Kidnapping as Art

When I started writing my caper novel Two Performance Artists Kidnap Their Boss And Do Things With Him in 1999, the book’s kidnapping angle seemed unique. I’d fallen in love with the idea of performers committing a kidnapping as a performance—not kidnapping for love or money or politics, but as art. And like anyone who lives to revel in new ideas, I thought to myself, surely nobody’s thought of this before, right?

Boy, was I wrong. In all my reveling it hadn’t occurred to me to research whether the concept had already been tried by others, and of course it had, and would be again, many times over.

There had been the art group Blast Theory, who in 1998 unveiled a pay-to-play lottery experiment in which winners were kidnapped.¹ Ten entrants were chosen at random around the UK and secretly followed, after which “two winners were then snatched in broad daylight and taken to a secret location where they were held for forty-eight hours.” Captured by a film crew, the kidnapping was also broadcast on the Internet, where online visitors were allowed to “control the video camera inside the safehouse and communicate live with the kidnappers.”

A year later, Columbia University art grad and provocateur Brock Enright began operating Videogames Adventure Services, a company that constructed “reality adventures” in which clients could pay to be snatched from the streets of Manhattan, bound and gagged, and forcibly held by a cast of convincing actors posing as kidnappers.

Enright’s business model was repeated in 2002 when rapper-entrepreneur Adam Robert Lamon (aka “Mr. Scrillion”) launched his Extreme Kidnapping service in Detroit, complete with a “torture menu” whose options included customized levels of intimidation, electrifying sessions with a stun gun, and even waterboarding.² (Perhaps taking his love of simulations too far, Mr. Scrillion would later be arrested by the Secret Service for alleged counterfeiting.) Scrillion’s service had been inspired by David Fincher’s 1997 film The Game, in which Nicholas Van Orton, a depressed investment banker played by Michael Douglas, is given a dubious gift for his forty-eighth birthday: his unwitting participation in a terrifying meta-game of intrigue staged by a company called Consumer Recreation Services. At one point, Van Orton is drugged, kidnapped, and wakes up in a Mexican graveyard without ID or money. The lesson: never let yourself get too depressed.

While these “consensual kidnapping” projects might be categorized as commercial with their public advertising, participation fees, and legal disclaimers, I discovered from talks with several longtime curators and performance artists that the above examples are predated by a more terrifying brand of experimental kidnapping: namely, kidnappings, staged as potentially real, by performance artists for art purposes.³ During these actions, spectators would be kidnapped without advance warning, and held for indeterminate periods, which allowed captors to play close to the bone with themes of consent, anticipation, credibility, and fear. The radical 1970s were rife with these “art kidnappings,” especially at Amsterdam’s de Appel gallery.

Founded in 1975 by Wies Smals, de Appel was ground zero for Europe’s time-based art scene for many years, with performers experimenting intently with artist-audience boundaries, if not the very definitions of performance. Could an everyday act—even the commission of a crime—constitute art? How far would an audience—or even a show’s curator—be willing to let a performer go?

Smals found out firsthand. In a video she shot in 1977 during “Where It’s Coming From,” a piece improvised by performer Charlemagne Palestine, Palestine pulled a knife on Smals, then chased her around the locked gallery until he managed to corner her and grab the camera.⁴ Turning the lens on the terrified gallerist, Palestine’s message was that “any observer must be actively involved in the performance.” ⁵

In the 1977 piece entitled “Take the Money and Run,” performers Robin Winters and Coleen Fitzgibbon (together known as X&Y) executed a mock robbery- kidnapping of their de Appel audience.⁶ After warning that only audience members who “agreed to comply with X&Y’s...