I also eschew the identity of "puppeteer" it is a concept that blurs the boundaries of discrete objects and persons. I do think Anarchist Nihilist Puppet Show is my day job.

Kalan Sherrard

Categorized in : Thinking Identity Anarchist

Not being categorized is like keeping your mouth shut. Categorization is linguistic, people trying to understand each other. Words are misty, language is a fog. I want to be in as many boxes as possible, describe myself as thickly as possible.

keeping-your-mouth-shut fog people

From my earliest youth I've been riddled with angst about the homogeneity of the world and have tried to do things to break it: attacking abercrombie & fitch in the mall with a plunger, posting strange statues made of garbage around my town, different kinds of interventions, parades and experiments. I've always cared a lot about difference.

strange different world

Everyone should be able to make art about ideas without getting c... by Kalan Sherrard

Everyone should be able to make art about ideas without getting cornered into self-art.

Puppets and dolls are the gateways between human beings and objects. There are tons of cliches to spout about puppetry and animism, the primacy of the object, attacking anthropocentric worldviews, etc, and while there were always puppets around, I started working with them to deal with the times I knew I wouldn't be able to collaborate with other humans, to have a team.

cliche worldview team

I do what I do because it seems to be critically missing in the world and I want to see it not-happen.

Most of the things are either not communicable through human expression or they're top secret. Also I'm working on being a better person, and becoming more disciplined.

being-a-better-person better-person secret

[Do you know] how it feels to be a clownish character? It's always complicated to imagine conveying yourself outside of your body. Inside myself I feel like this rich, complicated thing, and then I see representations of myself, especially in the media - and I think this is why it's troubling for me, because I feel so caricatured and flattened.

media character thinking

I'm extremely critical. I don't consider myself a performance artist. I balk at the term performance art.

performances term art

I like street performance because it's garbage time. The subway is garbage time: no one can say I'm wasting their time because they've already thrown that time into the subway. If they don't want to see me they can go to the other end of the platform. But on the street I do feel this disgust towards the audience: why would you waste your time looking at me? Why are you being so respectful of me? You should attack me.

garbage waste want

I'm interested in confronting police brutality and police abuse of cracking down on street performers and street artists, but also in valorizing street art as legitimate performance within the artistic sphere, where it's so often conflated with pan-handling and begging and not "successful" art. I want to change laws around street performance.

successful law art

I’m not doing anything wrong, I’m not obstructing anyone’s access. When I have a crowd I make sure that the crowd makes room for people. I’m an artist who cares about the cultural fabric of New York City. I care about New York as a harbor for street culture - and I care about street culture as a base-level populist diffusion of ideas. And I believe in making those ideas accessible to everyone.

artist new-york believe