[In December 2002, just as New York City was bracing for a transit strike that was called for four days hence, 37 black boxes labeled "FEAR" were found in the Union Square subway station. The discovery caused significant concern and drew public attention—in a New York-sort of way: people were disturbed, suggested theories of the boxes’ origin, and went about their business—which, in a subway station, meant going someplace or coming back from someplace.
[Aside from the looming strike threat—New York City without public transportation is hell, believe me—we were just over a year past the 9/11 attack; it was fresh in everyone’s memory.
[Now, I live near Union Square and the station, which is under the park at 14th Street and 4th Avenue/Park Avenue South, is one of the city’s busiest. It’s the station I use most of the four that are near my apartment—though I didn’t happen to have been in it that day. I do remember the incident reported below, however.]
“37 BLACK BOXES
LABELED ‘FEAR’
by Robert F. Worth and
William K. Rashbaum
[The article below was the first I read about the mysterious boxes in “my” subway station. It ran in the New York Times on 12 December 2002 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”]) while the story behind the discovery was still a puzzle.]
There were 37 cardboard boxes in all – some spray-painted black, some wrapped in black electrical tape, all of them inscribed in white block lettering with a single word: fear.
At some point yesterday morning [Wednesday, 11 December] the mysterious boxes were affixed to the walls and girders of the Union Square subway station in Lower Manhattan. Within minutes, in a city long on edge, there was concern that they contained bombs or presented other dangers. The police were alerted, the station and its surrounding area was evacuated, and passing trains were barred from stopping at Union Square, one of the city’s busiest stations.
After hours of investigation, and the delicate, ultimately uneventful opening of the boxes, the police said they believed that the episode was a stunt but did not know its origin or intent. One possible explanation, investigators said, was that transit workers, who have authorized a strike for 12:01 a.m. Monday [16 December], were somehow behind the prank.
A union spokesman denied that transit workers had had anything to do with the boxes.
Stunt or not, in a city with terror in the back of its mind and rumors of possible wildcat actions by the transit workers’ union, the bizarre boxes seemed to crystallize a host of anxieties, and generated panicky speculation among those who stood waiting above ground to hear what they contained.
“You have to wonder,” said Bob Lamb, 57, as he stood in a frigid rain and stared at the crowd of police officers guarding the subway entrance on the southwest corner of Union Square. “It seems suspicious so close to the strike date, but nowadays I guess this kind of thing is becoming routine.”
A police sergeant first noticed one of the boxes about 10:45 a.m., near a stairwell leading to a lower platform in the station, the authorities said. As he was examining it, a subway rider told him that there were others.
The boxes were about 16 by 20 inches, and about two inches high, the police said. Some were duct-taped to the station walls, some attached to pillars near the edge of the platforms and others scattered elsewhere, including under a bench.
The station was shut down, and subway riders and employees were evacuated. The police bomb squad and the Emergency Service Unit were called in, and they examined each of the boxes, swabbing them for hazardous materials and dusting them for fingerprints before the station was reopened in the early afternoon, the police said.
Police officials said they had no hard evidence indicating who was behind the event. One official said, however, that detectives thought there was “probably a pretty good chance that it’s strike-related.”
Another police official also pointed out that Union Square was the frequent site of antiwar protests and other acts of civil disobedience.
And a third official said a review of videotape recordings from a camera in the sprawling station failed to shed light on the incident.
A transit union official rejected any suggestion that workers were responsible. “Transit workers have never been involved in anything remotely like that, and for people to speculate on that is irresponsible,” said Ed Watt, the secretary-treasurer of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union.
In Union Square, though, there was no shortage of people who said they suspected the transit workers.
“It’s probably the transit people,” said Amy Kalt, who was selling scarves and other clothing at one of the square’s market kiosks yesterday.
Others were more sanguine, observing that the city has its share of apolitical pranksters and attention-seekers. “It’s probably nothing,” one pedestrian, Jane Comfort, said as she hurried off toward another subway station. “I’m a good conspiracy theory person, but it didn’t occur to me that this was about the strike.”
And to some visitors from abroad, the incident said much about New York’s relative inexperience with mysterious threats, terrorist or otherwise.
“In Tel Aviv, we get these things all the time,” said Guy Grossman, a graduate student in philosophy who is spending a month in New York. “If it’s a bomb, the robot removes it in five minutes. You have a lot to learn here.”
[In December 2002, New York City averted a potentially crippling transit strike when the Transport Workers Union Local 100 and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority reached a tentative contract agreement. The strike, which would have halted subway and bus service for millions of commuters, was averted after negotiators "stopped the clock" and continued talks. An agreement was reached late on 16 December, avoiding the shutdown.
[Robert F. Worth became a New York Times reporter at the metropolitan desk in 2000. He was the Times correspondent in Baghdad from 2003 to 2006, and the Beirut bureau chief from 2007 until 2011. He’s also contributed to the New York Review of Books and he’s the author of Rage for Order (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).
[William K. Rashbaum is a senior writer for the New York Times, covering municipal and political corruption, the courts, and broader law enforcement topics in New York. He writes investigative stories and news articles.]
* *
* *
“AN UNUSUALLY
ARRESTING ART PROJECT”
Melanie Lefkowitz
[The following article, revealing the perpetrator of the Black Box Mystery, ran in the Queens edition of Newsday (Melville, Long Island, NY) on 17 December 2002 (Sec. A).]
Clinton Boisvert’s public-art assignment earned him an A.
A Class A misdemeanor charge, that is.
Boisvert, a freshman at the School [of] Visual Arts, turned himself in yesterday on charges he scattered 37 small black boxes stenciled with the word “fear” in the Union Square subway station Wednesday [11 December], just as worries about a transit workers’ strike were reaching a crescendo.
[SVA, a private for-profit art school, has facilities in both the Chelsea neighborhood on Manhattan's west side, and the ‘Gramercy Park neighborhood, on the east side. The east side campus is less than a ten-block straight shot south to Union Square. Chelsea’s a little farther, but only a one-mile/20-minute walk.]
The incident touched off jitters across the city, suspicion that disgruntled transit workers or even terrorists could have been involved, and the evacuation of the transit hub for more than five hours.
But Boisvert’s lawyer said the 25-year-old student only intended to observe the public’s reaction to his project, and wasn’t even aware of the potential transit strike when he planned it.
“It’s an innocent art project that went unfortunately awry, to say the least,” said Boisvert’s lawyer, William Stampur. “It was done in the morning rush hour in full view of hundreds if not thousands of people walking by – it wasn’t done in any surreptitious fashion.”
Boisvert was awaiting arraignment last night on charges of second-degree reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct, officials said.
Boisvert, who is from Michigan, has lived in New York for only three months. He allegedly taped the boxes to walls, pillars and benches throughout the station. A friend who was helping him carry the two bags of boxes will not face charges, police said.
The stunt was part of a class assignment to display art in a public place, police said. Stampur said that Boisvert hung up the boxes, went to class to make his presentation and was planning to return to the station to retrieve his work when he found out the subway stop had been evacuated.
“If it weren’t so serious it would be jocular,” Stampur said.
A spokesman for the school did not return a phone call seeking comment.
Police described Boisvert as “clueless,” not malicious.
“This was not a publicity-seeking stunt in any way, shape or form,” Stampur said.
[Before Melanie Lefkowitz left journalism to enter academia, she was a newspaper reporter for 20 years, and her work has been published in Newsday, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the New York Post, among other publications. She taught journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.]
* * * *
“ART STUDENT’S
PROJECT ON ‘FEAR’
by Kevin Flynn
[Kevin Flynn’s report ran in the New York Times of 17 December 2002 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”]).]
Clinton Boisvert’s assignment for his Foundation Sculpture class, according to the police, was to situate art in a specific place, not to create alarm in the subway system.
But Mr. Boisvert, a college student at the School of Visual Arts, succeeded in the latter, if not the former, last week when he taped 37 black cardboard boxes inscribed with the word “Fear” in the Union Square subway station, according to investigators.
After seeing the disruption his project had caused, Mr. Boisvert contacted a lawyer. And yesterday morning, he surrendered to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which intends to prosecute him on a charge of reckless endangerment, a spokeswoman said.
[Formally, there’s no such office as the Manhattan district attorney. Manhattan is the name of the borough, a city division. The DA is a state job (which, by the way, is why it doesn’t have term limits, as all city positions do) and the incumbent’s jurisdiction is the County of New York—which covers the same ground as the Borough of Manhattan but is a state division. (The other four boroughs are also counties, and two of them, like Manhattan, have two names.)]
“The kid is clueless, basically,” a police official said. “He did not seem to know the ramifications his art project would have.”
When the mysterious boxes showed up last Wednesday, taped to the girders and walls in the Lower Manhattan station, they raised the sort of wide-open questions that authorities in a city still anxious about terrorism do not enjoy answering. Were they some kind of bomb canisters? Or a threat from a union member contemplating a transit strike? Or simply an artsy stunt?
The station was shut for hours while the bomb squad examined each box, dusted for fingerprints and checked for hazardous materials. When the station reopened, many subway riders just shrugged. But the Transport Workers Union had to labor to dissociate itself from an incident that some riders mistook for a bit of intimidation.
“No one at the school understood that he was going to do something that was of that radical a nature,” said Adam Eisenstat, a spokesman for the college.
Mr. Boisvert, 25, in his first year at the school, had submitted a proposal to do a different project for the class, but apparently changed his mind, Mr. Eisenstat said. “He chose to make the city, the subway, the topical events, his canvas,” he said. But Mr. Boisvert was trying to mark the tension, not create it, Mr. Eisenstat said. “The tension is at a level that I think he never realized,” he said.
William Stampur, Mr. Boisvert’s lawyer, said his client had arrived in New York only three months ago from Michigan and had not even been aware that a transit strike was being contemplated. Mr. Stampur described the boxes as an innocent art project that had been erected during the morning rush when hundreds of people were passing by. “It was done methodically and in open view,” he said.
As a result, he said, Mr. Boisvert did not anticipate that others would view it as mysterious and frightening. “He feels so bad,” Mr. Stampur said.
Reckless endangerment is a misdemeanor that carries a maximum term of a year in jail upon conviction. A friend who helped Mr. Boisvert arrange the boxes is not likely to be charged because his role was minimal, the police said.
Mr. Boisvert was waiting in a Manhattan holding cell last night for arraignment, and missed one of his final exams, Mr. Stampur said. Mr. Eisenstat said it was unclear just how the subway project would be graded.
[Kevin Flynn is an editor with the New York Times and the co-author (with Jim Dwyer) of 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers New York (Times Books, 2005). His work as an investigative editor helped earn the Times numerous awards, including a 2009 Pulitzer Prize. He served as the police bureau chief of the newspaper from 1998 to 2002, when he became investigations editor for the newspaper’s Metro desk. He’s currently investigations editor for the paper's Culture desk. He’s also the editor of The New York Times Book of Crime: More Than 166 Years of Covering the Beat (Sterling Books, 2017).]
* *
* *
“CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK:
AND CRIME BECOMES
ART”
by Michael Kimmelman
[This news story was published in the New York Times on 18 December 2002 (Sec. E [“The Arts”]).]
By strange coincidence, New York City’s crime rate was reported yesterday to be the lowest among the 25 largest cities in the United States, New York ranking 197th among 216 cities with at least 100,000 residents. This puts the city below squeaky-clean Provo, Utah, but (thank goodness) still above Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.
At the same time it turned out that those 37 black boxes with the word “Fear” on them, which mysteriously turned up attached to girders and walls in the Union Square subway station last Wednesday, were, as you may have guessed from the start, an art project. The boxes, which spread panic and caused the police to shut the station for hours and call in the bomb squad, turn out to be the work of Clinton Boisvert, a 25-year-old freshman at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, who surrendered Monday [16 December] to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which intends to prosecute him on charges of reckless endangerment.
So now it is left to hapless, fledgling art students, fresh from Michigan, to keep up the city’s gritty reputation for crime. At least New York can still take pride, as the nation’s cultural capital, that even our misdemeanors are works of art. Take that, Rancho Cucamonga.
First things first. Clinton, what an idiotic project. As the saying goes, art this bad ought to be a crime. “The kid is clueless, basically,” a police official said on Monday, demonstrating remarkable acumen as an art critic. The state of public and political art has now declined to the point that plenty of people who follow it simply presumed last week that what happened at Union Square must be a work of art, not a fake bomb by a terrorist or a threat by a union member contemplating a transit strike. In the 1960’s, people might have guessed it was a loony labor activist; in the Son of Sam 70’s, a loony loner. Yesterday’s loony loner is today’s Conceptual artist.
[The term “Son of Sam” refers to David Berkowitz (b. 1953), a serial killer who terrorized New York City between 1975 and 1977, leading to possibly the biggest manhunt in the city’s history. His crimes involved the shooting or stabbing of six individuals and the wounding of eleven others. He also became known as the “.44 Caliber Killer” due to his weapon of choice, a .44 Special caliber Bulldog revolver. Berkowitz also sent letters to the press and police, taunting them and signing them as “Son of Sam,” a name derived from his claim that he was taking orders from a demon that resided in his neighbor’s dog, named
[Berkowitz appeared calm in court on 8 May 1978, and pleaded guilty to all of the shootings. On 12 June 1978, he was sentenced to a 25-years-to-life term in prison for each murder, to be served consecutively. Berkowitz became eligible for parole in 2003, but remains incarcerated in upstate New York’s Attica Correctional Facility. His next parole hearing is scheduled for May 2026.]
Mr. Boisvert couldn’t be reached for comment yesterday. His lawyer has told him not to talk to the press for a while. Trying to imagine what he intended, I can only guess that he might say the boxes bearing “fear” were meant to make tangible, as sculpture, what New Yorkers have felt since 9/11 – to give physical form to prevalent emotion. But that’s art mumbo jumbo. By provoking fear, the work trafficked in emotional violence. Carried to an extreme, violence as art leads to the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s notorious remark, which he tried desperately to retract, that the attack on the World Trade Center was “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos.”
[Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) was a German composer, acknowledged as one of the most important, but also controversial, composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He’s known for his work in electronic music, for introducing controlled chance (aleatory techniques) into serial composition, and for musical spatialization.]
Mr. Boisvert’s inspiration was evidently Keith Haring [1958-90; pop artist who emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture; studied at SVA], who made his reputation in the 1980’s drawing happy, cartoonish dancing figures and barking dogs in chalk on the black paper pasted on unused advertising spaces in subway stations [including, coincidentally, Union Square Station]. He was a graffiti artist, which made him a harmless, beloved petty criminal. He did not leave dangerous-looking black boxes in crowded public places. Mr. Boisvert is an admirer of his, Barbara Schwartz, one of his teachers, told me yesterday. She stressed that his project wasn’t meant to be a prank. She insisted that he was a very serious young man. The work was intended to get people talking, she said.
Well, it did. She said she had no idea he was planning it. Her assignment for the freshman foundation sculpture class was to make a site-specific work, part of the curriculum for years. A couple of students in the class shot films on subways. Mr. Boisvert had said he was going to paint Fed Ex boxes black and arrange them in a room in the school. Ms. Schwartz had reserved a room for him, she said, but he mentioned nothing about “fear.” He said he wanted a dance floor. She thought he was planning a performance.
Clearly, he changed his mind after he spoke with her. “It was my last class of the semester and everyone was presenting what they had done, and his was the last project before the break at 2 o’clock that afternoon,” Ms. Schwartz said. “He put out snapshots he had taken around the subway station. He said he had taken the boxes to Union Square that morning and placed them in plain view of everyone. He said he had painted the word ‘Fear’ on them.
“We were all saying, ‘Wow, how interesting,’ but I looked at him when it dawned on me. I said, ‘Clinton, you didn’t leave them there, did you?’ One of the other students then said the trains were no longer stopping at Union Square and two others said there was a bomb threat. I said, ‘Oh my God, do you think this has something to do with your project?’ He looked stricken. He never imagined what would happen.”
Ms. Schwartz consulted her superiors at the school. Mr. Boisvert consulted a lawyer.
He spent a night waiting in a holding cell for arraignment. His work thereby became performance art. The history of modernism is littered with artists whose outrageous provocations have made headlines; only an elite few have made it into jail. Mr. Boisvert joins that company.
A night in the slammer probably caused him at least as much fear as he caused straphangers.
[Michael Kimmelman is the architecture critic for the New York Times and has written about public housing and homelessness, public space, landscape architecture, community development and equity, infrastructure, and urban design. He’s reported from more than 40 countries and twice been a Pulitzer Prize finalist.]
* *
* *
“LETTERS: TEACHERS
SHARE BLAME”
by Louis Torres
[The letter below pertaining to the guerrilla artist, Clinton Boisvert, was printed in the Queens edition of Newsday (Merrick, Long Island, NY) on 21 December 2002 (Sec. A).]
Clinton Boisvert is the hapless student who planted 37 black boxes stenciled with the word “fear” at the Union Square subway station. If he is found guilty of the misdemeanor of reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct [“An Unusually Arresting Art Project,” News, Dec. 17], his teachers at the School of Visual Arts should certainly be held responsible for brainwashing him into thinking that something like stenciled boxes displayed in a public place would be considered “art.” He probably thought they would give him an A for originality for the place he picked! They still might.
Louis Torres
Manhattan
* *
* *
“WARNING: ART
AHEAD”
by Lenore Skenazy
[Lenore Skenazy’s column in the Daily News (New York City) ran on 22 December 2002.]
Whatever happened to the plain old pursuit of beauty?
The artist had a great idea: He would put some suspicious packages in the subway to get people thinking about bombs, terrorism and maybe even deeper stuff, like a change in the balance of power. Cool!
But this was not 11 days ago here in New York. This was 1994, in the London tube. And the artist, Brooklynite Gregory Green, took one crucial precaution: He put up plaques to explain his project, which had been approved in advance by the subway authorities.
[Gregory Green (b. 1959) is active in New York, where he also lives. Green is known for sculptor-assemblage. He creates conceptual pieces that suggest explosive devices, such as pipe bombs neatly packed into briefcases or hollowed out books with nuclear warheads. His purpose is to stimulate creative thought about freedom and personal responsibility. As for the installation connected to the London Underground, it may be related to a work called Suitcase Bomb #10 (London) (1994) which was part of a series that seems to have been exhibited in London, but I was unable to connect it specifically to the Underground.]
That way, nobody had to shut the station for five hours.
Here in New York, Clinton Boisvert would have done well to follow that model. Instead, he placed 38 black boxes [sic; all other reports said there were 37 boxes] labeled “FEAR” around the Union Square subway station Dec. 11. After the cops dismantled the packages, they set out to find a suspect described as “artsy” by a commuter who’d seen him.
The profiling worked. Even as police were seeking, presumably, a guy with a goatee, black clothes and a tattoo, they got lucky when School of Visual Arts freshman Boisvert – goatee and black coat, yes, tattoo status unknown – turned himself in.
Apparently he had no idea his boxes would cause such a commotion. “He’d have to live in a black box to be that dumb,” opined a colleague.
Whether or not he intended to create havoc, I leave to the judge. But clearly he did intend to create art, and that is just as disturbing.
His sculpture class assignment had been to put a piece of art in a specific place and watch the public’s reaction.
That’s pretty broad. If he had placed 38 wads of gum on the subway floor, would that have been any different? How about 38 papier-maché rats? Or condoms?
My guess is, all would have been equally acceptable in class, because almost anything gets to call itself art today.
Beautiful pictures and stunning sculptures? Those are so old hat that sometimes it seems artists are running in the opposite direction, just to be considered legit.
Why can’t they go back to the simple pursuit of beauty? “I don’t think you can go back to anything,” says Dave Tourje [b. 1960], an artist in Southern California. “The only thing you can do is keep moving forward.”
Forward to “FEAR” boxes. Great. “One of the functions of art is to be on the edge of what is permissible,” says James Yood, a professor of art theory at Northwestern University. Provoking the middle class, he explains, is a time-honored artistic pursuit.
That pursuit has lead [sic] to such gross attention grabbers as Andres Serrano’s [b. 1950] “Piss Christ” [1987] – a crucifix hung in a jar of pee – and the infamous dung-covered Madonna [The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) by Chris Ofili (b. 1968)] at the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s “Sensation” show [2 October 1999-9 January 2000].
[Both Piss Christ and The Holy Virgin Mary are mentioned prominently in my posts “The First Amendment & The Arts” (8 May 2010) and “The Return of HIDE/SEEK” (4 January 2012).
[I also recommend having a look
at “Susanne
Langer: Art, Beauty, & Theater” (4 and 8
January 2010)—I think Skenazy should have
as well—which discuss the art philosopher’s ideas about beauty. Langer’s theories
are also discussed in “Jackson
Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954 (MoMA)” (2 October 2017). The ideas of Langer (1895-1985) crop up many
times in posts on this blog.]
But Yood points out that even Michelangelo [1475-1564; Italian Renaissance sculptor and painter] provoked the public in his day: His “Last Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel was criticized for too much nudity, and parts were soon painted over.
[The reference to Yood didn’t connect. I assume Skenazy means the Israeli rock band, but I couldn’t find any reference associated with them concerning Michelangelo.]
“The first person who did a painting about something that wasn’t a religious subject was considered bizarre,” adds Carol Oster, a Manhattan sculptor. So were such groundbreakers as the now-loved Impressionists, and the wacky Dadaists, whose claim to fame was placing a urinal in an art gallery. After that, it was anything goes [see my report on Dada (20 February 2010), the 2006 exhibit I saw at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City].
Some of that anything is disturbing, but, indeed, does make a point. Those “Suspicious Looking Objects” in London, for instance, were part of Green’s 10-year exploration of power. His bomb-centric art was trying to make people aware of how easily our world could change if a person or group embraced terrorism. Rather prescient.
The difference between Green and the “FEAR” boxes is that Green identified his work as art. He wanted people to think about issues, not about dying on the way home.
Setting out to simply upset people is not art. It’s self-indulgence. The art world has too much of that already.
[Lenore Skenazy is an author, speaker, and syndicated columnist. She’s known for her advocacy of free-range parenting and her work with the organization Let Grow. She was a columnist for the New York Daily News for 14 years. Skenazy has written for various publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Mad Magazine, and the New York Sun, and has given lectures at venues like Microsoft Headquarters and the Sydney Opera House.]
* *
* *
“METRO BRIEFING:
NEW YORK: MANHATTAN:
Al Baker
[This short notice was part of a regular column in the New York Times on 31 December 2002 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”]).]
Under heightened alert to inspect unidentified packages that may conceal bombs, the police arrested a woman yesterday for placing four cardboard boxes in the Union Square subway station. The incident follows a similar one on Dec. 11, when the same station was evacuated after 37 boxes labeled “Fear” were placed there. The black boxes taped inside the station yesterday were labeled “Fear Art.” Cleaners in the station reported seeing the woman, Ani Weinstein, 26, of East Chatham, N.Y., placing the boxes there. When she was arrested, she had 10 more boxes, the police said. Ms. Weinstein was accused of reckless endangerment and other violations. The police said there was no evidence that the incidents were linked.
[Al Baker was a reporter on the Metro staff of the New York Times for close to 20 years beginning in 2000. He was a police reporter and the police bureau chief, covered education, Long Island and Westchester County, and was the Albany Statehouse correspondent, among other roles. Baker also wrote for Newsday and the New York Daily News.
[Clinton Boisvert was initially charged with reckless endangerment, but Lawyer Stampur got that dismissed, leaving only a charge of disorderly conduct. He was given a ticket, fined, and ordered to fulfill six days of community service and write a letter of apology to the bomb squad.
[He got up early and did
manual labor from the back of a dump truck. Boisvert thus paid his debt to society.]
