Arts Rescue Mission -Aid For Aging Artists
P u b l i s h e d W e e k l y, N e w s, A r t s, & S t o r i e s F r o m T e x a s .... U s u a l l y
Vol. 2, No. 9, p. 1
July 15, 2026
I got the band BLONDIE busted by ART POLICE!
by Will Turner, 07-12-2026 (word count 1,141)
A truly dreary rainy weekday afternoon, just after Thanksgiving in NYC, 1978. I was friends with Jimmy Destry, keyboardist of the then upcoming band BLONDIE, and out of sheer boredom (the Manhattan equivalent of cabin fever: apartment claustrophobia) a group of us made a solemn pilgrimage from The Village to the Whitney Museum of American Art, a journey less than half a mile as a dishonorable murder of crows fly, yet fraught with foreboding danger, a Twilight Zone transition into another, more ominous and sinister reality. The six of us (Jimmy and his girlfriend, Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, my girlfriend, myself) hailed a cab on Waverly Place, a mesh of umbrellas failing miserably to protect a dozen inappropriate shoes while splashing through foul water across a nondraining street to enter the Sacred Repository of Art.
I readily concede we weren’t quite the typical tourists from Wichita moseying about from painting to painting. Decked out in the latest finger-in-your-eye punk-rock styles, all black leather, colored hair and spikes: well, let’s just agree we stood out from the otherwise lackluster crowd. An entire detail of Security was immediately mustered, intent on following our every step.
For over an hour we wandered aimlessly, admiring, disdaining various works of art, spouting typical pretentious college kid pronouncements on aesthetics, high-minded yet vacuous nonsense, until we stumbled upon THE ARTIFACT.
Out in the middle of a room, like traditional sculpture, with no ostensible rope barriers to fend off the great unwashed, sat Claes Oldenburg’s SOFT TOILET (1966). Since some may not have been vouchsafed the almost heavenly grace of encountering THE ARTIFACT in real life, (probably not something likely to come across while grocery shopping, or driving in workday traffic), I will attempt a terse description.
THE SOFT TOILET, this inexplicable monument of human ingenuity, is a hand-sewn, gracelessly pliable art object made of loosely stuffed vinyl, limp and drooping like an aging human body surrendering with more grim determination each day to gravity, endowed - perhaps possessed - with a very specific personality, a seemingly effortless gravitas, a profound sense of cosmic humor and stark drama all its own.
It was so unexpected, beyond all conventional perceptions of reality, confrontational yet instantaneously alluring, irresistible collective sighs riding high atop an ocean wave, Circe’s Sirens chanting across the room’s cloistered silence, luring this poor young art sailor from Texas toward inevitable destruction, doomed to the dire certainty of being smashed upon wretched rocks of anguish, despair, jutting raw out of the wine-dark sea of humanities’ modern art.
Now, I’ve always prided myself for some level of discipline, impulse-control in most facets of life, effortlessly resisting everything except temptation, but in that instant, my mind a complete blank, reacting - with nary a single nano-second of thought - to some primeval urge from the lizard brain curled lazily at the base of my skull, I reached out and lightly touched Claes Oldenburg’s SOFT TOILET.
Instantly a shrill disharmony of whistles exploded through the silence of the sacred space, and we were surrounded by guards, all ready to defend the Soft Toilet from these nefarious Barbarians at the Gates, quite prepared to sacrifice their lives if necessary for the greater good of the integrity of soft-toilet-art not to be interfered with by despicable punk-rockers with evil intent. I’m still surprised my finger wasn’t shot off in the heat of the moment, or I wasn’t at least tasered or something.
Patience had won the day – the Art Police had finally apprehended a Fiendish International Terrorist Gang of dastardly Soft-Toilet Touchers. Absolute scum.
As a group we were immediately herded into a windowless room, Officers of the Guard diligently checking our I.D.s. I still don’t know if it was for better or worse that The Blondies weren’t known around NYC sufficiently for the Art Cops to recognize them, at least Debbie Harry, who was already getting local media attention. Their breakthrough LP was just weeks away from release.
However, there was no dispute possible with the relevant facts of the case: I was from Texas, a virtual foreign threat; I had desecrated the Holiest of Art Holies; I was a clear menace to society, a threat to humanity, fully capable of Touch Crimes of the First Degree, an Evil Little Man from an Evil Little Country. The sole mystery awaiting solution: what was I doing amidst all these people from Brooklin? Didn’t Leon Trotsky live in Brooklyn? Did I know Leon Trotsky? Was I Leon Trotsky?
Debbie Harry explained I was a visitor from Texas, and didn’t understand the rules, and that the rest of our group had nothing to do with the ill-advised toilet-touching incident, but to no avail. Things had escaladed beyond mere reason and sanity: exceptional action was demanded by exceptional times. The Art Gendarmerie had reached their Rendezvous with Destiny. No turning back now, folks. Double-Down time.
After their persistently insidious third-degree methods of ham-fisted sadism failed to break our resistance, furtive glances were exchanged among the beleaguered authorities. We were all informed our identities were painstakingly noted and filed away – in triplicate, on Computers! - for future reference, should any further soft-toilet-touching attempts be contemplated. The Officer in charge of The Art Constabulary gruffly barked that we were all, as a group, officially ordered to vacate the Museum Premises, with immediate effect. Get the hell out, and don’t even think about ever returning. Ever.
Under threat of another dire whistle blast assault, we were all forced into a freight elevator and out the front doors by a military phalanx of Defenders of Soft Three-Dimensional Art.
Out on the curb, hunkered under a chaotic coterie of color and pattern-clashing umbrellas, heads still reeling from the surreal nature of bizarre events, our merry band of survivors crossed the boggy street for warm shelter provided by an ever-present NYC coffeeshop, and laughed for an hour at the dreamlike psychosis of the entire event, Jimmy’s otherwise silent girlfriend surprising everyone by suddenly comparing the insanity to an episode of Fawlty Towers.
Yes, I perpetrated the insidious SOFT TOILET FINGER-TOUCHING CAPER of November 1978. And, on a certain level, I am still quite proud of myself.
Note: This photo of the Soft Toilet was taken days before it was first displayed in 1966. By 1978 – twelve years later – the sculpture had settled into an increasingly decrepit state, with the vibrant blue water decomposing towards dull burnt umber, while the crisp white toilet biodegraded to a sickly flesh tone, sagging in all directions, all aspects of the aging plastic’s reaction to time and the air. Oxygen is truly caustic to some substances. I probably should have sought out Medical Attention after touching it. ~ Will Turner
Click On Image To Expand To Full Screen
Claes Oldenburg, Soft Toilet, 1966 *
In 1961, Claes Oldenburg wrote a manifesto asserting his radical artistic position: “I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.” Soft Toilet, a work that eschews the conventional properties of the art object, does not sit on anything—even a pedestal, like much sculpture—but rather hangs from a metal support. Oldenburg emerged as a Pop artist in the early 1960s with his so-called “soft” sculptures of quotidian objects, such as this work. Here he transforms the toilet—a factory-produced, rigid porcelain symbol of modern hygiene—into a hand-sewn, pliable object made of stuffed vinyl. Beginning, as he usually did, with drawings of the fixture, Oldenburg produced three separate iterations of the toilet: a hard version constructed out of cardboard, a soft model of sewn canvas (which he called the “ghost” version), and the vinyl Soft Toilet. Limp and drooping like an aging human body, Soft Toilet is endowed with a personality and sense of drama all its own.
Introducing Will Turner
Music and Arts Contributor,
The Mission News
Before Will Turner writes a word for Mission News, it helps to know that music has been chasing him most of his life. A veteran of the early days of Houston's Commerce Street warehouse, widely recognized across Texas as a studio musician, sought after lead guitar player, and song writer, we are excited to have his voice join The Mission News.
He began as something close to a child prodigy in South Texas, playing guitar in a country-and-western band while he was still young enough to be conspicuously out of place among the grown musicians, most of which were in their mid-sixties. Comedy was built into the situation: a boy carrying a guitar into a performance with a band of adults, wearing their perfunctory leftover band costume from the player he was replacing, a 300 lbs. Country Western guitarist who had passed away. Expected to play like one of them with his sleeves and pants legs rolled up, Will tells the story with the dry humor of someone who learned very early that talent can get you through doors your age ordinarily would not.
Then came New York. Will arrived in 1978 and quickly found himself auditioning in the middle of the city’s exploding punk and new-wave scene. The audition went well - well enough that Blondie asked him to join the band. It is the kind of line most musicians could build an entire biography around. For Will, it is one turn in a much longer life of performing, songwriting, listening, and paying attention to what music reveals about the people and times that produce it.
That history makes him a natural fit for The Mission News. As a Music and Arts Contributor, Will Turner brings firsthand experience, a writer’s curiosity, and an ear trained across genres and generations. He knows music from inside the room - not only as a critic, but as someone who has lived it.
*Photo and info Whitney Museum of American Art
