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Zardulu I See You at It Again

Written By Monday, March 21, 2022 Add Comment Edit

A few months ago, around 11 at nighttime, my telephone lit up with a Twitter notification. I had a direct message from Zardulu, the self-described wizard and performance artist who has claimed to be the mastermind behind the viral Pizza Rat video that took the cyberspace by tempest in September 2015.

"how-do-you-do," she said.

Three questions immediately occurred to me:

  1. Was Zardulu DMing "hello" to all of her Twitter followers for unexplained mystical/creative reasons known merely to herself?
  2. Zardulu is known to give interviews now and then — she'd done one with my colleague Aja Romano last yr. Did she want me to write about her?
  3. Was Zardulu planning to use me to get to Phonation, and through that platform develop a new viral hoax/myth?

The answers, equally information technology turns out, were no (give her fourth dimension), aye, and maybe.

I spent the next few weeks chatting with Zardulu — e'er over Twitter — while likewise talking to fine art historians who could comment on the nature of her work, and fellow journalists who'd dealt with her in the by.

Information technology was an always fascinating just often opaque process. Zardulu'due south persona is shrouded in mysticism, and she presents herself every bit equal parts wizard and creative person who works in the medium of viral videos.

Her work is rooted in surrealism and classical mythology, and while some viewers experience as though her videos are just trickery dressed upwards with pretension, they're organized around the idea that disrupting the mundane is a basic service to human existence.

My goal in talking to Zardulu was to go a handle on the motivations behind her work, and what makes it different from the fake news we can't finish talking about — to make up one's mind what, if anything, separates performance art from a "hoax." And the whole time I wondered, fruitlessly, if she was creating some other, larger art project, and if I was function of it.

"She sounds similar an art villain": enter Zardulu

Zardulu first entered the public consciousness just over a year agone, not long afterward the net was overtaken by a slew of viral rat videos. The most famous was Pizza Rat, the scrappy picayune can-practice rodent trying to become his dinner home at the end of a long day like whatever other New Yorker. I of the more than obscure examples featured Selfie Rat, who used a sleeping commuter's telephone to snap an ambrosial, bewhiskered selfie. And in the midst of information technology all was Zardulu.

In January 2016, John Del Signore reported for Gothamist that Selfie Rat was a hoax, and although he couldn't find definitive proof, he was pretty sure Pizza Rat was too. Selfie Rat, he said, was the work of ii actors from the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre who were hired by a operation artist named Zardulu. "When she described the project to me, it seemed pretty weird," Eric Yearwood, one of the UCB actors, told Del Signore. "Especially the part where in that location wasn't going to be any sort of revelation at the end of it. I would not be able to have credit for information technology and neither would she."

Meanwhile, some other source that Del Signore quoted — anonymously, because Zardulu had required them to sign a nondisclosure agreement when they'd worked with her to plan a different stunt — expressed confusion over the artist'southward apparent MO. "[She] makes these fake scenarios, releases them as real through news, social media and whatever else," the source told Del Signore. "Many accept been HUGE stories. Weirdest function is that she never comes frontwards or capitalizes on them whatsoever."

But the telescopic of Zardulu's piece of work, and her elaborate persona, wouldn't emerge until February, when the podcast Reply All spent an episode talking about her. In conversation with Yearwood, hosts Alex Goldman and P.J. Vogt learned that Zardulu had plans. "She has a large vision and she was describing the [Selfie Rat] projection as a piece," Yearwood said. "A puzzle piece. In this grand tapestry of illusions that she wants to create in New York Urban center."

"Wow," Vogt responded. "She sounds like an art villain."

Zardulu's persona is actually less akin to that of a comic book villain and more than that of a slightly kitschy heathen wizard, all flowing mystical robes and masks and rat insignias. Her Twitter feed is filled with enigmatic thoughts, and her manifesto with arcane symbols.

Her medium of selection is viral videos, but they don't always involve rats. Zardulu has likewise taken credit for the three-eyed fish that appeared in the Gowanus Canal, and for a picture show of a raccoon riding an alligator.

And her mission is this: to create fantastical displays and have them go viral, making the globe a more magical place in the process.

As Zardulu tells it, Zardulism is about mythmaking

"In their classical sense, myths are expressionless," says Zardulu'southward manifesto. "We have rejected any connexion to the mythology of the uncivilized world." The only myths that our contemporary globe creates are provided by "those who wish to exploit us," who "produced images to dictate what we needed and desired." Those myths tin can take the class of ads, which tell stories about how buying certain products will make us happier, meliorate, more beautiful people, or they tin can have the course of imitation news stories distributed by people in power.

Zardulu's manifesto
Zardulu's manifesto.

Zardulism is a reaction to this exploitation. The practitioner of Zardulism — the Zardulist — creates new myths, myths to which we tin take an authentic emotional reaction: viral videos, images of animals doing weird things in which we can recognize ourselves. Zardulist myths are, Zardulu writes, "pearls of merriment for the world to enjoy."

In the by twelvemonth or so, she has slowly become more than public near her work. ("I don't do creature fauxtography any more," she told me offhandedly. "So, I've been talking about some of my pieces.") She told the Washington Post that she was behind Pizza Rat, and even did a video interview with a reporter; she told me she was behind the prosthetic leg found in a Wisconsin beaver dam, and sent me pictures to prove it.

Zardulu with beaver and prosthetic leg
Zardulu with the prosthetic leg and taxidermied beaver she used to stage an fine art piece where the leg was "institute" in a Wisconsin beaver dam and returned to its owner.

"Like many of my pieces," she said, "it deals with the reunification of homo and nature. It is likewise an homage to a Persian oracle who was the get-go person recorded to have fashioned a prosthetic leg." (Hegesistratus, the Farsi in question, is sometimes described every bit a soldier and sometimes as a prophet.)

"I see taxidermy equally symbolic of our separation from the man soul," she explains.

Zardulu considers herself the realization of the surrealist dream

I asked Zardulu why she thinks myths are and then of import. Information technology'south basically a surrealist idea, she told me. If, as the surrealists believed, art comes from the unconscious, so the ideas art conveys are often built on Jungian mythological archetypes. That means art is, by its very nature, mythological, and vice versa.

Zardulu sees her work every bit following in the footsteps of André Breton, the founder of surrealism. As she wrote to me on Twitter:

Breton imagines a globe where fantasy and reality composite together in a super reality, or surreality. That's easy to see in the art produced past the painters in the movement.

However, if one wants to alloy fantasy and reality, they can not truly practise so if the audition is participating. They know what they are looking at is a painting.

And so, I take my fantasy and present it every bit reality to an unknowing audience. Thus creating a true surreality. I suppose you could say that Zardulism has used the digital era to make Breton's dream of the surrealists come up true.

I decided to ask a few art historians to counterbalance in on that idea.

"It would be misleading to call her a surrealist," said Elliott H. Male monarch, an art historian at Washington and Lee Academy who specializes in Salvador Dalí. Just he added that Zardulu's work does have an analogousness for surrealism:

I call back of Salvador Dalí's 1942 autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, where he writes, "So picayune of what could happen does happen." In other words, Dalí might say, it is disappointing how normal things usually are. Why, he asks, when he orders a lobster in a restaurant is he never served a cooked phone? Everything is and then predictable — where is the unexpected that could make daily life so much more than interesting? Cue Zardulu to imbue the quotidian with a sense of the boggling and surprising — what surrealism vaguely called "the marvelous."

Surreal Things Exhibition Opens At The V&A In London
Salvador Dalí'south "A couple with their heads full of clouds" shows the surrealist marvelous.
Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

Rex thinks that Zardulu's work also draws from the Situationist International, or SI movement, of the 1950s and '60s. SI emerged from surrealism and Dadaism, with added Marxism for flavor, and a major role of its theoretical apparatus revolved around the idea of "the spectacle," in which people living under advanced capitalism feel life primarily through their objects.

"Things that were once directly lived are now lived by proxy," writes Situationist Lawrence Law. "Once an experience is taken out of the real world it becomes a article. As a commodity the spectacular is adult to the detriment of the existent. It becomes a substitute for feel."

Or, as King puts information technology, "The easiest fashion to remember of 'the Spectacle' is the movie The Matrix: The spectacle is invisible but everywhere, according to SI theorist Guy Debord, and one fashion to dismantle it is to craft 'situations' — moments of absurdity that admit and subvert expectations, thereby disrupting the established order."

Zardulu'due south myths, her "pearls of merriment," work the same fashion that SI situations do, to disrupt the spectacle of capitalism and connect her audition to a more vital, accurate life.

Zardulu "removes the framing machinery that separates fiction from everyday life"

Pedro Lasch, an artist, fine art history professor, and managing director of the Social Exercise Lab at Duke University, sees Zardulu's piece of work as being visually rooted in the experimental avant-garde films that Alejandro Jodorowsky made in the 1960s and '70s. "His films were basically byproducts, filmed happenings of sorts, that would perpetrate certain myths and mythmaking," Lasch says. "Jodorowsky is the grandfather of that type of work and has been really important and inspiring to several generations of artists now."

Only philosophically, Lasch says, Zardulu'south mythmaking tradition was born in 1729. That'south the year Jonathan Swift published his satirical essay "A Modest Proposal," in which he suggested the poor of Republic of ireland sell their babies to the rich to eat.

"I actually think 'A Small Proposal' is one of the most radical artworks in history," Lasch says. Less, he explains, for its contents than for its form: It was printed as a pamphlet, with nothing to distinguish it from the hostage political pamphlets of its day. "What he effectively did — and what Zardulu does, and many other artists, those of united states who are interested in this type of practice," Lasch says, is "remove the framing mechanism that separates fiction from everyday life. And that can exist a very confusing human action. Like once theater leaves the phase and enters everyday life, or once an artwork is not on the wall but is literally in people's experience, a lot of much more radical questions are raised."

Lasch himself works in that tradition today. He's the creative person behind "Twin Towers Go Global" and "Phantom Limbs," a 2012 art piece for which he spread the false news story that New York's Twin Towers were being rebuilt in cities around the globe — either in cities that were contested territories at the time (Baghdad, Cabo) or in cities that had previously recreated New York's annual Twin Tower memorial light beams (Paris, Budapest). The project was, he wrote elsewhere, both a memorial to those who died on 9/11 and an analysis of "the ruins of the very mod/colonial system that produced the Twin Towers in New York and that likewise shaped the ideological boxing that led to their brutal destruction."

"I think ane of the things that myths and what these days we often phone call fake news have immune u.s.a.," Lasch told me, "is to face something that is actually happening — like in this case the light beams — that is in itself bizarre; reality often beats fiction — only then bring united states of america into the category of fine art."

On a very basic level, Lasch'southward project is also the project of political satirists and the Situationists and the surrealists and Zardulu, whose shared intention is to disrupt the mundane with the extraordinary; to identify a distorted mirror into reality that reflects our experiences dorsum at us in a course and then heightened than we can at final realize how odd it truly is.

Just this kind of piece of work brings with it certain ethical questions: Is it just lying? How is it different from false news?

Is there a functional difference between a hoax, fake news, and art?

When John Del Signore showtime started to report on Zardulu for Gothamist, the word he used most oft was "hoax," with all of its attendant notions of someone trying to dupe the innocent for base material gain. The idea that there might be any kind of artistic or political impulse behind the Pizza Rat and Selfie Rat videos seemed absurd: They were just funny animal clips, and plain someone was fabricating them for some sort of as-yet-unknown merely doubtless nefarious purpose. "Is Selfie Rat just the tip of a rotting, viral iceberg made of elaborate hoaxes?" he mused.

"I try to avoid using the discussion hoax," Zardulu told me, "because information technology immediately devalues things that I consider to be cultural treasures."

"Would you debate that in that location's a difference between your piece of work, which is created with artistic intent, and the faux news created by someone with a political or commercial agenda?" I asked.

"Of form, the difference being the intention and the event. That's how we judge everything else," she replied. "I started doing what I do long earlier Trump and the alt-right starting fabricating news stories."

"All art is lying," Lasch pointed out when I spoke to him. "We tend to separate storytelling from lying, or making a painting from deceiving, but it really is charade. We're asking people to believe in something that isn't there."

But then by that logic, is fake news art?

"I retrieve people are okay with being played with a little bit, if information technology's not someone trying to purely turn a profit from it," Lasch said, "That's what separates it from political gain in terms of the way it'south been used in politics now." Lying as an artist, for creative purposes, in other words, is very unlike from lying as a political leader whom the public is supposed to be able to trust, for purposes of political gain. A performance creative person who stages a rat doing something funny and puts a video on YouTube is doing something extremely different than the president of the The states making a false merits almost voter fraud.

"I take never made any money off of my work," Zardulu said firmly when I asked her. "I take an unrelated, full-time job and where others might use their free money, I apply mine to create my art."

I reached out to Del Signore and asked if he still idea Zardulu was a hoax. "I recollect a prankster would probably attempt to claim credit and 15 minutes of cyberspace fame past now," he responded, "then this seems more like the work of a conceptual 'artist.'"

So why, then, is Zardulu coming forwards nearly her work now? What does she have to proceeds? She says it's role of an evolution in her process. "I used to call back that people finding out about my work would destroy it," she says. "However, afterward people found out that I was training rats to make viral news stories, I kept staging more than and more than videos of rats doing ridiculous things and they would become viral every time. I realized, people don't intendance if things are real or not. They want an experience of wonder."

We don't take any idea who Zardulu actually is

"I wonder near myself," Zardulu told me. "I recognize that what I do is out of the ordinary. As comfortable equally I am with my artistic philosophy, nonetheless I wonder: Why?"

Throughout her time in the public spotlight, Zardulu'southward identity has remained a mystery. Given her frequent use of Upright Citizens Brigade performers in her work, many have speculated that she is really the creation of a collective of people who met at UCB, most likely including Eric Yearwood. The fact that she appeared in a video for the Washington Post doesn't necessarily disprove that story: The woman wearing the Zardulu robe and mask for that interview could easily accept been a single representative of the group, or someone they hired.

"I am not and accept never been in UCB," Zardulu said when I asked her about the theory. But her persona is as much a office of her work as the videos she creates, and any time the question of her identity comes upwards she likes to outset talking near the mysterious nature of identity in the digital age. When the Huffington Post started asking questions last June, she sent them an electronic mail with the subject line, "Please ship proof that you are existent." When I started request her nigh information technology during our interview, she sent me this:

It's a strange thing getting asked if you're real. Do they mean to ask if I really wear a simulated beard and a robe or if the images I mail of myself are actually me? Are any images of you actually you or are they how you lot want the world to perceive you?

In the digital historic period we can be anything nosotros want. Nosotros tin be a stoic concern person on our LinkedIn folio and be great a beer can on our foreheads on our Facebook page. It's the age of the avatar.

Then, here I projection to you, the magician, Zardulu

Am I real, yes. Am I a joke, no.

This whole commodity might be a slice of Zardulist art; I can't know for sure

As a viewer of art, I similar that Zardulu'south work is so slippery and deceptive: That's part of the pleasure of it, the idea that it opens up a world full of possibilities and marvels.

As a journalist, I detect her extremely paranoia-inducing. It is disconcerting and hard to build a story around a series of conversations with artists who tell you very apparently that their piece of work is most deceiving journalists.

After I transcribed my conversation with Pedro Lasch, information technology dawned on me that every anecdote he gave me involved artists planting faux stories in the press through some ways or another. Otherwise innocuous statements began to jump out at me: "Artists, like politicians, should not be taken at their give-and-take," and, "They were besides exploiting a moment where some media did non take very thorough checking mechanisms, although apparently that's still the case."

Zardulu herself certainly didn't set my mind at ease.

"What philosophy, what class of artistic expression virtually defines the era we alive in?" she asked me rhetorically during our interview. "False misrepresentation."

Oh , g od, I thought. I could very well be in the middle of a high-concept art piece I accept no ways of understanding.

For an art fan, the idea was exciting. But for someone with a responsibleness to report the truth, it was likewise terrifying.

The only thing to practice, I concluded, was fact-cheque absolutely everything I put into this slice every bit scrupulously as possible. I got to work researching.

At i signal during our talk, Zardulu mentioned that her work was inspired by a childhood acquaintance with a magician who bred unicorns. (Well, one-horned goats. Close enough.) I plant the wizard's website and verified that his internet presence dates back to at to the lowest degree 2007, then if Zardulu invented him, she'southward been playing an extremely long game. I wrote him an email asking if he could ostend or deny that he knew Zardulu as a child.

He wrote dorsum, polite and dislocated. He'd never heard of her. Could I give him a hint every bit to her real identity? "If I had whatsoever clue who she was back in the day — whenever that was," he wrote, "I'm sure I'd remember her."

Oh , hey, I realized. I could probably become this guy to tell me who Zardulu really is. It could be a scoop! A genuinely new piece of information to add to the Zardulu saga.

But what purpose would I really be serving? Information technology's clear by now, after more a twelvemonth of video after video, myth subsequently myth, that whoever Zardulu is, she is or they are genuinely committed to the artistic project of the Zardulu manifesto. Would knowing the identity of the person behind the mask, whether that's a collective of improv actors or some millennial Brooklyn art girl, actually add value?

Or would it just destroy the persona that is role of the way she does her art? Would it exist every bit bad as doxxing the author Elena Ferrante? Does maxim, "Hey, the person who makes this art you similar is actually some other person whom you have never heard of" achieve anything constructive at all?

I sent the "unicorn wizard" Zardulu'southward Washington Mail service video interview and clarified that I didn't want him to reveal her actual identity; I merely wanted to see if I could verify one of the few biographical details she'd provided to me.

"I exercise think I know who this one probably is..." he wrote back, and nosotros left it at that.

Zardulu, in the meantime, keeps building her myths, and over the past few months she'due south granted interview after interview. She is, for lack of a better term, hustling. She's thinking about doing something with cat videos, she told me, and she wants to revive her old advice cavalcade. "Where does an occult-obsessed, viral-news-fabricating net magician go?" she asked me. Probably the Hairpin, I told her.

The spree of publicity she's embarked on might very well be role of a new Zardulu myth, and this article might exist part of it also. I can't say for certain.

Simply I think Zardulu would like the fact that I can't end wondering near information technology.

myersshatuse.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/4/24/14912316/zardulu-viral-videos-mythmaking-surrealism-pedro-lasch

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