The performance piece 'Ivanka Vacuuming' seems to irk the first daughter even more than 'fake news'

[Cattledog]

As visitors throw crumbs onto a carpet, the stand-in Ivanka Hoovers them up, with a rictus of a smile on her face. In a literal but comic sense, she is doing the “clean up” work that she struggles to do within the administration, which always seems to soil things — even its own efforts to dismantle political and social contracts. Is Donald Trump racist? No matter, Ivanka will clean up the mess, even as her father tweets out more dog-whistle racism. But the din of the vacuum will never mask the larger noise coming from the administration.

There is something Sisyphean in the two-hour performance. The crumbs just keep coming, and the cleaning up is never done. Crumbs recall the economics of wealth and poverty, the idea of trickle-down economics, and the old saying commonly but falsely attributed to Marie Antoinette: Let them eat cake (or brioche). Perhaps the crumbs are us, the 99 percent, the “losers” in the great economic shakedown of late capitalism that left the 1 percent with half the world’s wealth and gave us the spectacle of the secretary of commerce, Wilbur Ross, suggesting that furloughed federal workers could survive the government shutdown simply by taking out loans from their local bank. Ivanka’s vacuum fattens and swells on the little people, and not one crumb will be left behind.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/the-performance-piece-ivanka-vacuuming-seems-to-irk-the-first-daughter-even-more-than-fake-news/2019/02/05/fe70801c-296c-11e9-984d-9b8fba003e81_story.html?utm_term=.6ddc83e66b4d

Video here:

https://vimeo.com/315681089