Burning Out
In search of smartdumb: Aaron Young's "Greeting Card"
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An older man on my block in Los Angeles happens to look and dress a lot like members of the Hells Angels motorcycle club I used to see congregating outside their hideout on 3rd Street in East Village. My new friend is much kinder and much more talkative and likely hasn’t committed any serious crimes, so I admit I’m embarrassed my brain lumps him in with a violent global outlaw motorcycle gang. I see him almost every morning when I’m walking my dog, when he usually asks me if I have finished reading Autobiography of a Yogi, the book he recommended me when we first met.
For whatever reason, I only realized today that my friend doesn’t remind me of Hells Angels so much as he reminds me of the Hells Angels who performed in a 2007 art piece by Aaron Young, called “Greeting Card.”
There is scant record of the happening on the internet, which is interesting in and of itself – for better or worse, so much of the internet from that era continues to disappear. I managed to dig up this Page Six-ish blurb on New York Magazine’s website:
On September 17, artist Aaron Young turned the Seventh Regiment Armory into an art-world version of an indoor Hells Angels rally. For seven minutes, ten riders performed elaborate burnouts over a vast patch of specially painted boards; their tires dug into the orange paint, underneath leaving giant scribbles in their wakes. Five hundred VIP guests stood on the second-floor wraparound balcony as the riders skidded, back-circled, and revved their engines. Amid celebrities and curious somebodies such as Stephanie Seymour, Chloë Sevigny, Terry Richardson, Usher, Rufus Wainwright, and Tom Ford (he and Sotheby’s “sponsored” it; Art Production Fund produced it), many in the audience had to make use of the gas masks passed out at the entrance as the air filled with burned rubber and exhaust. At the end, two cycles “signed” the painting AY 07, to cheers.
My friend who lived on the same block as the Hells Angels at the time, and a few of her girlfriends (one of whom was kinda/sorta dating the artist iirc), managed to be among those 500 guests. Probably because I wasn’t invited, I decided to dismiss the whole thing as yet another art world piss-take. But here I am thinking about it almost 18 years later.
One of the details lost in the above writeup, according to my friends, was how funny it was. This was not helter skelter. The cyclists rode slowly and delicately, their motorcycles wielded less like vehicles of mayhem and more like weird mechanical paint erasers. If you’re me, you see the words “indoor Hells Angels rally” and immediately think of monster truck rallies, specifically the opening warmup show of motocross riders performing insane mid-air tricks, jumping over crushed cars, turning an entire stadium into a kind of hornet’s nest of two-cycle cacophony. That’s just not what it was though. Instead here were hardened probable criminals on Harley-Davidsons putting on an artsy-fartsy pony show. They filled the room with engine noise and exhaust, and created tire marks on painted boards, but that was the extent of their terror. The happening itself was of course performance art, but also the fact that Young convinced them to take part in the first place.
I admit I wouldn’t mind one of Young’s scuffed up painted boards hanging over my sofa — an artifact of late Fluxus, which itself is a spiritual forebearer of smartdumb. What bothered me initially about the piece – i.e. “What did the artist even do here?” — is now what enchants me, i.e. “Wow, he managed to do barely nothing at all.”