Help signs

Excerpt from the publication On a Clear Day You Can See Forever:

A man with a thick blue eye exhibits the scars and open wounds on his leg to the constant stream of people walking by on this busy street. On his lap just above his leg is a little cardboard sign asking for help. It states he’s a homeless veteran who needs money for food. A police officer walks up to him and tells him to move on, and the man with the sign puts on his shoes and rolls down his pants. As the man gets up to leave, I walk towards him and ask if I can buy his sign for four dollars, since that’s all the money I have on me. As he hands me the sign he says: “God bless you”, in a flat voice, as if I had just given him a quarter.

This is the second sign I’ve bought from this man, and it’s almost identical to the one I bought a month ago.

The longer this sign was on my studio wall the more difficult it got for me to decide what exactly I wanted to do with it. I felt that I couldn’t show it or announce it as my own work without altering it or injecting something of myself in it. It would have been too simple to show it unchanged, and it would lack all traces of my inability to have any impact on the things I encountered on the street, which is why I bought these signs in the first place. I became aware that anything I painted on this sign would be a pose, and therefore hypocritical and insincere.

The first signs I painted and decorated myself were almost impulsive acts, reactions that came naturally. But after thinking more about it, looking at and talking about the signs I had already painted, I felt that I had lost that directness and had to come up with another solution.

Since I felt that I had lost the ability to work on this sign with sincerity, I started to think of other people who didn’t have these problems and could paint the sign for me in a genuine, sincere way.

New York has thousands of hot dogs stands and probably even more nail studios. On almost on every corner, above shops, in the backs of obscure shopping centres, in subway stations everywhere, you can find places to get your nails done. Most establishments only do the manicures: they cut and smoothen edges and give nails a crystal-clear polish for a healthy natural look. Among the black and Hispanic women, it’s popular to have little decorations applied to their glued-on plastic nails. These paintings are custom made and can feature a holiday theme or someone’s name, but most of them are just very colourful decorations with shiny little stones, hearts and flowers. The nails you see are so elaborate and fine in detail that they resemble the illuminations monks made in the Middle Ages.

When I walk into Wonder Nails on Broadway with the cardboard sign under my arm all the girls who work there start to giggle, and this makes me feel as if I have just walked into the ladies’ room. The oldest woman (the boss) explains to me in broken English that she only knows Mandarin, and she calls for someone to help. Heidi is a Chinese girl and the only manicurist at Wonder Nails who speaks English. I ask her to paint the homeless sign I’ve brought with me in the same way that she paints nails.

She asks me what and where she is to paint, and I tell that is up to her, that she is free to paint whatever she wants. She repeats this question a few more times to make sure she really does have the freedom to do whatever she wants to do.

She asks 50 dollars for the actual painting and the materials, explaining that she has to buy the stones, paint, etc., and that it will be ready in two days.

When I return two days later and walk in the door, I can see Heidi running off, disappearing behind a wall in the back. More giggles and lots of smiles as the older lady offers me a chair. Heidi returns now with a fresh layer of make-up and with her hair done. She makes me sit in yet another chair and shows me what she has painted on the sign.