An artist has made a fire-hose "performance piece" into a long-running joke."

By George Myers Jr.
Dispatch Entertainment Reporter

NEW YORK - This is a story about the persistence of art and a fire hose. It's about an idea whose time came and went, returned and stayed. She who laughs last, laughs best.

Meet Dove Bradshaw, 45-year-old purveyor of high jinks at one of high art's most unchuckling of cathedrals, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Now an artistic adviser to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Bradshaw also is a performance and conceptual artist who has exhibited her drawings, photos, paintings, sculpture and film in shows at galleries and museums around the world.

And she has exhibited herself - as a smiling and frowning nun - in a 1979 performance piece staged in the subway corridors of Grand Central Station.

Yet her most renowned, if not notorious, performance is one in which she had to be almost invisible - as she acted on behalf of ambiguity and unreason, whimsy and rebellion. Nothing overthrows an institution so much as a horse laugh.

Knowing, as her stylistic forebears Marcel Duchamp and John Cage did before her, that art can be ambiguous and iconoclastic, and as self-referential and self-conscious as a shell game, Bradshaw "claimed" a fire-hose station in the grand gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's second floor, saying it was art, her art.

After a time, the museum bought it, hook, line and sinker.

It was not easy: The artist in October 1976 stalked the museum - watching its guards, timing their movements - until she found just the right moment to affix a label to an "archetypal, classically beautiful" glass-encased fire hose. Her unofficial label identified the object by name and materials ("brass, paint" and for the material of the hose

Dove Bradshaw / Metropolitan Museum of Art

Bradshaw's 1992 postcard photo of the Metropolitan Museum of Art second-floor fire hose, which Bradshaw first "claimed" as art and called Fire Extinguisher. She later retitled it Performance.

"canvas") and the artist as one "Dove Bradshaw, American 1949-."

Unamused, the curatorial staff removed the label within a week.

Bradshaw mounted another attack. Equally as determined, the museum staff or guards repelled her effort and label again.

Months elapsed, but Bradshaw and idea stayed intact. Possibly the museum staff had by 1978 understood performance art and the slippery idea that the entirely subjective boundary between art and life, stage and street, was rapidly collapsing. For whatever reason, when bradshaw affixed her label again, it stayed put and gave Bradshaw encouragement to seek what any mildly encouraged artist would seek: evidence of success, a flirtation with commerce, an expanded audience, thrills.

So, in 1978 the inventive artist printed a Met-like postcard of "her" glass-encased fire-hose from a photograph she took of the hose. One day, when everyone at the Met's Gift Shop staff blinked, Bradshaw stuck a batch of them in with the official Met postcards reproducing the images of Claude Monet, Joseph Albers, Jackson Pollock and the like.

Bradshaw visited the Met weekly to restock her card, which since has sold hun-

dreds. The Met enjoyed commission-free sales and another small boon by not having to pay the mystery artist a customary royalty. The local news media in 1979 picked up the story blew Bradshaw's cover and drew attention to the joke. The punch line disappeared from the fire-hose.

But the die was cast; the museum was warmed by the attention. Now knowing the who and whereabouts of the artist, the met in 1980 acquired her original photograph of the hose - from a collector who bought it from Bradshaw for $1,000 - to make its own postcard.

Alas for Bradshaw, museum curators came and went, and the photo itself was misplaced - lost for eight years. Recovered finally in the museum's matting department in 1988, the card was finally reprinted - as the Met's cards are, once every 10 years - putting Bradshaw finally and officially on display with Monet, Albers and Pollock in 1992.

Having no rights to her postcard, Bradshaw today earns no commission from her 20 year effort, a performance running as long as any success on Broadway.

There's more: A Saks Fifth Avenue art director bought one of her cards from the Met, blew it up to poster size, silk-screened color onto the hose, brass pipe and words, a la Andy Warhol, and used the posters as in-store displays. Bradshaw's name, too, was reproduced on every poster, which were displayed indiscreetly by Saks elevators.

But Bradshaw had some rights. The idea, at least, was hers, as the postcard text clearly stated.

Wanting to enjoy some part of the success brought by her efforts, Bradshaw asked Saks for "a small compensation" - a $100 gift certificate to the store - and got it. The same can't be said for Monet, Albers or Pollock.

Reached at her home Wednesday in New York, Bradshaw said she's not done with the hose, or the Met. "My next step in this campaign is to get the museum to designate the hose as a sculpture. I'm hoping a collector might then buy the hose from me, for $10,000."

A spokesman at the Met said the fully functioning fire hose is not for sale, though it offers the 1992 postcard of Bradshaw's Fire Extinguisher, as the artist first called it, for 50 cents.

Because of the unique, years-in-the-making aspect of this fancy-into-fact artwork, Bradshaw retitled her piece, to Performance.

"Performance fits the piece best," she said. "After all, should there be a fire, the piece would go into effect."