By Ned Vizzini

Park and Awe
The "Fear" box artist strikes again.

CLInton Boisvert is out to prove that he’s a real artist. He’s doing it the same way he proved he was an artist the first time: by placing disturbing sculptures in public places. And then running.

If you haven’t heard of Clinton, you’ve probably heard of his first public exhibition, the three dozen or so FedEx boxes spray-painted black and stenciled "Fear" that he put in the Union Square subway station last December. The boxes lived up to their name in ways the artist never expected, shutting the station down and necessitating the services of the NYC bomb squad. The project landed him in the assistant DA’s office, and his work graced the cover of the New York Post.

Clinton was just doing his homework as a freshman at the School of Visual Arts; the boxes were a final project for his "foundation sculpture" class. The class had a site-specific final, to be installed either inside or outside SVA, but Clinton didn’t want to exhibit in the school setting.

"There’s no point in installing something in the school. It’s hard to learn anything from the students... The thing that I’m most curious about is how the public is going to react to something."

That December day, Clinton suited up and did his work at nine in the morning. At over six feet, with blond hair and a goatee, he looked pretty much like any other shmuck on the train, and plenty of people watched as he put the "Fear" boxes under seats, on stairs and up against pillars. He even put one right by the windows of the police post in Union Square (next to the wall of names that seems to be NYC’s first true 9/11 monument). He assumed he was on surveillance video somewhere, but the cops didn’t notice that morning. He spent 40 minutes putting the boxes in their places, and while the exact number has been garbled by theft and evidence collection, he says there were at least three dozen.

"I didn’t think I would make it all the way through getting them all installed," he admits. "I didn’t think it would be five minutes before someone started asking questions, telling me to get the hell out of there."

No one did, and Clinton returned to classes at SVA. That afternoon, one of his professors pointed out what Clinton hadn’t considered: that people might think "Fear" boxes in the subway were bombs and go apeshit.

Clinton’s fellow students, loaded with pre-professional jealousy, all traipsed down to Union Square and came back with updates. The bomb squad had the whole station roped off; they had deployed a robot; all the trains were stopped; there was a huge traffic jam; people were angry.

"I wasn’t sure what to do. Everybody said, ‘Look, just sit tight; don’t do anything until you contact a lawyer.’" So Clinton called the ACLU that night and retained William Stampur.

Clinton was initially charged with reckless endangerment, but Stampur got that eliminated, leaving only a charge of disorderly conduct. He was given a ticket and ordered to fulfill five days of community service and write a letter of apology to the bomb squad. He paid his debt to society.

"I rode on the back of a dump truck for five days. It was a nice routine for a week. I got up early and did manual labor."

Legally, he’s clear, and in one year his records will be sealed. Like most artists, his main concern is the critics.

"I was written about in a number of papers and magazines… A lot of people came out and bashed me, saying, you know, ‘Chances are we’re never going to hear from this kid again,’ and ‘He doesn’t have talent.’" Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic at the New York Times, called the project "idiotic."

In the wake of the "Fear" box brouhaha, Clinton turned down interview offers from CNN and MTV, choosing instead to make his declarations with his next project, Number Two in an Unknown Series, a much more technically ambitious work. Two figures, one of them cast from a six-foot-seven model and the other a small female crouched with her legs open, oppose one another. The female sits shrouded on a table, while the male stands with a gigantic ballistic rocket penis coming off him, shiny and completely tiled with Times headshots of 9/11 victims. The woman has a gun covered with medical photos of childbirth and holds one hand over her face. Clinton put these sculptures up at Union Square on Friday, May 23.

Enlisting a few fellow art students, he moved the mammoth, steel-enforced male, the eight-foot missile penis, the woman, the gun and a table from his dorm to the main theater of Union Square. Parks officials milled about as he assembled the shrouded artwork. Few passersby took notice.

"We’re white," said one of Clinton’s assistants. "There’s no way they’d let us do this if we were Arabs."

Clinton wheeled the male into place, unveiled him and his giant penis and walked briskly away without looking back at his art.

Parks service employees approached the piece almost immediately, but not before curious onlookers with cellphones and babies gathered around, gibbering to friends. Cameras clicked and flashed.

After consulting for 15 minutes, the assembled Parks employees dismantled Clinton’s artwork, stuffed it in a mobile dumpster and trucked it away. A man with glasses and a camera followed, muttering that at least the missile should be saved.

"I’d worked on this thing for a couple hundred hours," says Clinton of his dump-and-run strategy. "But that’s a little bit of the shtick and the experiment. I mean, how do the police and the authorities deal with something like this? Are they going to damage it? Are they going to destroy it? Are they going to hold on to it? Are they going to throw it out?"

If he ever gets his sculpture back, Clinton intends to display it in a gallery together with his summons.

"I’m turning the authorities into art handlers."

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