convincing people // nicholas grider
WHAT IS IT
The big cube thing isn’t not a stunt—it’s art. Or it’s both. It’s a statement. It’s a bold public statement about the way things are now, the state of the world today, how we fail as people but survive as a species. It’s a gesture, an invitation, a welcome home, a house made of receipts built on stolen and contaminated land.
WHO MADE IT
As is sometimes the case with public art, there’s no easily located provenance, so it relies (sometimes intentionally) on the network spread of whispers and complaints and short-form videos with what amounts to sources cited, although some would argue documentation is its own form of creation.
WHO WANTS TO KNOW
Spencer, who works downtown in the building he also owns. This is less because he needs to work in a specific location than because he can chuckle to himself that as owner, he can have a lavish glass and granite office in a premium skyscraper at the edge of the too-big-to-freeze lake and still say he’s working from home, even though working mostly means directing others to make advantageous transactions and acting like it means a lot when they do or don’t. Spencer wants to know because he’s had an idea for a while, and it’s kind of like this idea but just for him.
NO BUT WHAT IS IT
It’s a large block of ice inside a large bulletproof glass display case, slightly bigger than the block of ice and square like the slowly melting ice inside. Inside the ice and held aloft by it, there’s a lit-up neon sign in white that reads, in vivacious cursive, KEEP GRINDING, which is a reference to the defunct podcast of a well-known influencer who died under mysterious circumstances shortly after the podcast went defunct (or was abandoned, depending on who you ask).
WHAT ABOUT ANGELS
The sculpture project is called Fallen Angels, though no actual angels are depicted. This is a (not very) indirect reference both to the white neon descending onto pale concrete as the ice melts slowly during the bright midwestern winter and to the recently disgraced and mysteriously dead podcast guy. The alternative title in parentheses is Convincing People.
DID THE DEAD INFLUENCER BRO MAKE THIS
No. Kind of. He was the source, the kernel of the idea for a project initiated by a “trust proud” artist recently profiled in the New York Times Style Section as The Rebel King.
WHAT’S CONVINCING PEOPLE
It’s the title of a song by the OG industrial band Throbbing Gristle, which Royce claims is his favorite band even though he’s only ever listened to 20 Jazz Funk Greats a handful of times on Spotify, which itself is a statement of some kind about how the ownership implied by claiming to have “favorites” is absurd, or whatever.
WHO CARES
About which thing.
ABOUT THE ART
Spencer cares. Spencer has more money than God and wants about as many angels to command. When the owners of things care, everyone cares. Same thing about space. A container describes the space it owns like angels describe a world an unseen god has created, so according to the press release logic of Spencer’s charity org, every container is a form of angel itself, but what if an angel was created for the purpose of containing an angel?
HOW DO YOU CONTAIN AN ANGEL
You don’t! The corporeality of angels is a belief system thing, though in the original Hebrew concept of malachim, a malach was simply a messenger and had no soul like humans, so they were just single-use vessels for messages, like God’s favorite Kleenex.
KLEENEX?
Working backward from the tree of knowledge stuff, you could maybe argue that either all knowledge/information is contamination, or at least that’s how God sees it. Sending a message means both spreading it and getting rid of it.
WHY HEBREW
This is Chicago, Mary; if you want to talk to a Christian instead, there’s no shortage of them around, but why stop there? Messengers and their containers are a thing across many faith systems; it’s just your boy Martin Luther, et al. who came up with a direct dial to God.
DIRECT DIAL TO GOD?
That’s the art piece that, along with a lot of advertising, put Royce on the map. It’s a rotary phone that you have to climb a remote island mountain to access, and when you get there, no matter what number you dial, it rings, and nobody ever answers, but on the other hand, you can talk however long you like and say whatever you want. It was covered in Artforum’s dueling critics thing, where two art critics disagree about whether something is bullshit or not, and if it is, in a good or bad way.
WHY DOES THAT MATTER
It’s the 21st century. We’re post-McLuhan babes in the woods cosplaying as changelings, and it’s not the medium that’s the message; it’s the discourse that haunts it forever like a thousand angry ghosts.
WHAT’S “TRUST PROUD”?
The artist Royce (who set in motion a found idea realized as a sculpture in downtown Chicago by the angelic army of local teamsters) is trust proud, as in he lives entirely off a sizable trust fund and is proud of it while proudly admitting he has not earned and does not deserve it. By “trust proud” he’s (allegedly) rejecting the notion that unearned wealth is a natural source of shame by being emphatically—some would say ironically—proud of transforming wealth made effortless in the psychedelic cathedral of late capitalism by weaponized “unearned” power into a public utility, often in aesthetic forms that cannot, strictly speaking, be owned or, outside of a strict fiscal sense, contained.
GIRL, WHAT?
It’s making nothing out of something but with extra steps.
WHAT DOES THAT SAY ABOUT ANGELS THOUGH
If you squint, you could say that if containers are angelic and angels are disposable, but angels can contain and preserve angels, the maintenance and preservation of meaning, Royce would argue, is a circle jerk (non-derogatory). Every vacant space is a revelation waiting to happen, and every crowd is an angel, and nothing is ever gained or lost.
WHAT HAPPENS TO THE SCULPTURE
In a few weeks, Spencer throws a party for Royce at a tech conference he’s hosting, and at the party things get as wild as they’re supposed to, and Royce watches Spencer get knocked out by a professional Nikola Tesla impersonator in a bare-buckles boxing match held in a male living space Spencer had Royce design and decorate as a “reprisal” of the set of American Psycho. (Not the apartment, the film set.) After Spencer comes to, Royce talks to him about future use of “angel containers” for Spencer’s more pragmatic uses, but the fight itself inspires Royce to hire professionals to make drawings of the fight that look like AI renderings but are not, which he then has taped to the outside of the outdoor sculpture so it looks like maybe bad drawings of a billionaire getting beaten are the real container for the death of angels, or the death of whatever it is angels make by virtue of being displayed.
WHAT DO WE DO NOW
Either remember what you’re meant to witness or forget it, just like with everything else.
AND THAT’S IT
Somebody said something once about how all angels fall eventually, including the ones that never fly.
Nicholas Grider is a queer writer and artist in the upper Midwest whose story collections include Misadventure (A Strange Object/Deep Vellum) and Forest of Borders (Malarkey).