Mr. Peanut has been busy raising a family
Exhibition of works by Vincent Trasov showcases performance- art icon and more
There’s more to Vincent Trasov than Mr. Peanut. Trasov achieved instant notoriety in 1974 when he ran for mayor of Vancouver in a peanut costume, top hat, cane and spats. He was an official candidate and called himself Mr. Peanut after the recognizable corporate mascot.
He lost. Incumbent mayor Art Phillips was easily re- elected. But in a short campaign that lasted 20 days, Mr. Peanut captured the imagination of most Vancouverites, except for a few cranky politicians who didn’t get it. The media loved Mr. Peanut and had a field day with puns about a nut running for political office.
Mr. Peanut was so highly regarded he was picked by The Vancouver Sun as one of the province’s 100 most influential people as the end of the millennium approached in 1999.
Mr. Peanut was a unique candidate. He never said a word and spoke only through campaign manager John Mitchell. At allcandidates meetings, when it was his turn to address the audience, he would tap dance with his backing performers the Peanettes.
His campaign included catchy one- liners such as Elect a Nut for Mayor. His platform turned PEANUT into an acronym: P stood for Performance, E for elegance, A for art, N for nonsense, U for uniqueness and T for talent.
“[ Mr. Peanut] was an empty shell,” Trasov said in a recent interview. “People could pore their ideas into the empty shell. I was just a vehicle for other people’s imagination.
“When it came to the mayoralty campaign, it was the media that was creative. They put their ideas into Mr. Peanut for me. They had to treat me seriously because I paid my deposit.”
Although the campaign was funny, Mr. Peanut was more than just a joke. Trasov was an artist and his decision to run for mayor as a nut was performance art, one of the new types of art that emerged in the 1960s.
Trasov was part of a group of innovative and groundbreaking artists that came together in Vancouver during that period. With Michael Morris, the two of them founded Image Bank, a conceptual image archive. They were one of eight co- founders of Western Front, one of the city’s first artist- run centres.
What few people realized was that Trasov’s Mr. Peanut performance in the 1974 civic election was his last.
Within a few years, Trasov was living and working in Berlin. After his very public work as Mr. Peanut the performance artist, Trasov returned to working on his process art in the studio.
Now for the first time in Vancouver, a selection of his works from the past 32 years is being exhibited at Trench Gallery: Vincent Trasov: Selected Works 1980 to 2012.
Although Mr. Peanut the performer has retired, Mr. Peanut hasn’t entirely disappeared. He’s returned in 22 beautifully rendered ink drawings.
Mr. Peanut is now a grown nut. He has a family whose most prominent member is the buxom Mrs. Peanut. They have a son who looks up to everyone.
Mr. Peanut travels a lot and the drawings show him relaxing among ruins around the world. Some of the drawings play on the West Coast theme ( Trasov spends part of the year at Babyland at Roberts Creek). One shows a totem pole made out of peanuts topped by a squirrel.
The exhibition includes a video of the first public performances of Mr. Peanut. Called Mr. Peanut in New York by David Rimmer, the 1972 video shows Mr. Peanut as a regular nut on the Staten Island Ferry heading to the Statue of Liberty and walking on the sidewalks of the city.
The other video is Flammable, a record of Trasov’s first event as an artist. In 1969, outside the Student Union Building at the University of B. C., he set fire to a pile of flammable objects and invited people to watch. Trasov said he was inspired to use fire by the work of French artist Yves Klein who used flame- throwers and acetylene torches in his work.
One of the themes throughout Trasov’s career as an artist has been using elements such as fire or heat and water in various processes. In one group of four works, he’s drawn with copper sulphate, a substance that goes on without leaving a trace and only becomes visible with the application of heat. As he said, the first stage is reminiscent of writing secret messages as a child by using invisible ink such as lemon juice. The works combine earthy burned brown streaks and marks with aqueous blues and greens.
In a series he called Burnt Studies, Trasov developed a unique process using heat. He cut out squares from magazines and stacked them about 20 or 30 high in a package made out of tinfoil. Added to embers and left overnight, the paper smouldered but didn’t completely burn. He compared it to baking a potato in the oven. The process transformed the paper into blackened shapes that he glued onto a board. The resulting collages look like burnt and charred relics of language.
“I like the risk,” he said about using heat and fire. “I was always interested in elements – with fire and water. [ Fire] can be very destructive. It takes that control to make it a creative act rather than a destructive act.”
Trasov will be giving an artist’s talk at the gallery Saturday at 2 p. m.