At Washington’s Flashpoint Gallery, Ivanka Trump is vacuuming crumbs.
Or at least, a 16-year-old model dressed like Trump is vacuuming crumbs, and more than a dozen visitors mill about her watching. The small exhibit is free, open each evening through Feb. 17.
The art installation is interactive, but simple. Pink walls, pink carpet, a model in a pink dress, and a pile of crumbs that the artist invites viewers to throw on the floor. The artist’s description at the entrance to the strange exhibit is bewildering:
“While Ivanka smiles and vacuums, graciously, elegantly, willingly, for the duration of the performance, the viewer is the one who shifts the action, throwing a handful of crumbs from a pedestal onto the carpet. (It’s surprisingly pleasurable.) Ivanka vacuums whether crumbs are present or not. Do we throw them to help her fulfill her duty? Are we complicit? Do we throw them because it’s fun to subjugate her in this act of classic feminine domestic drudgery? Maybe she’s just asking for it, right? But what does our degradation of her say about us?”
Sound a little sexist and retrogressive, not to mention vacuous? Trump thought so too. “Women can choose to knock each other down or build each other up,” she tweeted on Tuesday. “I choose the latter.”
The artist, Jennifer Rubell, writes that the exhibit is “a questioning of our complicity in [Trump’s] role-playing.” But standing in the room, it feels like nothing more than exhibitionism, another juvenile spasm of impotent contempt for the Trump administration. And complicity in this is foist upon viewers, we who gawk at a 16-year-old and toss crumbs on a carpet in a twisted power play.
The model does not appear to smile, but who can blame her? Vacuuming for two hours would work arm muscles more than enough to dissuade you from wearing out your cheeks, too. The faux Trump carefully avoids the gaze of onlookers, but at one point, our eyes lock. I feel crass for staring at her. We both turn away.
Celeste Jacques, a visitor, gingerly tosses a few crumbs and says she didn’t expect the exhibit to be feminist, but believes it challenges stereotypes of Trump based on her father’s policies.
Jacques is standing next to Julio Alba, who explains why he chose not to throw crumbs. It gave him Cinderella vibes, he says, and he didn’t want to be the evil stepmother.
As you turn away from the exhibit, there’s a guest book to sign. It’s open to a page full of names and email addresses, and some visitors have left comments. One says, “This was both weird + interesting,” which seems to be a mood shared by all of the solemn-faced visitors in the small exhibition space.
Then there’s one more comment, the one that sticks with you as you walk away. “I wonder, if it were another first daughter, what would our reaction be?”
