TEMP AGENCY PERFORMANCE ART:Randy and Dave Henry and I were living together in Boston during the 1985-86academic year, and this must have happened shortly after we moved in. Randysigned on with a temp agency, and he got a particularly dull and tediousassignment at 'Fidata Investments' or something like that. He worked on the'cash desk', and his job consisted of taking these little slips of paper thatthe investors had filled out, and writing 'Received - Cash Desk' on the back ofeach one.
Needless to say, intense boredom set in before too long, and Randy - perhapswondering if anybody was even looking at these slips after he processed them -started to introduce a little variety into his inscriptions. At first heembellished them with James Brown/Funkadelic-derived phraseology - "Coming ToYou Live From The Cash Desk" and "Movin' and Groovin' in Stereo At The CashDesk" and things of that nature - then, stripping down the inscriptions to abarer essence, he simply wrote verbatim the titles of James Brown tunes on thebacks of the slips. Finally, taking off from 'Pass the Peas', Randy took theinvestment slips into a more conceptual, minimalist realm, signing each slipwith nothing but the name of a fruit or vegetable. And of course, he kept arunning list of what he had written on a piece of scrap paper which he left inthe desk drawer.
Well, the assignment ended as arbitrarily as it had begun, but no other tempjobs were forthcoming. At the end of the month, Randy showed up at the tempagency office to collect his measly check, and was met by the entire staff whomarshalled him into an office with an air of great urgency. Here he wasconfronted with a carefully compiled stack of xerox copies of every slip he hadmis-inscribed - and the most damning piece of evidence of all, the veritablesmoking gun of the whole show, the handwritten list retrieved from Randy's desk.No doubt they had cross-referenced the list to make sure their dossier ofevidence was complete.
"The investors have been complaining," the temp agency manager said, as if thiswas the worst thing that could possibly happen. Trying to make sense of the factthat the offender was a Yale graduate, she added, "You're obviously a verycreative, very intelligent person . . ."
But then the manager's words failed her. "what . . . WHAT were you THINKING?"she sputtered.
Listening to Randy describe it, I could picture these petty technocrats' entireworld being shaken apart as they tried to get a handle on the incident.
It was the separate list that put it over the top. The list removed the prankfrom the category of mere vandalism and elevated it to that of performance art.
The list revealed the intelligence behind the seeming randomness. The list madeit clear that these were not the scrawlings of an insane person or a disgruntledemployee - these they could have handled using existing mechanisms. But therealization that there are other ways of bringing order to the world, ways whichcould be totally alien to the ways of temp agencies, financial investments, andcorporate bureaucracies - this was for them a deeply subversive, frighteningthought.
Randy too was puzzled by the blow-up. "If anybody had told me to stop, I wouldhave," he later said.
I don't think that when Randy took that temp job he deliberately set out to makeit into a performance piece, but I also think that for him the distinctionbetween art and everyday life wasn't as sharply drawn as it is for most people.
I've been thinking about the Temp Agency Incident a lot recently. One thing itdemonstrates is that Artists Don't Ask Permission. If Randy had asked his bossif it would be okay to write 'asparagus' instead of 'received - cash desk', youwouldn't be reading this right now. Mediocre art is what happens when people askpermission - of an audience, or a corporation, or a government agency, or amuseum, or anyone who they think might get offended. Art that doesn't askpermission is the real thing, and it can be threatening to the small-minded.
As with a lot of Randy's work, there's also a lesson here about treating yourwork as if it's important, even if nobody who 'gets it' will ever see it. I usedto secrety imagine that some day I and all my other artist friends would beOfficially Recognized as Important by some establishment or another. We'd beinterviewed by bright young reporters from whatever they'll have instead ofmagazines thirty or forty years from now. "Wow," they'd say, "you were RandyHostetler's roommate? WHAT WAS THAT LIKE?"
That may yet happen, but lately I've come to think that importance isn'tsomething that is retroactively bestowed on artists by some outside, futureauthority. It has to come from within. Randy, I think, understood this early on.He didn't wait around for someone to swoop down and 'discover' him, he didn't domuch self-promotion, and despite the obscurity of his work, he never seemed toworry about whether it was 'important.' He was simply at ease with his artisticnature and he made his work important by just doing it.
luke jaeger
