The founding provocateur of the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, who spent his youth fiercely attempting to violently collapse the distinction between art and political terror, has finalized his transition into static archival material.
Ben Morea, the abstract painter whose relentless campaign to dismantle the American cultural apparatus through street brawls and unsanctioned refuse relocation briefly terrified the downtown bourgeoisie, died on Thursday at the age of 84, thereby succumbing to the most aggressively conventional narrative arc available to the human organism. His passing represents a profound failure of nerve; for a man who famously rejected the commodification of the avant-garde by hurling garbage at the pristine façade of the Lincoln Center in 1968, the act of quietly expiring of natural causes feels decidedly derivative, a tepid echoing of the biological compliance demanded by the very medical-industrial complex he once purportedly despised.
One cannot evaluate Morea’s legacy without situating his particular brand of confrontational Dadaism within its proper historical matrix; his work was an evident, if somewhat pedestrian, continuation of the aggressive anti-art syntax pioneered by Arthur Cravan—the early twentieth-century pugilist-poet who vanished off the coast of Mexico rather than endure the indignity of a traditional obituary—while simultaneously leaning heavily on the canonical, though by now profoundly exhausted, institutional subversion of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. Yet where Duchamp merely repositioned the porcelain urinal to expose the fragility of gallery taxonomy, Morea and his profane collective attempted to reposition the actual detritus of the Lower East Side onto the literal laps of the cultural elite, a gesture that, while possessing a certain visceral charm, ultimately lacked the rigorous semiotic framework required to transcend its own immediate filth.
The 1968 garbage drop at Lincoln Center, often cited by nostalgic and intellectually lazy bohemian apologists as a masterstroke of direct action, must be understood not as a political triumph, but as a tragically flawed attempt to rewrite the spatial grammar of the Upper West Side. When Morea’s acolytes deposited the uncollected refuse of the sanitation strike upon the plaza, they were attempting to disrupt the sanitized consumption of high culture; however, one must note, with no small amount of exhaustion, that they completely failed to articulate a coherent post-structuralist alternative to the ballets they were interrupting. It is here, in the widening gulf between ideological ambition and tactile execution, that Morea’s project most clearly falters, revealing a theoretical kinship less with the Situationist International and far more aligned, both in its chaotic staging and its reliance on aggressively colorful personalities shouting over one another in confined urban spaces, with the early seasons of the MTV reality program *Jersey Shore*.
The tragedy of Ben's passing is not that we have lost a revolutionary, but that he allowed his corporeal form to expire in such a linear, chrononormative fashion, completely undermining the dialectical tension of his early 1960s happenings.
This is not to say that the Motherfuckers were entirely without merit, only that their insistence on treating the metropolis as a canvas for unmediated spectacle was eventually perfected by others possessing better branding and considerably more hair gel. As gallery archivists now descend upon Morea’s surviving canvases—those ragged, aggressive abstractions that will inevitably, and somewhat deliciously, be auctioned at Sotheby’s to the very hedge fund managers whose institutional predecessors he so desperately wished to defenestrate—we are left to ponder the limits of radicalism. The man who once declared that the cultural establishment must be burned to the ground has now provided that same establishment with a finite, closed loop of production; his death neatly sealing his oeuvre into a digestible, highly curatable package that will undoubtedly serve as the thematic centerpiece of a forthcoming retrospective, complete with a beautifully typeset, forty-dollar canvas tote bag.