At PAGEANT (70 Graham Ave.),  a second-floor dance studio on the edges of Bed-Stuy and Williamsburg, the lights had dimmed and the largely naked Crackhead Barney, caked in white powder, carried a microphone around and asked a crowd of local hipsters in her usual streetside yell: “DO YOU WANT TO RAPE ME?”  

I had run into Barney about a week earlier, outside an abandoned lot in Bushwick, since converted into a community garden where, in recent years, migrants would show up at food distros. After a complicated back and forth with the city earlier this year over makeshift electricity, the garden had been locked up by the site’s owner and Barney was there to protest. “Where the fuck else am I going to harass all the immigrants?” she asked me, detailing a performance piece involving giving “them a taste of America.” Like any activist, she had an art show going on next weekend.

This was GOD IS RAPING ME, an hourlong performance piece, perhaps one of the more evocative works to come out of the indie theater scene. Before delivering it here, she had devised it during a residency run by Chocolate Factory Theater, a nonprofit that operates out of an old dye factory in Long Island City. Now, at PAGEANT, Barney’s presence has a kind of aggressive, piercing power, not unlike watching that scene from last decade’s Suspiria remake, itself also a feat of endurance wrapped in a pat political allegory. 

What Barney is enduring is all of us; at various points, she chants, “Every day, this happens every fucking day,” in a kind of unhoused staccato, her voice rattling like something overheard on Nostrand. In a bit that was truly remarkable, Barney also wanders around, lifting a barrel-sized trash bin and hurling it from one side of the room to the other, scattering the space with litter, wandering naked and full of rage. Hauntingly elegiac music, played by RabbiStravinsky on a kind of makeshift plastic cello, can be heard processed through waves of distortion, like mid-career Xiu Xiu.    

Contained in a single room, and no longer harassing passerby or annoyed celebrities or politicians, the Crackhead Barney project reveals itself less as a cry for attention than an attack on the architecture of polite society, creating a kind of painful, creaking poetry out of abject, untouched space. She covers her exposed nipples with pieces of tape and yells at cameras: “This is for Instagram!”

Pieces of paper reading “N*****” and “T*****,” as well as “Zionist” and “Moslem,” all written in marker, demarcate and categorize the crowd, though this is made ridiculous by the conceptual laziness of the gesture. As a self-identified creation of the city’s leftist spaces (“I have solidified my position in the landscape of politics by being an influential instrument in getting Mamdani elected,” she told Artnet last month), she takes on the symbolic everyday genocide of the Israeli state as the show’s primary target, though she also helps herself to the Trump mask that’s been a longtime part of her retinue. She wraps herself in an Israeli flag and then presents it to members of the crowd, asking each of them repeatedly: What do I do with this? Eventually, she wipes her ass with it.  

At the show’s climax, a handful of actors, playing paid agitators, leap up and begin yelling at Barney, one wearing a t-shirt reading I Stand With Israel, depicting two enormous, thick hands holding each other. He chants, “We are on indigenous land and you are an antisemitic piece of shit.” Later, the troupe arrives again, joined by dancers dressed as cops, who proceed to tie her up BDSM-style before circling her naked body, unmoving and confined to a chair. 

“Crackhead Barney is one of the most pure performance artists working today,” someone from the neighborhood’s experimental theater scene tells me afterward. She tells me the American flag Barney carries around with her, Liberty-like, full of obscene scrawls, is something Barney takes from place to place, changing with each show, as if to say, it’s our flag now. It’s hard to argue with that. In her lore, Barney found her name as a frustrated arts student at Hunter, when she began accosting New Yorkers in a Barney costume she bought from Amazon, who delivered it with only one eye. “People would be like, ‘That’s not Barney – that’s Crackhead Barney!’” she told Metal Magazine. “If I was white they would probably call me Queen Barney.”

Fittingly, Barney eventually invites members of the audience to circle her with rope, mining a lynching, before she collapses to the floor to mime touching herself or actually touch herself. Eventually, she pisses on stage. In a way, she has given us everything and, perhaps, nothing at all. When she asks people in the crowd if they would rape her, the answer I kept hearing back from the pleasantly startled Brooklyn theater crowd was: “Do you want me to?”

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Photos by Andrew Karpan.