the cart department
Photos: Ivana Casanova.
The Cart Department is a loose collective of performance artists, anarchists, nihilists, and other creatures with a home base of New York City who explore together the potential of parades of elaborate trash sculptures built in shopping carts as counter-normative non-instruments. Membership of The Cart Department is loose and open to all who embody a desire to see a world where there are more beings pushing carts full of noisy, rustydusty, smellhung, heavyfeather curios through the streets. Core, founding members who came together to not organize The Greatest Cart in the World Pageant include –
Papo Cucaracha Vertedero El Tercero
The Cart Department hosts (not)happenings and (anti)talent shows on the streets and subways of NYC – and sometimes further afield – on a(n) (ir)regular basis.
In October 2018 The Cart Department was invited to take over Grace Exhibition Space, creating new installation work and presenting a collaborative cabaret that included participatory mash-ups of traditional Puerto Rican ballads and thrash metal improvisation sang through a vacuum cleaner, the destruction of a cardboard city with heavy chains and streams of urine, a ritual in worship of the divinity of asparagus, a presentation on the meaning of puppetry by an overqualified aubergine, and the funeral procession of ‘Sparkle Mouse’ – a field mouse found earlier that week deceased and covered in glitter within a bucket of Christmas baubles. Alongside Cart Department founding members, this show included the collaboration of Crackhead Barney, Señor Langosta, and Ivangie Nieves.
