For Dreamer, Shuey spent five days sleeping on the Fidalgo Room floor as part of Presence, a group exhibition of interactive video installations. Bumbershoot visual art exhibitions are open and free to the public during the days preceding Labor Day weekend and, at that time, the audience typically consists of people who are fairly attuned to how to act around art. But the weekend brings in a larger, less predictable crowd. This is the boon and bane of Bumbershoot visual art exhibitions. It's a great opportunity for artists to gain exposure to a lot of people but exposure to all those people makes for an exhausting and somewhat degrading experience. Having participated in Bumbershoot before, Shuey knew the risk he was taking by placing himself in such a publicly vulnerable position, but what he didn't anticipate was potential violence.
"Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised by all these people intent on wanting to do something physical to me but the fact that a majority of the comments were violent was a shock," Shuey told me. He admitted that, given the context of the other work in the show (where an action on the viewer's part caused a reaction or change in the artwork), people were naturally inclined to expect that of Dreamer. Shuey said he heard the same conversation over and over again throughout the weekend: people first establishing whether or not he was real (or dead, some wondered aloud), then debating how they were going to make him do something. Part of the time the interaction was benign or sweet (the woman who hummed to him for 15 minutes) or harmless but still invasive (the boy who tried to kiss him). But more than half the time, people suggested doing something physically harmful to him.
"Since parents were the ones dictating the interaction, their kid would look to them and ask 'What do I do with this one?' and since there was this whole question about whether or not I was real, they'd say, 'Well, kick him,'" Shuey said. Putting aside that Dreamer was an art installation and some people get twitchy when confronted with difficult art, it's distressing to think that so many people were inclined to kick him just because they could (he was underfoot, after all). Although nothing escalated to direct harm, it took a huge psychological toll on Shuey. By the time Sunday rolled around, he asked his girlfriend to sit in the room with him to stop people from harassing him.
When he relates this experience to people, half of them say, "Well, what'd you expect?" Thankfully, there's another half who are genuinely dismayed.
