A Public Hanging for the Faint of Heart
Wiley Norvell
Scenes from Assocreation’s A Public Hanging.
The 21st Century revival of Manhattan’s time-honored public hanging tradition comes to us from an unlikely source. Born out of the Austrian artist collective, Assocreation, this latest incarnation favors metaphor over morbidity. "A public hanging is literally what we are doing. It’s on the sidewalk, on the street and people will be hung from hooks," explains Leo Lumina, 28, co-founder of Assocreation (members each work under a nom de guerre, shunning celebrity).
At dusk on April 21st and 22nd, the rusted butcher’s rail at Atlas Meats in the Meatpacking District served as the set for A Public Hanging. Dangling 12 inches above the pavement in reinforced business suits (purchased at a thrift store and equipped with inexpensive harnesses), volunteers experienced the temptation of near flight and the restrictions of weighted suspension.
Beneath the meat rail, pink neon chalk read the slogan, "Freedom is a piece with no ground." Lumina explains the aphorism, "A piece with no bund. To me this means this is unlimited, because there’s no ground. There’s no limit or end. We take the ground off the people. The ground has a lot of connotations. It’s associated with property, with safety, security."
This was the fourth hanging for Assocreation. The previous three having taken place in their Vienna atelier. Moving the event to a site-specific outdoor location in New York provided for a culmination of concept. Twenty-eight year-old Marcus James, another of the three Viennese to participate in the New York installation, regards this hanging as an evolution of those previous. "If you do a work and then you put it on the street, you get a lot of associations [from people] because it’s not protected. It’s not in an art context. And you have to deal with a lot of different associations."
Bystanders and participants in New York tied the event to lynching and public executions, whereas Austrians commonly saw links to the holocaust. Assocreation did not intend for either interpretation. "What we are interested in with this hanging and in our former work is to take the ground away from the people so that you don’t stand on your own feet anymore," says James. "It doesn’t prevent people from having their own associations which are sometimes really amazing."
Voyeurism is always secondary to the tactile in Assocreation’s work. Since its inception in 1997, its six full-time members have built on the direct interaction of participants via a physical intermediary. In 1999’s Bump exhibition, they installed identical wooden walkways in Linz, Austria and Budapest, Hungary. As pedestrians walked across the path in their city, their movements were replicated and inverted by the moving boards in the other city, "bumping" passersby from below. The telematic installation connected both cities in real time, separating pedestrians only by the intervening floorboards.
With 2003’s Common Ground, Assocreation built a walkway in Valencia, Spain with cobblestones connected in a woven mesh of metal springs. Pedestrians accustomed to walking along in quiet anonymity were confronted with each other’s weight, direction and presence.
There are two constants that appear in various incarnations in Assocreation installations: the ground and freedom (freiheit to the Austrians). "What interests us is sensuality, the body, the moment, the experience, the interaction," says Lumina, adding that the desired physical freedom is always teasingly incomplete. The floorboards separating cities or the harness resisting unfettered flight are minimal, yet provocative restraints. "When I say our work values sensuality, I have to say that we deal with the opposite as well. Sensuality is involved, but it’s never achieved.
"We have the idea of a missing sensuality."
The harness’s pressure, the heaviness of dangling legs and the resulting disorientation were essential tools in the hangings. "The longer they hang, the more they lose the feeling for themselves. With me, first I lost feeling in my fingertips, and then the whole arm!" exclaims Lumina, his eyes still showing intoxication from the experience (a week later, he demonstrates his continued lack of sensation with a series of painful finger contortions).
Assocreation painstakingly documented the installation through photography and video. Their website boasts similar efforts with past projects. While contradicting the spontaneous and temporal quality of their installations, these byproducts are an attempt to capture the quintessential moment of each experience. "We always have problems in documenting our work because it was about feeling," concedes James, noting the hangings offered a sense of spectacle that readily translates to film. "It’s easier because when you see people hanging you get shocked or a certain feeling but in our former works it was nearly impossible to take a picture. Vibrations: you cannot document that."
The effort admittedly falls short of capturing the tactile impression of the hanging. "You can see what the installation is about but you can’t feel it," explains James. "If you really want to know what it is about, you have to feel it."
