Always With Us — But Why?

"I immersed myself in the project, going out almost on a daily basis and walking five, six, seven hours a day," the artist explains. "Once, I even walked 12 hours around the city – uptown to Harlem, East and West, downtown to Battery Park and back home to the East Village. I never took transportation anywhere because I felt that since the homeless live on the streets, I had to walk the streets like they do. After a while, a few said to me, `I’ve heard of you. You’re the guy going around buying signs. I was wondering if you were ever going to find me.’"

The artist is Andres Serrano, whose large Cibachrome photograph of a crucifix immerse in urine gained him notoriety twenty years ago. The project is Sign of the Times, in which he sought out homeless people on the streets of New York and bought their hand-lettered cardboard signs from them. He usually paid the people $20. He posted a piece about the project on Creative Time Reports, a website ancillary of the artists’ collective Creative Time that “aims to publish dispatches that speak truth to power and upend traditional takes on current issues.”

Serrano, a native New Yorker, says he “had never seen so many people begging and sleeping on the streets” as he saw this fall. If true — and I suspect that it is — this is surprising and appalling.

It might be said that Sign of the Times is merely provocative, as was said of “Piss Christ.” (I thought otherwise. I found it very powerful and wrote this piece in Commonweal about it.) But what does it mean to say “merely” provocative? Provocation has its uses. Last week the Times ran a multipart essay, with photographs, about a girl who is homeless in my own neighborhood — Fort Greene, Brooklyn — but I haven’t gotten around to reading it or writing about it. Then here comes Serrano with his sign project and suddenly I am thinking and writing about homelessness.

In an age that we are told is an age of smartphones and bitcoin, the very constancy of the materials of homeless people’s signs — cardboard and magic marker — says otherwise. It reminds us that the circumstances of everyday life change less than the trendspotters tell us. It reminds us of how little the astonishing economic “development” of recent years has touched homeless people or developed the stock of affordable housing.

To be homeless is still to be homeless. The streets are still the streets. A sign is still a sign. And even if, as we have on good authority, the poor will always be with us, the human responses to poverty and homelessness must always begin in something as simple as a feeling about a cardboard sign — in the feeling of shame that Kwame Anthony Appiah points out is the basis of social conscience.

My friend Rosanne Haggerty has spent her adult life creating housing for people who have been homeless. I am going to write to her and ask her what she thinks of Sign of the Times.

• 19 December 2013