Jessica Militare
Kalan Sherrard: New York’s Nihilist Anarchist Puppeteer
Kalan Sherrard, a self-proclaimed nihilist anarchist puppeteer, is about to perform
on the 14th Street-Union Square L Train platform. He’s wearing blue lipstick, an orange
Pussy Riot-style ski mask over his jagged sandy brown crew cut, a tattered houndstooth
scarf, a soiled gray onesie pulled down to his waist exposing his svelte upper trunk, pink
American Apparel briefs, knee pads, and a green fanny pack. An MTA janitor sweeps
by, christening his stage. Out of a small brown suitcase, Kalan unsheathes his
disfigured, grubby props -- a seven-limbed bug-eyed dolly and animal skull marionettes,
an aqua My Little Pony figurine, a pink foam creature and a tiger-zebra hand puppet
embellished with a cystic genital overgrowth made from cotton balls and stockings. A
slew of stuffed critters and plastic babies line the outside of his suitcase as spectators.
He props up his valise to reveal an affixed mini chalkboard that reads “Fuck The Police
:)” It’s showtime.
Act one: a melee of Kalan spitting on balloons, irksomely rubbing the inflatable plastic,
popping them, gyrating onto a packed, departing train, and slapping black tentacles
while manning a bear cranium marionette to a whimsical harmonica tune. His
impromptu freak show is a New York City subway fixture, offering amusement to
patrons after rough days in the cubicle and raucous nights on the town. But right now, at
8:30 p.m., on a Monday, most onlookers are mystified. Is he just another trust fund art
kid living off his parents’ dollar?
Antenna Man, a saxophone player wearing purple glitter star-shaped sunglasses and
pink and yellow braids, joins Kalan for an extempore jam. Antenna Man circles Kalan
while roaring on his sax; Kalan clangs a tin can on all fours while crawling a lanky stonefooted thing across the floor. Antenna Man, whose real name is Larry W. Carter, is a
Flushing native, who’s played the subway for 35 years. He met Kalan on the train, and
likes to groove with him.
“I love his art because his art represents the things you see in reality, and the things you
see in America,” Antenna Man says.
A guy yells to his friend: “That’s art motherfucker!”
And to enlighten us that he’s not insane and has a purpose, Kalan, donning a necklace
with a toothbrush and flosser attached and a pink cape, flashes a “Support Street Art”
sign.
If you ask Kalan what in the hell he’s doing, he’ll give you an amalgamation of
responses. His stock answer: “a non-narrative, nihilist, anarchist puppet show about
literary theory.” But Joe Schmoe isn’t catching the 25-year-old’s references to Derrida,
Deleuze and Dadaist philosophy; the high-thinking, poststructuralist captions on his tiny
blackboard -- like “Gender’s Over,” “Nihilist Silence,” and “Pathetic Bourgeois Catharsis”
-- elevate his street show from wacky to metaphysical. Depending on his mood, he may
say he has no hope in humanity, and all that’s left to do is act insane. He’s also critical
of the social norms in typical theatre venues -- the polite rules the audience must follow,
like clapping and keeping silent.
“I don’t like that,” Kalan says. “I’m interested in populism, and anti-elitist arts, and
making things that are interpretable and that are not locked in and that are permeable to
discourse.”
A quick Google search of Kalan Sherrard leads down a rabbit hole of unexpected
celebrity. This summer he and a performance partner appeared on America’s Got
Talent as avant-garde noise musicians, wherein an uncomfortable clip shows the duo,
uh, making noise, while Heidi Klum, Howie Mandel, Scary Spice and Howard Stern
(who told them he’d be ashamed if they were his children) condemned them with a
rejection buzzer. On his blog, Kalan called it “one of the most boring experiences we
have ever been able to have.”
On the Daily Show, John Stewart featured a clip of Kalan prancing in a cow suit and
udders at the 2009 Pittsburgh G-20 Summit, where he was arrested for rioting. And
after he was interviewed during Occupy in New York, Stephen Colbert mocked Kalan as
“a nut job in a burlap sack with a squirrel hat and goggles who does performance art
nihilistic puppet shows in the subway.” But he spent months on the cause: squatting in
Zucotti Park and performing on Wall Street. He even arrived in Oakland, Calif., right
before thousands of people occupied the city’s shipping port.
“It was explicit about not having demands and not having goals,” Kalan says about the
Occupy Movement. “...You can talk about it as a failure -- but looking back, there was a
point in America where there were thousands of communes proliferating in the center of
every urban situation. That was really special and beautiful.”
Fundamentally, Kalan makes things out of garbage. “I like to collect things that seem
like they’re laden with meaning, and then mix them up and fuck with them,” he says.
“Meaning is loose, and I think we can create meaning, and that’s why I’m a street
performer.”
Or, as his old roommate at Oberlin College, filmmaker Davey Fields says: “He scares
people.”
Kalan is part of a bohemian movement; he’s a streak in a faction of young people
whose goal is to disrupt the capitalistic notion of comfort -- our insulated milieu of
smartphones and office jobs and hetero-monogamous relationships.
“For some, when he walks a puppet onto your leg it’s like a showering of love if you’re
open to it,” Fields says. “And for others, it’s like get away you scum, you’re scaring me, I
don’t want to think about that.”
***
In between shifts, Kalan scavenges for food. He rarely buys prepared meals -- only
Lemonheads, Mike and Ike’s and Little Debbie’s at the bodega. He likes to dumpster
dive. Tonight, he finds a cold, coarse plate of chicken and rice in a garbage can next to
a Halal truck in Union Square.
“It’s disgusting the way I eat out of the garbage,” he says. “...I used to imagine having a
tiny microwave I could carry around with me.”
He washes the bite down with a half-full cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee he found in the
park. Kalan isn’t concerned with getting sick. He says eating this way ultimately makes
him stronger. “You’ll get a cold maybe,” he says. Before heading back underground, he
devours an uneaten shish kabob dog sitting on top of putrid leftovers.
***
Most nights, Kalan can be found at his main outpost: the Bedford L platform, the
first stop in Brooklyn’s posh Williamsburg proper. But he’s pretty sick of performing
there.
“In terms of an analysis, a lot of people who hang out at Bedford are fucking shitty,
bougie rich kids who I would not want to associate with,” Kalan says, with an erudite air.
He laughs. “The true nihilists, who are pretty selfish and awful, and are doing a pretty
handy job of collaborating and ruining a lot of our world, and are the up-and-coming,
junkie CEOs.”
After a few hours at Union Square, he gives Bedford a shot. The crowd is thick; it’s postbar primetime. In his usual getup (plus a necklace of chicken bones), he blows a
melancholy strain on his mouth organ, repeatedly compresses a monster squeeze toy,
and gallops My Little Pony on top of the suitcase. He makes intense eye contact with
his peers; his stark, blue-green eyes animate his thin, masked visage. He walks out a
black baby doll marionette, which makes a few onlookers uncomfortable. A mass of
nearby MTA workers scoff. No wonder he’s titled this act “Contempt for Living Things:
An Opera in 3500 Parts.”
There are days Kalan makes a dollar, and there are days he makes three hundred.
Besides the sneering MTA bunch, he’s doing pretty well tonight. After a few bits, Kalan’s
fluffy, handmade earflap hat is overflowing with dollar bills given to him by eager fans.
Most contributors receive a fist pump and a card bearing “www.enormousface.com,” the
domain to his nebulous, link-heavy website.
Two girls heading home from a Washed Out concert comment on Kalan’s costume: his
chicken bone necklace and cystic cotton ball belt make one of them queasy. The young
woman, wearing a beanie, says she’s high, and this is really screwing with her head
right now.
“I’m a vegetarian so I was kind of grossed out by it, but then again, I’m also a lesbian,
so it’s funny that I was so intrigued by his garlic balls,” she smirked.
Her friend, Sara Bateman, adds: “I think it’s cool for people to see performance artists
like this here...It’s also, gosh I don’t know how to say it, an annoyance. A lot of street
performers in the subway are an annoyance to people...because they’re trying to make
money.”
Matthew Christian, a violin player who started BuskNY with Kalan, an arts advocacy
group that informs street performers of their rights against police brutality, thinks most
people are unaware that it’s legal for buskers to perform in the subway. He says Kalan
is often pigeonholed instead of legitimized as an artist trying to make a living in a
nonconventional way.
“I don’t think it’s automatic for people to give when they see him, and that’s a shame,”
Christian says. “I wish people could recognize art in whatever venue they happen to
come across it.”
Whenever Kalan sees a fellow busker, he vigilantly hands them a BuskNY flyer. He
wants them to be informed. He’s a subway do-gooder: Christian recalls a time when
Kalan relentlessly tried to return a person’s lost backpack to its rightful owner.
“I think that’s something people don’t instantly think about him,” Christian says. “People
think more of the weird side. He engages on one level with busking in a very serious
way, but he’s also just a very nice person.”
Christian teamed up with Kalan this summer after he saw a cop trying to remove him
from the subway mid-performance. In 2011, Christian was arrested himself for playing
violin underground, was held for 46 hours in jail, and ended up suing the city. The case
was settled. Since then, he’s been arrested twice for playing; one charge was dropped,
and in the other, he accepted an Adjournment in Contemplation of Dismissal because
he’s in Senegal teaching English. Christian says the charge will be dropped and sealed
in six months.
“The biggest problem for busking nowadays is that people think it’s sketchy, and sort of
don’t respect it as an art form,” Kalan says. “I love doing what I do altruistically, and I’m
not fundamentally interested in making money. But I also sometimes feel exploited, and
used, and objectified. If every person who thought it was worth it to take a photograph
also was like, ‘I should give a dollar,’ I would be making good money.”
***
When Kalan was about two years old, his dad took him to the park near their apartment
in Mercer Island, a suburb outside of Seattle. Kael Sherrard (Kalan’s name is a
compound of his father’s and mother’s name, Anne) heard that children have a
psychological leash -- they’ll wander 10 or 12 yards from your picnic blanket, but their
mental tether will always gravitate them back. He was curious, and let Kalan roam. By
the time the child was several hundred yards away, almost obscured by a tall edifice,
Kael had a poignant realization.
“I thought, okay, he doesn’t have a leash,” his dad says, chuckling. “And I’ve always
thought that he’s been a kid without a leash. He just wants to explore the world, and
take off, no fear.”
Kalan grew up in the nearby Cougar Mountain area of Bellevue, Wash. Cougar
Mountain adopts a more bucolic, wooded backdrop, while surrounding Bellevue is
predominately affluent suburban sprawl. (Kalan used to hold up “No Bellevue” signs in
the town’s major intersections because he thinks “the suburbs are one of the most
rapacious structures in capitalist society.”)
From pre-school to 12th grade, he attended Hillside Student Community School, an
alternative private institution his grandmother Edith opened in the ‘60s. His dad is the
director, and teaches high school English, History, and fencing. The family’s home is
right next door. Anne Kiemle, who uses her maiden name, is an 8th grade teacher at a
nearby public school. An only child, Kalan was raised a liberal Christian, but stopped
going to church at 14. He was often surrounded by nature, and life was very much close
to home.
“To say my family had a commune on a little mountain outside Seattle is like a gross
exaggeration, but also probably sort of true,” Kalan says.
Anne says there wasn’t a TV in the house when Kalan was growing up, and he didn’t
get a computer until he was about nine.
“He was always occupied with something creative,” she says. “If I read him a book, he
would be making art at the same time, because he couldn’t just sit there.”
Kalan’s performance art skills started young. At age 12, he and his cousin Noel (he
considers Noel practically a brother) set up a “Complaint Booth” on Seattle’s Green
Lake, where locals could come and raise a stink. At 13, he made cows out of cardboard
and sticks, and placed them in a grassy patch in his apartment complex. When the
animals went missing and were destroyed by neighborhood bullies, he put up signs in
their defense. Kalan eventually received an anonymous apology letter.
“...It was like there was some sort of conversation going,” Anne says. “So he’s been
doing this for a while.”
In high school, Kalan was a true crust punk: he listened to British anarcho band Crass,
and frequented vegan, anarchist potlucks when he traveled to Spain. His uncle caught
Kalan and Noel trying to hop a train to San Francisco when they were 16. Kalan came
home, and his parents sat him down for a serious talk.
“We said, Kalan, why don’t you have a legitimate adventure? You know, something that
isn’t going to get you killed,” Anne recalls, laughingly. “So he keeps trying to do that,
probably.”
He spent the last half of his senior year as an exchange student in Spain instead. He
learned about the Spanish Civil War, and Franco’s overthrow of the leftist front. At
Oberlin, he spent his first year of college enmeshed in anarchism and Tolstoyan
literature.
“There was just a point when I was like this is so much bullshit,” Kalan says about his
choice to give up Christianity. His parents were completely supportive of his decision.
As for his puppet show, Kael, a lover of traditional expressionist and impressionist art
says, “I’m very impressed by what he can just do off-the-cuff. At the same time...there’s
a piece of me that sort of wishes he would be willing to modify the absurd element to
make it more approachable...to do something maybe a little more traditional. Sometimes
I think it’s a little too far out to reach many people.”
Since graduating in 2010, Kalan’s traveled the country and world, spending most of his
time performing on the streets of New Orleans, South America, and New York. He may
seek out a performance art community in Mexico City this spring. And when he isn’t on
the platform, he’s still onstage. Kalan is a staple at street artist Matthew Silver’s bimonthly performance art revue, “Circus of Dreams” at Bizarre bar in Bushwick. Silver, a
34-year-old bearded Jersey native with a sedated, druggie drawl, says of Kalan’s work:
“It’s really beautiful, it’s very intimate, it’s actually nice to know that somebody else is
doing the same thing you’re doing.”
Much like Kalan’s abstract puppet show, Silver’s act is duly far-out: he often makes fart
noises and vivifies inanimate objects. Silver opened the last “Circus of Dreams” in a
No. 2 pencil suit on crutches. He calls his act “The Love Portal.”
When I asked him to describe it, he told me: “Imagine if you will, the entire world
decides to drop all their head games...and just remember when they were a little kid,
and give and receive love simultaneously, consciously...”
***
Kalan isn’t a head-for-the-hills agitator who would rather castigate and blister than
submit to the free market. He accepts contradiction – he pays rent (though refuses to
shell out more than $200 a month; even if that means sharing one bedroom with four
people, which he did this summer), and to justify their $14 price tag, the waistband of
his American Apparel undies are covered in self-penned tally marks counting how many
times he’s worn them (he’s at 120) – though in moderation. Kalan is fascinated by
privilege and where that’s left him. He’s white and was raised middle class, but he’s not
endowed with a trust fund like he’s so often stigmatized. He sees that trope as an easy
way to write people off. The wispy beanstalk is more concerned with generating
community – he’d rather be a living, breathing, contributing organism in a capitalistic
society working to build awareness rather than protesting corruption from a log cabin in
the woods.
“People say this about anarchist politics -- oh well then why aren’t you living in the
woods and being self-sufficient outside of capitalism? That’s selfish,” he says. “That’s
using your privilege to lever away your guilt. I want to have an affect on the world. I
don’t want to say fuck you world, I want to be active in creating communities of
resistance.”
Kalan often earns minimum wage or more in the subway, but his standards of living are
quite low. Right now, he squats at a warehouse apartment in Bushwick that houses 11
people. Behind a rolling steel door and a swath of bikes, a small, brown portal leads to
an airy community space with reclaimed wood-paneled walls, a kitchen cluttered with
pots and pans and spices, and a makeshift shower in a sink. Kalan shares his tiny room
with another man, but his hoard of stuff makes the domicile his. Puppets, accordions,
snow globes, and literary theory anthologies clutter the shelves. A single bulb casts a
tawny glow. Self-made taxonomy boards overlay his desk -- he picks up bread clips,
buttons, tampons, bones, anything he can find off the street to create them.
“It’s nice to have weird, shitty, special things,” Kalan says.
The warehouse is a creativity haven. A roommate’s painting of a melting face hangs in
the hallway, and friends rush in and out, working on music and art projects. It’s
commonplace to hear elocutions like, “He’s going to open the first weed store in
Vermont,” and “We’re going to chill and make some art today.” Kalan met one of his
roommates, J.W., a few years back while he was performing in New Orleans. He floated
his bear skull marionette across the street, walked up to J.W., kissed him, and did a
back roll away. J.W. interpreted Kalan’s act as more than just a puppet show. More like
magic.
“I should stop calling them puppet shows. I need a rebrand!” Kalan says.
“Oh, I wouldn’t call it a puppet show, that’s a fucking terrible name,” J.W. retorts.
In his most pretentious tone, Kalan smirks: “I do culturally appropriative voodoo.”
J.W. pauses. “Yeah, that would be more accurate I think.”
***
As a shy, impressionable sophomore at Oberlin, Davey Fields heard all about Kalan
Sherrard’s campus antics. He was a controversial figure, “and everybody talked a lot of
shit about him,” he says. Davey wasn’t exactly of Kalan’s ilk; Kalan was making bold,
public statements -- like the time he and a few friends ate a bunch of beets and then
threw up on each other in front of the library during midterms. Davey was more
subdued, and had never been involved in theatre. The next semester, the two were
placed together as roommates.
“We just totally hit it off,” Davey recalls. “We would stay up at night reading to each
other, painting together.”
Davey read him the The Book of Disquietude by Fernando Pessoa, and Kalan showed
him Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel. They joined an
experimental theatre troupe together, and did wild shows: in one, a girl asked an
audience member to spit in her face, and if the person refused, someone in the cast
would get cut with an electric turkey carving knife.
“I don’t even know how I feel about it now, but I was totally into it then,” Davey says.
“And I think Kalan still is into that kind of confrontational stuff today, in a less menacing
way. He values that spontaneous collaboration that can happen with anybody that
happens to be watching.”
***
Riding the subway with Kalan is like overseeing a throng of precocious youngsters at a
petting zoo: he’s the exotic wallaby the tykes are teeming to touch; I’m the customary
animal handler, assuring the overprotective mothers he isn’t feral and is alright to pet.
On the A train, a family on their way to ice skate in Bryant Park is obsessed with his
seven-limbed baby doll’s melted face. He’s wearing it around his neck.
“I want it,” a young girl proclaims.
“...Why?” he answers.
“Because, I like it.”
Kalan offers her his card, and says he’ll mail her something.
“...Oh, he got business cards,” an older woman standing next to her says as she snaps
pictures of him.
“Oh, it’s not about business,” Kalan says. I’m the only one who gets the joke.
“What it’s about?”
“I don’t know, what do you think?”
The woman takes a close-up of the maimed doll.
“Only in New York people,” she says to the train car before exiting.
Later on, while we’re riding the L to Union Square, Kalan voices something I’ve been
thinking about all day: when he’s standing next to me, people think he’s somewhat
normal.
“If you’re hanging out with someone, there’s certain things you can’t be, that people
often assume I am,” Kalan tells me. “Like a homeless crackhead, an insane
schizophrenic crackhead that no one will hang out with.”
But as an absurdist, he knows his sanity will be questioned. Kalan insists that he has
never touched drugs in his life.
“...You get a lot of banal, pathetic people saying, ‘Oh, too much acid,’ and it’s like sure,
whatever.”
And yeah, at first glance you wouldn’t think Kalan has a degree in comparative
literature. Or that he was a member of the Student Senate in college, and is thinking
about going into law and opening his own free-thinking school. You wouldn’t know he
took off a semester to hitchhike from Seattle to Patagonia with $60 and a harmonica in
his pocket. Or that he graced the cover of New York Magazine in 2011 as the Gen-Y
poster boy during Occupy.
Photographers from New York approached him in Zucotti Park and asked him to write
body commentary on a piece of tape that would be included in the photo -- he scribbled
“Our Economy is A Cancer” on his -- but upon publication, New York edited it to “Sucks
To Be Us” and ran it against his wishes.
“It doesn’t suck to be us, it’s okay to be us,” Kalan says. “It sucks to be used, it sucks to
have your image used.”
***
It’s the day after Black Friday, the city is still buzzing with shoppers, and whether he’d
like to admit it or not, Kalan is protesting. On the Union Square platform, he writes
“Black Friday” on his chalkboard. He imitates a fire alarm with three penny whistles in
his mouth, stomps his feet like an angry child, waves a tattered American hand flag in
his left hand, and gesticulates his bear skull marionette in his right.
“...I love what you’re doing. Remember me? You made me cry last time,” a tall black
man dressed in booty shorts, a straw hat and a tied up belly shirt, with a boom box on
his shoulders tells Kalan.
Kalan asks how he’s doing, the man smiles, and continues to watch. Domingo Torrell, a
20-year-old vogue and breakdancer, says Kalan’s puppet show makes him emotional
because “...it’s him expressing himself...I love it. It’s the best thing I ever saw in New
York.”
Kalan’s got a “no cameras” sign up (he usually points a TV remote at people who take
pictures of him), and a man with a point-and-shoot asks to take his shot. “I’m
theoretically positioned against photography,” Kalan tells him. People use photography
as a way to defer interaction, he dictates. But Kalan welcomes him anyway, and they
have a full-blown debate as the early evening trains swoosh by. Kalan recognizes it’s
funny to enforce rules no one will follow, constructs he fundamentally disdains. He’s
packing up for a restroom break, when a young woman peers at him with mopey eyes.
He asks her re-assuredly: “Do you want to see a puppet show?” She nods, beaming. A
mother stands front row, hand-in-hand with her two little girls; the toddlers twinkle while
Kalan mans the creepy toys. Pure, unadulterated gratitude. If only he knew others
behind the scenes felt the same.
“Sometimes I see him like a little depressed,” says Lydia Roman, an MTA janitor for
nine years who’s carrying a trash bag by Kalan’s set. “He said, ‘do you think nobody
loves me?’ I let him know, I notice you. Every time I come I give him a smile. He ain’t no
danger to nobody. He just in his little world.”