr efficiently and without discrimination. The critique was produced by the institution’s indifference, not by the artist’s intention, which is either the most honest institutional critique possible — the institution critiquing itself by simply functioning — or a retroactive claim on an accident, depending on your theory of authorship.
Tony the sanitation worker, who filmed the moment as a precaution and whose footage is now the centrepiece of Farr’s documentation, is uncredited in the artist’s statement. He is described as “a worker whose action completed the piece,” a framing that the art world has not yet finished debating and that Tony himself described, when reached by a reporter, as “that’s fine, I just didn’t want to get in trouble.” He has not been offered a share of whatever the piece sells for, if it sells. The gallerist in Chelsea is interested but has not yet discussed terms. Tony goes to work at 4:00 a.m. The art world, he says, “is a different kind of thing entirely,” which is the most accurate review of the situation available.
Further Observations
It is worth pausing to consider what this situation reveals about the broader landscape of public life in this part of the world. The gap between announcement and action, between framework and outcome, between what officials say at press conferences and what happens in the streets, is not a gap that emerges from malice or incompetence alone — though both play a role — but from a structural mismatch between the speed at which problems develop, the speed at which political credit is sought, and the speed at which institutional solutions can be implemented. Announcements are fast. Press conferences are fast. Reforms are slow, unglamorous, and require sustained attention across electoral cycles, which is precisely the kind of attention that political incentives do not reliably produce. The result is a particular kind of civic theatre in which the performance of action substitutes for action often enough that the distinction becomes blurred, and in which citizens develop a sophisticated dual consciousness: they know what is happening, they say what is appropriate to say, and they adapt their actual lives to the reality rather than the announcement. This is not cynicism. It is a form of intelligence developed under conditions where the alternative — taking every press conference at face value — would be functionally disabling.
What changes this, when it changes, is rarely the quality of the plan. It is the quality of the follow-through, which depends on political will, institutional capacity, funding continuity, and the kind of incremental, unsexy progress that does not generate press conferences but does, eventually, generate outcomes. The countries and cities that have transformed themselves — that have moved from announced frameworks to actual functioning systems — have done so through this mechanism: not better plans, but better execution of ordinary plans over long enough timelines that the compounding effect of sustained effort becomes visible. The framework is not the problem. What you do with it the morning after the press conference is the problem. Manila, like many cities, is still working this out.
Also: The London Prat on Bluesky — https://bsky.app/profile/londonprat.bsky.social/post/3moebk3bwna2i
SOURCE: Santa Claus