Spreading the Word

By Barry Owens

In the name of art, performance artist Nicolas Dumit Estevez has slept on a hard bed made of art catalogs, waking to a breakfast of wine, Brie, crackers and other staples of the art gallery opening. He has strapped 80 pounds of art books to his back, perched an easel on his shoulder like a cross, and schlepped his burden from Battery Park City to Harlem.

Another time, he outfitted himself with a pair of bicycle mirrors and walked the entire distance from Maiden Lane to the Bronx Museum of the Arts—backwards.

"A woman asked me if I had health insurance," the artist recently recalled. "She was really concerned. She followed me for 10 blocks."

Last month, Estevez donned a blue frock and, following a mock blessing and a "Eucharistic snack" of grape juice and bread in a conference room of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, set out on another of his torturous journeys—this one to New Jersey.

He toted a heavy iron letter "P" in one hand (the "P" stands for penance pilgrimage, and performance art,naturally) and a copy of "Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present," by Roselee Goldberg, under his arm as if it were the Scriptures. He also carried a stack of pamphlets (title: "Spreading the Word") that explained his mission. Once in New Jersey he would stop at sites

including a Catholic school and a senior center, plopping down a soap box and using a megaphone to preach the word of performance art, before arriving at the Jersey City Museum. Wending his way through Lower Manhattan, onto the Battery Park City esplanade and to the ferry terminal, he offered around his pamphlets —to smokers on the sidewalk, a flagman at a

construction site, a hot dog vendor—but was mostly ignored. He was emphatically waved off by a man outside St. Paul's Chapel on Broadway who held a sign that read, "Jesus is in the earth relm (sic)." The man, who looked as if he had been standing there awhile, recoiled from Estevez's offering. "Get away from me," he said. "You got a problem?"

The journey was the fourth of seven planned "penances" for Estevez in a work he calls "For Art's Sake." It is modeled after the religious pilgrimages of devout Catholics to the tomb of St. James in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

Estevez's prior work includes setting up a "Passer-by Museum" on the street where exhibits were made up entirely from items donated from, well, passers-by. And he once donned a sandwich-board sign that offered his services free of charge to small independent businesses in Jamaica, Queens. "Looking to work in hair braiding salons, dentists' offices, bridal shops, diners and soup kitchens,

		among other places," the sign read. At Church and Warren Streets, Estevez paused to look south toward the World Trade Center site. Farther west, he jaywalked to get a closer look into a construction site. Crossing West Street, he left puzzled nannies in his wake. Finally, at the ferry terminal, Estevez rested. A woman

found herself one seat away from him. Estevez stood to read a few lines from Goldberg's book. The woman found another seat.

"It's my first experience being so much inside an artwork," whispered Jersey City Museum curator Rocio Aranda-Alvarado, who accompanied Estevez on his trek.

The pair then waited in reverential silence for the ferry to arrive.