Two conceptual artists marry, move out to the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, and decide to create a conceptual history of an imaginary Bushwick Farms: An obsession with actualizing a conceptual lifelong endeavor.

And for the last 5 years, the artists Tara Cuthbert and Stuart Solzberg have been creating historical fiction and mythology, centered around this “farm.” The artists even renamed themselves as Joe Rotto and Violet Gray, and took the show on the road in a 1979 Ford pick-up truck and 1968 17ft travel trailer, to perform The Travelling Variety Show. The introductory video (10 mins) is here.

I discovered Bushwick farms via an ejournal called Tarpaulin Sky, which published an excerpt from The Fortune Teller’s Recollections,
written by the Fortune Teller, one of the people who joined the Travelling Variety Show:

There is something unbearably human about bad men. For example, there is no doubt that they will die.

Though I never loved the banker husband it felt appropriate to say Why have you forsaken me since I had a history of hearing my mother say it and also because of the symbolic number of years between our ages that added up to Christ on the cross.

Tarpaulin Sky has other fun stuff, like interviews in which authors say stuff like “To really answer your question, I have to go back to the time in my life when I started writing I Love Dick.”

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