March 07, 2004
Art in Action
(Readers unfamiliar with the story of Antoine Yates are encouraged to read A Defense of Animal Husbandry, published in this space in October, 2003)
The lard-jowled, CHUDish bureaucrats of the city continue to torment Antoine Yates, the tiger-man of Harlem. Last Monday, Yates was thrown in jail by Judge Budd Goodman for the crime of arriving late to court. Yates, for his part, insisted that he was in the bathroom when his case was called, to which Judge Goodman is reported to have raged: "If he's 30 seconds late, he'll stay in jail until this case is concluded." Judge Goodman, like Mayor Bloomberg before him, is clearly a man whose native poetry has been transfused with bile.
This latest development in the case of the tiger-man of Harlem only further proves that those once cherished pillars of our nature, empathy and good humor, have been dismantled and removed from the island of Manhattan.
I therefore propose that space be cleared at this year’s Whitney Biennial for Antoine Yates. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the art of the last 20 years could make the case and fill out the paperwork. Antoine’s love for Ming the tiger and the tragic, public, ending of that love, demonstrated better than any artist working today the conflict between man and nature -- between the city’s need to maintain order and its residents' desires to create meaning in their own lives, and on their own terms. Yates also best showed how money, class, race, sexuality, and flesh-wounds function in the public discourse. And in terms of spectacle, there’s no question that Yates upstaged Mathew Barney for audacious use of urban space.
I'll leave these heady discussions of the meaning of Antoine's work to the arty class. For my part, I think that adding Antoine Yates to the Whitney Biennial will show how love – pure, saintly love for life in its varieties – is held in contempt by this city. By putting this love front and center at the museum, the artist Yates will give the city's judges, lawyers, bureaucrats, hipsters and real estate agents a taste of what it means to love impossibly, and thus, in some small way, nudge this darkened city back on the path towards utopia.
“The only fault that I had was that I didn't have the proper financial things to give him, the land to roam. But that was part of my journey. I mean, that was my essence of what I was trying to create -- a paradise.” – Antoine Yates.
