AEROBIC UTOPIA... BAGEL BUNS. FIGMENT NYC2010

Proselytizing to their bewildered public about a carb-free, carefree, guilt-free Aerobic Utopia, during the Figment arts festival on Governor’s Island the Push Pops performed at the foot of a massive bagel hill with embedded 2-channel video installation featuring the original Buns of Steel Series. Over the racket of Buns of Steel® could be heard a doctored soundtrack including Bjork, MIA, Rhianna, Janet Jackson and the Push Pops themselves. For three 8-hour sessions, the Push Pops – renamed Crystal, Sapphire and Diamond - perfected their desultory workout on a constructed beach tableau complete with a custom umbrella and ice cold refreshments from Aerobic Utopia’s fictive sponsor, America’s No. 1 Fitness beverage, Crystal Light.

As witness to the Push Pops aerobic psychomachy, viewers were accosted by the jocular cries of an anti-consumerist ritual obscured by retro infomercial style nutrition and exercise jargon. Bagels! Bagel Buns! You’re Almost There! This is the first day of a whole new you! This is not a diet this is lifestyle! Exercise is not a sin!... went the Push Pop’s radical word salad. A rotating Nazi drill sergeant style “Aerobitician on Duty” led the group, interspersing her commands with deadpan readings from glossy celebrity fitness manuals (The Nucleus of my figure is my stomach – I have a flat and tight tummy. I stay away from anything with the word cream in it. Just substitute the word fat for cream - ice fat, fat cheese, whipped fat - and giving it up will be quite easy!) and fiercely delivered public confessionals (We were in love! Raise your hand if you ate fruit for breakfast? I am not my anxiety!)

On the third day, with thighs soar as hell and throats raw from polemicizing, the Push Pops ceremoniously covered the bagel hill during the onset of storm, switched on the megaphone siren and led a gaggle of screaming little girls around the hill in hysterical circles yelling “Bagels! No more bagels!” With Gav Baby close behind on the camera, the Push Pops spontaneously took their Utopia on foot to festival goers. “Aerobic Utopia Emigration” began with an impromptu jog around the island, greeting passersby with loud calls of protest, anger, heresy, waving the handmade sequin Bagel Bun flag high, all candy colored lycra and feminist joie de vivre.