The idea came to him after conversations with his mother, Jan Elliott, who retired as a high school counselor in Corvallis, Ore., only to see her nest egg disappear in the financial crisis of 2008; she was forced to re-enter the labor force to survive. Around the same time, Mr. Throwell was eking out a living in a cubicle for the first time, as a customs broker in San Francisco: “One of the most Kafkaesque jobs I’ve ever had,” he said, “like entering the void for eight hours at a time. It was horrible. I’d never been enslaved by labor before.”

For an earlier, one-man iteration of “Ocularpation,” Mr. Throwell sat naked behind a desk in the financial district of San Francisco for 10 minutes, part of a series of works questioning business and consumer culture. The authorities there barely batted an eye. He moved to New York in 2008, where his projects have led to detainment and once to arrest, he said — not surprising, perhaps, for an artist who considers the absurdist comedian Andy Kaufman a prime inspiration.

Mr. Throwell, an admirer of the performance group Improv Everywhere, has also staged an office worker olympics in Midtown Manhattan, with events like the 50-meter swim (held in a fountain). For “New York City Paints Better Than Me,” he donned a white jumpsuit and crawled the streets, becoming a canvas for a composition of trash and slime.

Mr. Throwell studied painting but supports himself as a photographer and filmmaker; he also runs Engineer’s Office, a very small gallery — it’s 6 feet high, 2 feet wide and 2 feet deep, in a decommissioned water fountain nook — in the basement of Rockefeller Center. “Nothing is for sale,” he said, “and it all gets thrown away by a janitor at some undetermined time.”