Art in New York is getting very hands on these days. We've got giant slides and sensory depravation tanks at the New Museum, live births at a gallery in Bushwick and now a non-stop strip poker game at the Art in General gallery on Walker Street in TriBeCa. At Zefrey Throwell's "I'll Raise You One," the artist says "clothing, charisma and a good bluff are the only currency."
The stripping started Saturday and runs each day through November 19th. The whole thing is pretty simple: "Each day for a week, from 10:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., seven players will gather around a white table in the storefront Project Space of Art In General to gamble away what most consider so dear, their clothes. At the end of each round, the players will get dressed and begin again, creating a meditative repetitious action that continues over the course of a workday."
"In a world where money has taken supreme importance and all functions of life are commoditized," the show aims to establish "a world of absurdity and purposelessness, allowing the casual onlooker to participate in a guilt-free voyeurism, while teasing out a different outlook on our personal interactions and day-to-day routines." And according to our photographer Katie Sokoler, the whole thing is also just a fun time.
This is by no means Zefrey Throwell's first foray into public nudity for art. Back in August the artist had men and women strip down amid the morning commuters on Wall Street as part of a show called "Ocularpation: Wall Street," a piece of performance art that managed to handily foreshadow the current Occupy Wall Street movement.
TEXT: Gothamist
PHOTOS: Katie Sokoler/Gothamist
