Consider The Panda
If tasked with a Noah’s Ark 2.0 scenario and we come up short on cargo space, let us pack extra earthworms, frogs and bees. Let’s leave the pandas behind.
The current population of roughly 3,000 giant pandas, or panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) spend their slow days snacking on 20 to 30 pounds of bamboo followed by nights of notoriously lousy breeding. Like the unicorns, fabled rejects in the first great world flushing, pandas might be better suited as poster children than Darwinian positive members of our planet. They are perfect fuzzy icons for the World Wildlife crowd. And, perhaps, a perfect icon for the rarefied ecology know as contemporary art.
In the Rob Pruitt creation myth, the banishment of Pruitt and Early from the Kingdom of Art as punishment for their 1992 “Red, Black, Green, Red, White and Blue” show at Leo Castelli Gallery is broken with the Cocaine Buffet. This 1998 vengeance on curators, critic and collectors, in the form of a knee bending 16-foot mirror Smithson drug sculpture, is then followed with a big bright Mea culpa of panda hugs. First shown in 2000, the glitter panda paintings hold both the melancholy image of our endanger fellow mammal and the candy gloss appeal of a overesized FAO Schwarz stuffed toy. Or as Michelle Grabner of Frieze called it -
“The paintings’ clichéd imagery neutralizes their real endangered status making us less culpable in the creatures’ pending extinction. And therein lies the beauty of the clichéd image. The trite is pliable; its meaning is so depleted that we must reassign significance to it.”
Let us now skip forward 10 years. We head to the far borderlands of Bushwick Brooklyn and Ridgewood Queens. Here we find a man sized panda. Homeless and waiting, he sits in his mis-shipped China crate. He offers himself as a punching bag prostitute. In exchange for a penny, you may hit this bear. 100 blows for a dollar. For your convenience, text (347-742-2293) or tweet Hill (@natexhill) for a panda house call. The panda severs Brooklyn only individuals and couples on a one-time or continuous basis. Conceived and performed by Nate Hill for the #TheSocialGraph exhibition at Outpost, Punch Me Panda takes our icon from the allure of a glitter empty twilight to just plain down-on-his-luck. Yet, super cute looks and positive thinking pulls this bear up from a possible Pollackesque wallow.
“With these pennies, I can get on my feet, and you can get out that aggression. Together, we can make our lives better. “
Pruitt and Hill seek remediation in roly poly bear suits. The panda, now liberated form just another post-industrial not-going-to-make-it-until-we-clone-it victim (you’re up next Mr. Polar Bear), is now free to take on a new role. Pandas are the new Pietà .
