Wall Street Crab Feast, a participatory performance trafficking in vernacular culture, produced
by Peter Walsh, June 17, 2000.
I was thinking about money, and about what it means to be from a particular place.
This is Baltimore, an industrial city existing in a post-industrial world.
I was also thinking about that so-called perpetual gale of creative destruction, our economy,
that unleashes grinding economic poverty here in fabulous wealth elsewhere.
So I decided to hold a crab feast.
Baltimore's traditional, democratic, non-hierarchical summer afternoon pastime, and I decided to
hold it in the heart of Manhattan's financial district.
My goal was expenditure, a gift bringing provincial cultural wealth into the financial
capital, a symbolic act of confrontation, part challenge to our economic system, part
offer of friendship to my new Manhattan friends, people from everywhere else in the world, except
a Manhattan.
Friday morning, June 16, the crabs are harvested off Gibson Island in the Chesapeake Bay.
By Friday afternoon, they are at a roadside stand in front of Mercy High School in Northern
Parkway in Baltimore City, where I purchased two full bushels.
Then, Saturday, June 17, 200 miles to a rooftop in New York City at the 16 Beaver Group, an
artist collective halfway between Bowling Green and the New York Stock Exchange.
Look at this space.
Okay, here we go, the R&D.
You grab your knife, come on out of there, and you pull it back, just like your, it's
a pull tab, pull it right off, okay, then you grab the point, and you grab the bottom
of it, pull it off, and you grab it, crack it in half, okay, these are your two sections
with the meat in it.
You grab one of them, and you're going to bisect it like this, and when you bisect
it, it'll open up, and you'll see that the meat's just laying there.
Okay, are you going to eat it?
I don't know.
I don't eat meat.
I wasn't planning on having any.
You're not going to have any?
It looks so fun to do.
Well, that's the thing.
You don't want to eat it.
You don't have to.
Many times, people pick the meat and make a little pile and allow somebody else to eat
it.
One of the ways in which a crab feast like this tends not to be about eating, it's about
talking.
It's incredibly egomaniacal, and how at that time, after Easy Rider, the studios, that
was what the studios were.
He's a writer.
He writes about baseball, but he joined a baseball team, and he did a lot of different sports.
He really got, I mean, true insider view of all these different things, and he's always
like, I don't want to see, and see what I'm doing right now, this is a no-no.
What is this?
I'm feeling them to see what you guys are having.
Heavy of meat.
Heavy of meat.
Yeah, heavy is good, and you get smacked if you get caught doing that at home.
This is the all-wonderful cleanup routine of a crab feast.
In this case, we're using the Wall Street Journal, and basically all you have to do
is ball it up.
Oops, we lost a little bit.
Whoa.
So, we're on to the next performance.
