Pizza Rat and Other Subaltern Antiheroes
Nadim Samman and Dehlia Hannah in Conversation
DH: When was the last time you took the U-Bahn?
NS: I’ve gotten used to avoiding it over the past year. Taxi, bike, work from home—or just stay home altogether. The pandemic has definitely put a dent in my use of public transportation.
DH: Being pressed together inside a tin can doesn’t have the same romance that it once did.
NS: Romance? I don’t know about that. Was it ever any fun to take the underground?
DH: I remember as a kid of about 4 or 5 years old, taking the subway from Brooklyn to my preschool on Christopher Street, in Manhattan. Every morning I hoped that the train would pull in a different color than yesterday. Maybe cherry red all over. Or, better yet, red with one big bright picture painted on the side. I loved when it seemed like the picture was moving as the train sped past—like it was animated—and that uncanny feeling where you can’t tell whether you’re moving in space or something else is going past you. When the train stopped, I would try to decipher the letters or pictures before getting on board. More often than not it was just a riot of spray paint and scratches–thick layers of rival graffiti, occasionally covered over by the transit authority’s monochrome. Inside the packed cars I hung onto my mom’s hand while the lights flickered on and off. Often, we’d ride in pitch darkness until the next station. That would never be considered safe today—but it was early-1980s New York and blackouts happened all the time on the trains. That’s the only way we got to see some amazing pieces that were painted deep inside the tunnels, illuminated only by the light streaming down through the grates from the street above.
Actually, I probably learned about the previous pandemic riding the train. In the subway ads there was a beloved cartoon that ran from 1989–97 about the love affair of Julio and Marisol, made complicated by the AIDS crisis, Julio’s covert bisexuality, use of intravenous drugs—and condoms. Another perplexing public service announcement showed a penis in raincoat with the battle slogan, “Cover me going in.” Little did I know that all these issues were preying heavily on my mother’s mind. The blackouts probably spared her a lot of awkward explanations.
NS: That sounds more exciting than my experiences on the London underground, where everything is completely surveilled and regulated. Berlin is a different story. Like that great ad from the BVG—where Kazim Akboga sings Is mir egal—the people themselves are almost performance art. You can drink alcohol and one dog rides free.
DH: Lately the U-Bahn has the air of a space that has been devoid of advertising, along with riders. It’s an interesting moment for art to creep back in like a weed, re-growing in the urban jungle. A good time for re-wilding the place. Part of what gave the New York subway its energy in the 1980s (before a certain now-disgraced mayor killed it with discriminatory broken-windows policing) is that art on public transportation is always both wanted and unwanted. Official artistic commissions—like the NGBK—vie with advertising, public service announcements, and opportunistic acts of vandalism. Not just big pieces of graffiti and unrecognized masterpieces (like the Keith Haring drawings that NYC transit workers painted over daily), but moustaches on toothpaste ads and scribbled commentary. Riders are literally a captive audience, but the train also becomes an archive of reactions and ripostes—a dialogic space that’s much more open than any gallery.
NS: It’s hard enough to ask why art belongs anywhere, but the underground is such a functionally defined space that it presents special challenges. To begin with, it’s just plain unpleasant to ride in a hole in the ground, for all the reasons we don’t need to explain—crowding, lack of a view, the noise, the smells and grime. If people are not looking to escape this situation, they’re looking to transcend it. That’s why they’re glued to their phones, their books, their headphones. It’s also why advertising is so prevalent: it’s not just a captive audience, but one that desperately wants to look at something that will transport them out of the space—or at the very least, allow them to avoid meeting the gaze of their fellow passengers. Even though it’s an imposition, the advertisement’s contextual appeal is powerful. We look at these things without naiveté, fully aware of the cynicism of the advertiser. Yet we enter into a quid pro quo, because the ads are often the only things that want to be looked at. Inanimate things are by their very nature indifferent, but they don’t repay attention in the same way. They’re liable to deliver gross surprises. The piece of gum, the hairs on the seat—they’re repulsive. They push you away. The advertising is the only thing that attracts, even in a profane, fawning, patronizing way. There’s something grubby about the compact you make with it. You know it isn’t right, but you look.
This is the situation that the artwork intervenes in, with an offer of something less overdetermined by commerce and cynicism. But then the question for artists and curators is always, “What could that be?” It’s a difficult problem. Contemporary art wants to be critical and self-reflexive, wants to do work on you, catalyze cognitive gain, political change, enlightenment of some kind, wants to teach you, or do something with you. Underground, on your way to work, in a hurry, this runs the risk of being a bit needy. In the London Underground, Mark Wallinger’s labyrinth tiles were visual labyrinths. There may be some visual play to be had in navigating them with your eyes, but they are also a comment on your situation. You are in a labyrinth, and you know it all too well already. On occasion I have thought that I didn’t want to be reminded of that fact. That sort of commission—a conceptual critical one does not release you—can sometimes heighten your awareness of your unpleasant situation.
DH: But sometimes it’s dark irony that delights. Let’s talk about rats: that’s one thing you really don’t want to see, especially on the platform. Then along comes a rat hauling a slice of pepperoni pizza three times its size down the stairs of a NYC subway station and it breaks the internet. Pizza Rat (google it!) is a mascot—a dark mirror of our triumph over the abjection of the whole ordeal of commuting.
NS: The other route that art can take is towards decoration. Pretty things are eschewed by contemporary art, but decorative arts are what typify the most beloved metro systems of the world, like those of Moscow and Paris. The thing about decoration is that it lives up to itself when it is realized at proper scale—when it is not hemmed in by little box that would have otherwise been an ad for antacids. It requires much more of a commitment, in terms of aesthetic decisions and institutional resources, to make such a commission. In commissioning for metro systems, the question is always, “Where’s the money?” Are you just giving up a bit of ad space? This is why sometimes graffiti works better. I’d rather have a whole train sprayed by Katharina Grosse than a a small poster space set aside for a a conceptual statement.
DH: Not to mention the kind of grand historical murals and mosaics that you find, for example, in Mexico City’s subway system. These seem of a different era—politically and economically.
NS: I should be a little conciliatory. Even if, in principle, you want more from art than to fit into a small box, the appropriation of advertising space is certainly worthy of celebration, whether it’s accomplished through official or unofficial mechanisms. But if you think about it the other way, of wanting more from your metro ride, then we need to think about how art commissions—or poetry, or performance—participate in what Herbert Marcuse calls the affirmative character of culture. For those that decide to read the poem instead of the fine print on an insurance policy, or looking at the dick drawing below the sandwich ad, sponsored art can provide a little bit of elevation. Or a calming sentiment to placate the rider.
DH: You definitely won’t find concrete poetry or radical political poetry; it’s against the basic imperative of crowd control and mass appeal that is obligatory in this context. It’s just not the purview of the transit authority to affront its riders’ sensibility and politics in the same way as a contemporary art institution.
NS: I disagree, I think that’s all they ever do is affront my sensibility and politics. It’s nonstop abuse.
DH: Construed as a Gesamtkunstwerk, certainly you’re right. As a New Yorker, it utterly boggles my mind that there would be textiles of any kind on public transport—
NS: But the real point is that it’s a hard balance to strike between giving over part of the space to art, in whatever ad hoc way that is done, and allowing the real uncertainties that come with art, as opposed to trying to keep it within the space of a total functional system, which includes the imperative to manage the impulses, desires, and affects of its users. Even if (for a few people) contemporary art takes on an affirmative character by making us feel more ‘woke’ or more in on an elite conceptual joke, artists are constantly on the run from being instrumentalized. To embrace the antagonism of art to its institutions is, at the very least, a kind of admirable experiment for any metro system to conduct.
DH: The works in this show walk that fine line in various ways. Visually, they range from strange beauty—Sasha Amaya’s posters for Neophytes, which convey strong political statements about migration and acceptance via huge floral motifs—to performatively banal. Philine Puffer’s click the stars, which appears on the television monitors between other scheduled programming and duplicates the appearance and content of Google reviews of train stations, offers absurdity and a critical perspective on the datafication of the urban landscape for the engaged viewer. Other works, including Clara Brinkmann’s SubUrban – Berlin’s Future Lives Underground and Juli Sikorska’s Urban Heat Island Living: Berlin Neukölln adapt familiar image conventions of real-estate advertising and public service announcements (respectively) as entry points into speculative futures that are far from reassuring.
Perhaps most jarring is Florine Schüschke’s Attractive Sites for Dream Investments, which simply features a giant price tag hanging from various buildings in the vicinity of U-Bahn stations—an overt comment on the privatization and gentrification of formerly public sites, elaborated in an audio tour for interested parties. They don’t slap you in the face, but they aren’t quiescent either.
NS: Art always wants to cause some kind of trouble. As we roll forward through a space that is totally mapped out, anything that can really set our minds down a different course is welcome.