Carry On: The Labor of our Burdens
Art in Odd Places 2021: STORY
14th Street, New York City
Carry On: The Labor of Our Burdens was a durational public performance created for Art in Odd Places 2021: STORY. Along the length of 14th Street in New York City, the artist, dressed in a suit, carried a large house form on his back. Through this act of endurance, complex symbols of home, labor, identity, accumulation, and progress became conflated with ideas of individual burden and resolute, relentless forward movement.
There is a saying from the 1980s often attributed to Malcolm Forbes: “He who dies with the most toys wins.” It was a rallying call, and words of both empowerment and encouragement for those who equated consumer consumption and the accumulation of capital with the ultimate goal of life. It made it acceptable to believe that the merit of a person’s existence could be measured by the things they were able to own. The “best” things were often the most ostentatious and frivolous toys. At the time, those who believed, or bought into this, seemed to represent much of America.
Now, for many, times are different. We may more quickly recognize the inherent gendered focus in the statement, and we may more quickly question any conceit that proudly states that the yield of our contributions as humans should be judged by the consumer goods we are able to accumulate.
Yet still, we do accumulate.
The stories of our lives, our identities, are contained in the places we inhabit and the things we carry with us, in both literal and figurative ways. We create and accumulate mental spaces and physical things. We occupy physical spaces where we keep our physical things, and where we attach memories. This accumulation becomes a burden that is a universal part of the human experience, while also being uniquely and intimately personal.
The burdens of existence are reflected through the emotional and physical labor we accumulate as we carry both physical and metaphorical things. What do we keep? What is the scale and weight of that which we carry with us?
We fill the space we have, and then look to add a little more.
We persevere through an ongoing balance of carrying and shedding.
We endure.
The house form was built as a wearable sculptural structure and mounted to the performer’s body. As it moved through 14th Street, the house became less an image of shelter than a visible weight: a portable architecture of aspiration, responsibility, memory, possession, and fatigue. The performance engaged the public through observation and discovery. Pedestrians encountered the action in passing, within the normal movement of the city. Some paused, some followed, some watched briefly, and many continued on. The work existed within that flow, between the sustained labor of the performer and the constant press of public life in the city.
The house became a symbol for the confusion of progress, both personal and communal, and for the paths on which, and the spaces in which, we carry the burden of our ideas, our ideals, and our identities.