Classified Report from The Secret Clubhouse

Queering the World, One Fort at a Time

We’ve been fort builders from the beginning. Flux Factory—an arts collective originally fo­unded by a group of New School students in Williamsburg in 1994—is itself a fort, and every art project we ever produced was a fort, too.

I am, unabashedly, pro-fort. It is a childish impulse, I suppose, the building of forts. One generally constructs them out of pillows and extra sheets in the first go-round. Then you graduate to the out-of-doors. You go into the trees in an act of reverse-evolution, harkening back to distant ancestors with prehensile tails. But you’re also playing at building things, re­enacting basic civilizational urges embedded in the species mind. As soon as you’ve built one fort, you try to make the next one even better, bigger, more innovative. I had a friend in the Hollywood Hills, where I grew up, who built a fort with indoor plumbing, electricity, mechanical devices. But it still felt different being in the fort than being in the house. The fort was an experiment and the house was just a house.

I suspect (but these things cannot be proven definitively) that the relationship that art has to the real world is something like the relationship that a fort has to a house. They exist in the same world, they even share basic functional roles. And yet, they are dif­ferent. The art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto writes:

Since we are aware that some things are not works of art, the philosophical problem for contemporary aesthetics is to explain what makes the difference. This problem becomes acute when we consider works of art that re­semble, in all the particulars, some object that is not a work of art, such as Warhol’s Brillo Box. In this case it would be unreasonable to argue that such material differences as may exist between the artwork and the soap-pad packaging suffice to explain why the one is a work of art while its utilitarian look-alikes are not.

There is no way, on the face of it, to distinguish Warhol’s Brillo box from an actual Brillo box. So, you have to explore the object in terms of what it is trying to do, what it is “up to.” A regular Brillo box isn’t trying to be anything other than a Brillo box that can be used as a Brillo box. But Warhol’s Brillo box is up to something else. It doesn’t want to be used as a Brillo box, it wants to be understood as a work of art.

So it goes with the fort. You must...