Running Out of Time

Chapter 2 highlights multidisciplinary artist Papo Colo and his 1977 performance piece Superman 51. In Superman 51, Colo runs down the West Side Highway in New York City with fifty-one wooden planks attached to his back; he runs for ten minutes until he falls from exhaustion. This chapter explores the conceptual artist’s mapping of temporality against an already imposed choreography of Being through acts of collapse and the movements of running and jumping with the number fifty-one. Colo’s übermasculine public acts of endurance serve a revolutionary function for the Rican subject; he stages time on the building materials of space itself, illustrating the temporally limited components of masculinity. His performances of exhaustion highlight both the limits and potential of the Rican body bound by a geopolitical state of neither here nor there, now or then. The chapter looks particularly closely at Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and its connections to Colo’s Superman/Übermensch.