BANANA MAN.(Doug Fishbone uses bananas in art installation)

When people came across the pile of bananas that Doug Fishbone had arranged in the middle of Washington Street, in Brooklyn, the other day, they naturally had a lot of questions. They wanted to know how many bananas Fishbone had used (seventeen thousand), where he had got them (from a wholesaler at Hunts Point Market, in the Bronx), how much he had paid for them (almost seventeen hundred dollars), and whether he intended the pile as art. (He did, but he wasn't particularly insistent on this point.) Many people took one look at the pile and immediately decided that it was time for a snack. When Fishbone's mother, Anita, caught them, she would run over and say, "Excuse me, would you put that back? It's an art exhibit," at which many would become huffy and stalk off. Perhaps not surprisingly, several viewers asked Fishbone whether his mom, too, was supposed to be part of the exhibit. (She was not.)

Fishbone, who is thirty-three and has been told, with some justification, that he resembles Sly Stallone, came up with the banana project, as he calls it, by chance. A few years ago, after working as a financial adviser at American Express, as a sales rep in the textile industry in Israel, and as a publicist at the firm that manages Luciano Pavarotti, he took a job at a bronze foundry in Queens. Several of his co-workers were from Ecuador, and Fishbone got the idea of going there to live. In the city of Cuenca, he saw a huge pile of plantains being sold by the side of the road as animal feed.

"The thing was such a powerful image," Fishbone recalled. "Something just triggered in my head: I have to do this with bananas." He debuted the project in Cuenca, with twenty-five thousand bananas, and he did it a second time, in the port city of Guayaquil, with forty thousand bananas. (Ecuador is the world's leading banana exporter.) He has also mounted the installation in the Polish city of Piotrkow Trybunalski.

Recently, Fishbone, who is attending art school in ...