Tuesday, March 29, 2016

The Artist Behind the Three-Eyed Fish and Selfie Rat, and Other Hoaxes

N.Y. / Region

The Artist Behind the Three-Eyed Fish and Selfie Rat, and Other Hoaxes

By ANDY NEWMAN

The artist Zardulu, creator of Selfie Rat and the Three-Eyed Gowanus Canal Catfish, makes myths for the modern age.
One afternoon last fall, an actor named Greg Boz got a phone call.
It was a job offer, but not the kind he was used to getting. The caller was an artist who spoke in vague, mystical terms.
“She was like, ‘Would you like to be a tool for a grand architectural design?’” Mr. Boz recalled.
Mr. Boz, an improviser and comedian, was intrigued. He could also use the $100 she was offering. The next day, he met the woman on a bridge over the famously polluted Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn.
She wore a gold mask and gold robes. She had an assistant hand Mr. Boz a FedEx box.
Inside were five taxidermied catfish, each with an extra eye stuck to the middle of its forehead.
The artist calls herself Zardulu. Her medium is the elaborately staged viral video. As to her own identity, Zardulu will say only that she was born in Manhattan in 1971. Efforts to uncover her real name proved fruitless.
She has been revealed as the force behind the Selfie Rat, who achieved world fame for appearing to take a self-portrait with a passed-out man’s phone on a subway platform. She has been suspected as the creator of the even more famous Pizza Rat, caught dragging a slice down subway stairs in September, though another man claims credit for that video.
On that November afternoon by the Gowanus Canal, Mr. Boz said, Zardulu enlisted him in the Three-Eyed Gowanus Canal Catfish Project.
Greg Boz with the three-eyed fish he received from the artist Zardulu last fall. He used them to help stage a prank at the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn in November. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
He was given a fishing pole and instructed to return another day and to appear to have caught one of the fish, and to alert passers-by to his catch.
“It felt totally fake to me,” Mr. Boz, 29, said last week at his apartment in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the five fish laid out on his kitchen table. “I felt like I was being a bad actor. But it was funny.”
A few days after Mr. Boz’s faux fishing expedition, an article appeared on Gothamist: “Video: Man Claims He Caught Three-Eyed Fish in Gowanus Canal.” Mr. Boz said he is not the flannel-shirted fisherman in the video, but he assumes that Zardulu tried the scene with other actors.
A slew of news outlets, including this one, wrote about the fish with varying degrees of credulousness. It even found its way into the ultimate zeitgeist barometer: a subway ad.
Zardulu — or at least, a person writing from the email address that Mr. Boz and another of Zardulu’s collaborators said was hers — refuses to confirm any connection to a three-eyed fish or to discuss any specific illusions. This is understandable. Unlike most artists, Zardulu’s art seems to seek not recognition but erasure. Her art succeeds only to the extent that her hand is unseen.
She does, however, have plenty to say in a more general way about the enduring power of mystery. Like:
“I think creation and perpetuation of modern myths is a tragically underappreciated art form. It upsets me when I hear people refer to them as lies.”
Notwithstanding all that, she is not above coyly taking credit for Pizza Rat — writing that “one day I might be hiding behind around a corner coaxing a rat to drag something down a staircase” — even though the man who says he shot the video, Matt Little, insists it is legitimate.
Hoaxes are not exactly a new thing on the Internet, which has come to seem almost purpose-built to breed them. But Finn Brunton, an assistant professor of media at New York University and a historian of the web, said that Zardulu’s work was unusual for its generosity. Most hoaxes, he said, appear to be motivated by a simple desire to put one over on the world, or by hidden commercial interests.
Zardulu’s work, he said, “seems to be closer to doing magic. You stage these events, and it delights people and makes them happy to live in a world where something like this took place – and it’s almost as if it really did take place, as long as nobody talks.”
Zardulu’s existence was revealed in January after an actor who said he worked with her and was irked that she wanted to keep the projects secret contacted several news organizations. He identified another actor, Eric Yearwood, as the man in the Selfie Rat video.
Mr. Yearwood, when contacted by the Gothamist, confirmed that the video was staged by Zardulu. Both he and Mr. Little are improv actors who have worked with the Upright Citizens Brigade, a comedy troupe.
In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Yearwood said that after Zardulu reached him by email, she summoned him to a face-to-face meeting. She appeared in ceremonial robes and introduced him to her army of trained rats.
“It was kind of somewhere in between like a chemistry lab meets some kind of artist’s studio space,” he said.
For the Selfie Rat stunt, he said, Zardulu smeared peanut butter on the shutter button of a cellphone to get her rat Whiskers to press it.
The whole experience, he said, deeply impressed him.
“I’ve only met a handful of true eccentrics in my life, and true artists,” he said. “Art for art’s sake is a pretty unbelievable thing if you see it with your eyes.”
Though he admired Zardulu and was sworn to secrecy about Selfie Rat, he said he told his story in January because it seemed like it was going to get out there one way or another.
Mr. Boz said much the same thing. Besides, he said, the artist had signed her name in florid script on the underside of each of the three-eyed fish.
“With the ‘Zardulu’ written on the bottom,” he said, “she kind of wants it to be out there, too.”
A version of this article appears in print on March 29, 2016, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: An Obscure Artist With a Flair for Creating Viral Internet Hoaxes. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

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