letter
from new york : : matthew rose
yes,
we have bananas! 10,000 bananas : doug fishbone
©
Douglas Fishbone. Click for larger view.
The
title perhaps borrows from Woody Allen's 1971 film about a central American republic
mired in non-stop revolution, while the massive yellow cone steps right out of
Disney. Cast against a blue October New York sky, and perfectly-arranged 2 meters
high and 3 meters in diameter, New Yorkers, used to seeing most anything in their
streets were forced to stop and gawk: "How many?"
"10,000
Bananas" is both the answer and the name of Douglas Fishbone's conceptual
art installation, although he carefully piled 17,000 of them ($1,700 worth) in
a luxuriously high organic temple to the yellow fruit. Part of the recent Sixth
Annual Dumbo Art Under the Bridge Festival in Brooklyn, New York, viewers were
stunned by the yellowness, and the concentrated sweet smell, of the tropical fruit.
The
morning of the installation -- four hours after a truck from Hunts Point Market
in the Bronx (the largest produce market in the world) delivered 3.5 tons of the
fruit, and just when the uppermost banana at last crowned the tower -- two kids
successfully grabbed a few bunches for the "banana smoothies" they sold
to visitors of the art festival for $1 a glass. "They were first in line
at 4:30 when we took the work apart and handed out the bananas in "I
NY"
shopping bags," says Fishbone. "I got them to give me one for free,
since I was the source of the raw materials."
Fishbone's
mother, Anita, and his brother Alan, worked as a guards and assistants, helping
to create the banana piece and often shooing away hungry conceptual art fans who
attempted to eat the work. By sundown however, Fishbone, his mother and a handful
of friends were handing out the bananas as fast as they could. "It was very
important to me that nothing go to waste," he says.
But
Fishbone, 33, who has also sculptured his head out of gyro meat, says he was less
inspired by boosting local teenage capitalism than by the spectacle of so many
bananas. The work, he noted, symbolizes broad range of things from "Inca
legends," to "perishable natural wealth" to "Nazi references
of structural and institutionalized violence and greed."
His
first Banana piece took place in Cuenca, Ecuador and numbered 25,000 bananas;
the second, in Guyaquil, Ecuador, reassembled 40,000 bananas. (Ecuador is one
of the world's largest producers of bananas.) In Piotrków Trybunalski,
Poland, Fishbone went bananas again, and that is where local art critics saw Nazi-style
piles of hair, clothing, eye glasses and boots --metaphorically-- in this installation.
"Prior to the collapse of Communism, in Poland, the banana was a luxury item,"
says the artist. "I wanted to create an unusual and enjoyable event that
raised some deeper issues about consumption and violence."
But
what 10,000 Bananas means "depends on context, who's looking and who you
ask," says Fishbone, who is now finishing up his MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths
College in London. "I'm comfortable leaving the ultimate interpretation to
the viewer. Didn't Freud once say, 'Sometimes a banana is just a banana.' Or maybe
he was talking about a cigar."
Matthew
Rose
mistahrose@yahoo.com
