Video of the Wall Street
Crab Feast on the Lower Manhattan rooftop of the
16 Beaver Group artists' collective, just two
blocks from the New York Stock Exchange.
Wall Street Crab Feast:
A Participatory Performance Trafficking in
Vernacular Culture
Peter Walsh (USA)
Part of Exchange: An Evening
of Performance
organized by curator Carrie Lambert at
the 16
Beaver Group, 16 Beaver Street, Manhattan Saturday, June 17, 2000 Goto
Photo Gallery >>
*In the years since the Wall Street
Crab Feast was held on a rooftop at the 16
Beaver Group in Manhattan, global economic forces have
transformed the Maryland crab industry.*
On Saturday afternoon, June 17, 2000, at the height of the
world stock market boom, artist Peter Walsh held a crab feast
at the rooftop space of the artists’ collective 16
Beaver Group, located just two blocks from the New
York Stock Exchange in the heart of Manhattan’s
Financial District. (photo
gallery)
Called Wall
Street Crab Feast: A Participatory Performance Trafficking
in Vernacular Culture, the event brought the
marginalized culture of his hometown Baltimore into the midst
of the global economy’s command center. A traditional
backyard crab feast is as much a social space for community
and family discussion as it is a meal. Artists from around
the world - including Finland, Japan, Italy, Germany and Ireland
- were invited to take part in the free event.
The crabs themselves
were harvested off Gibson Island in the Chesapeake Bay and
purchased at a roadside stand in front of Mercy High School
on Northern Parkway in Baltimore City. They were then transported
200 miles by car to the 16 Beaver rooftop.
The third seating of the Wall Street
Crab Feast.
The steamed Chesapeake Blue Crabs (Callinectes sapidus)
are ready to be served.
Dumping the pot onto the waiting pages of the Wall
Street Journal.
The original "Clip Art" map of Lower Manhattan
with the Crab Feast location, subway stops and other landmarks.
Some
Background Information About the Creation of Wall Street Crab
Feast
From the invitation:
In a world dominated by triumphant Global Capitalism, what
are the roles and functions, if any, of local, regional,
vernacular, and provincial cultures?
In a world where technology bridges all distances at the
click of a button, is there a place for artistic and cultural
practices that are limited by the physical boundaries of
geographic communities?
In attempting to insert community-based culture into the
maw of global consumer society, are all differences reduced
to a lowest-common denominator pastiche of complex and specific
life experiences?
The Formal Invitation and related
reading materials for the Wall Street Crab Feast.
Wall Street Crab Feast was the first
of a series of art projects that I have created that make
use of social interactions to talk about economics and power.
In this case, I was working with the notion of "gift
economies," the non-cash social exchange systems used
all over the world that were first clearly described by the
sociologist Marcel Mauss in his 1950 book The
Gift. One aspect of how "gifts" operate
is that they bind people together by creating the obligation
of "returning the gift." With Wall Street
Crab Feast, I fed two bushels of steamed crabs,
corn on the cob and potato salad to scores of artists and
individuals from all over the world. What is most remarkable
is that the gift of food works so well. Many of the people
who attended were complete strangers and have since become
friends and compatriots. The exchange system, though limited
in scope, was clearly quite effective.
Newly
arrived in New York City from Baltimore, I intended the feast
to be a negotiation of sorts between my own untranslatable
experiences and knowledge from my hometown and that of other
participants. As the internet stock boom hit its peak just
blocks away, we were looking at and searching for other, non-monetary,
non-financial ways of human exchange.
Those
who RSVPed in time were sent a packet of discusion materials
and readings. These short selections were chosen with the
hope of inspiring a spirited exchange of ideas. I asked that
the participants make of them what they could (or ignore them).
Although my own beliefs fall in certain directions, I hold
no particular allegiance to any of these readings. In fact,
I strongly disagree with some of them.
1) A New Yorker ad for Novica.com plus selections
from the website www.novica.com
2) Thomas Friedman’s “The Golden Arches Theory
of Conflict Prevention,” from Lexus and
the Olive Tree, 1999
3) “The False Dawn of the Global Free Market”
from John Gray’s False Dawn,
1999
4) Selections from Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s
The New World Border, 1985-1996
5) Pages from the NSK electronic embassy, www.kud-fp.si/embassy/
, the “first global state of the universe,”
1998 [note: defunct
site as of 2004]
plus
6) “Crabs crawl from Bay to belly in less than a day”
by Rafael
Alvarez, 1986, from Hometown Boy,
1999, which does an excellent job of highlighting a series
of economic exchanges quite similar to the ones that brought
bushels of Atlantic blue crabs from the waters of the Chesapeake
Bay to the rooftop table at 16 Beaver Group.
Articles Written About Wall Street Crab Feast
1) “Crabs turn Manhattan into
an isle of joy,” The
Baltimore Sun, 6/19/00, Rafael
Alvarez. Reprinted in Alvarez's book Storyteller
(Baltimore: The Baltimore Sun) 2001, ISBN
1-893116-22-0.
My thanks go out first and foremost
to all the feast participants for having fun while
in fact being treated like guinea pigs in an experiment. Deidre
Hoguet, who worked by my side in making the nuts and bolts
of the project fit together, was indispensible as always and I am
forever indebted to her. Rafael Alvarez and his
father Manuel Alverez brought remarkable energy
and knowledge to the project . Manuel, a former union tug-boat man
in Baltimore, even lent me his crab steaming recipe. Ralph travelled
with me on the memorable overnight excursion setting our local crab
commodity into global motion and of course wrote the lovely article
in The Sun. I owe them both. Roberto Guerra
shot beautiful professional video of the event which I hope to post
on this website soon. Megan Sapnar and
Ingrid Ankerson, Josh Levine, Eric
Nehus, and Abel Yee all chipped in at
various points, too. Jack Livingston of Peek
Magazine was kind enough to take my project seriously and publish
Jan Werner's smart commentary. Also many thanks
to curator Carrie Lambert and 16 Beaver
members Colin Beatty and Rene Gabri.
And finally, thanks to the hosts and participants of the two post-feast
discussions for their superb feedback and discussions. The first
was graciously hosted salon-style by artist Carol Wood;
the second by Paige Sarlin as part of 16
Beaver Group’s Monday Night Series.
