only in new york?

Meet Kalan Sherrard, NYC’s Most Avant-Garde Nihilist Subway Performer

The latest episode in Nicolas Heller’s documentary web series “No Your City,” as published by Gothamist, features the arguably pretentious, inarguably earnest street performer Kalan Sherrard, who was recently arrested during his peaceful anarchist puppet show. Functioning as a video manifesto for his peculiar ways, the clip is at least compelling.

I think it has to do with being really bored with the world, sort of — both really bored and really interested,” he explains of his subway theater. “I think it has to do with politics in terms of being against and really critical of so many things in terms of how the world is organized. The only thing left to do is act insane.”

Coincidentally, Kalan just happened to be featured on the cover of New York in 2011:

(In a message to Intelligencer, he called the “Sucks to Be Us” headline, “pathos-ridden dis-empowering abstention.”)

I’m also fundamentally almost against context and sort of not interested in describing what I do,” he says in the new video, a detailed explanation of what he does — mostly a “non-narrative nihilist anarchist puppet show about literary theory” and “[make] things out of garbage and dead animals.”

I like to collect things that seem to weigh a lot semiotically and collage with them,” he adds. “Sort of to suggest that it’s very meaningful but also to say nothing is very meaningful at all.” He also hates when people take his picture.

Kalan Sherrard, the Avant-Garde Subway Performer