New York artist seeks naked truth of Wall St

All that glitters on Wall Street is fool's gold for a New York artist who has gone to extreme lengths to bare his views on the world's most famous finance center.

An exhibition of Zefry Throwell's work in Manhattan's trendy Meatpacking District transfers the angry sentiments of the Occupy Wall Street protests to the rarified atmosphere of the art gallery.

Housed in a bare-walled industrial space, "Ocularpation: Wall Street" features rows of golden objects that the 36-year-old artist says represent the Financial District's chief professions.

There are brooms for the janitors, piggybanks for bankers, handcuffs for police, high-heeled sandals for prostitutes, paper coffee mugs and Blackberry phones, neck ties, legal pads and a FedEx box -- all real and ready to use, except for being encased in gold-colored paint.

"The golden sculptures are representative of the US economy right now. They act as a metaphor for how the US relates with its own people and the rest of the world," he told AFP by email.

"Gold in this body of work references the current American financial dream: sold as a glitter jewel of bling and hype, but in fact a fantasy whose value is a thin layer of myth and speculation."

Throwell was ahead of the curve in casting a rebel eye on Wall Street. Back on August 1 last year, six weeks before the first Occupy activists launched what became their nationwide movement, Throwell was seeking the naked truth of the financial industry.

In a well-organized piece of guerrilla art, he and about 50 others, each playing one of those Wall Street roles -- banker, personal trainer, hot dog vendor, janitor and so on -- gathered at the start of the working day.

It was 7:00 am, just as the street was filling with people arriving at their offices and shops, when the 50 provocateurs swiftly undressed.

The result, which was caught on film by a pre-positioned camera crew, was a sometimes hilarious, always weird scene in which ordinary looking people, apparently for no reason, suddenly stripped nude, before continuing with their previous activities.

The footage was made into a short film that shows on a continuous loop downstairs from the gold objects at the Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert gallery.

Throwell says the flash mob idea was inspired by his mother, who was 65 and retired when the stock market crash destroyed her savings and forced her to go back into work. "At first she was depressed. Then she was furious," he says on the film.

The same could be said of many of the people who flocked to Occupy Wall Street in its early days, before demonstrators were whittled down to hardcore activists and growing numbers of homeless and other hangers on.

Throwell says his action in August caught the attention of the Occupy organizers, who came for advice. Their original idea had been to try to camp on Wall Street, which he calls "the most mysterious street in the world."

Instead, Throwell, who thought police there were too "jumpy," suggested taking over nearby Zuccotti Park. Occupy Wall Street did so successfully and camped out for two months.

"I am happy that people are paying attention to financial reform in the US," he said. "Hopefully it will save people from ending up in situations like my mother's where they work all their lives, save their money and then are abused by a system that doesn't take care of them."

Since the heady days of late summer 2011, the Occupy movement has hit hard times. The Zuccotti Park protesters were finally ejected November 15, with other camps as far apart as Boston and Los Angeles suffering similar fates. Today, the movement is struggling to regain the media attention and the public sympathy it once had.

But Maureen Sullivan, a spokeswoman for the "Ocularpation" exhibition, said this migration from gritty streets to chic gallery does not signal another stage in the Occupy movement's decline.

She described a "huge emergence of artists" on political themes and said there was nothing abnormal about the wealthy art world supporting the so-called "99 percent" of ordinary folk.

"The art world is very much involved in this issue. As much money as they have, they're leftist," she said.

Throwell described the dip in Occupy activity as a winter hiatus.

"They are regrouping. When things get warmer, people will come out side again. I believe this period of hibernation is actually a good thing," he said.

"Ocularpation: Wall Street" opened in January and closes February 11th.