A Quarter Mile and a Hundred Years Away
Lyra Kilston
Governors Island, a small bit of forgotten land between lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, was the site for "Set and Drift," a subtle exhibition of nine public artworks organized by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Used as a military base for four centuries, Governors Island has lain abandoned since the Coast Guard left in 1996. "Set and Drift," a nautical term that refers to the "external forces acting on a ship that make it deviate from its intended course," presents a diverse set of works that engage the fleeting moment before the island’s imminent transformation–it was recently purchased by the state, and development plans are afoot.
Governors Island is several acres of rolling lawn and large maple trees, some brick colonial-style buildings, and an imposing star-shaped fort. Although the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan loom across the water, the island seems lost in time, more like rural Virginia than 15 minutes from Wall Street. The island is conducive to languid strolling, and the rush of the city is soon forgotten, in the stillness of thick, humid air. This layering of incongruous time frames provides a lush ground for creative intervention.
Walking over a grassy hill, I first saw Jesse Bercowetz and Matt Bua’s The Last House on the Left. Known for playful, site-specific interventions, this team has built a one-room structure from materials found on the island. Their ramshackle assemblage of wood, cardboard, colored plastic, fake brick and fake boulders, houses an intricate museum of folklore about Governors’ Island. Hand-drawn posters announce fantastical headlines, and shaggy, organic sculptures depict lost development plans for the island, while a sound system plays stories and folk music. This work, as well as Anna Craycroft’s (delicate paintings adorn the windows of a colonial house), reflects upon the island as a place to play with the past. Craycroft’s paintbrush appears to draw through centuries of window dust, invoking a sense of domestic intimacy, while Bercowetz and Bua position the island as a peripheral space of possibility and fiction. With New York real estate as it is, these 172 unused acres so close to Manhattan have tempted dreamers and developers for years. Leo Villareal’s piece plays on this siren-like quality: he has set up sparkling L.E.D.s along the shoreline. They reflect and mimic the play of city light on the water, producing a shimmer in the darkness, aptly titled Beckon.
Like many recent X-marks-the-spot, peripatetic outdoor exhibits, like the public works for last year’s Whitney Biennial by Paul McCarthy or Lee Mingwei, the installations here range from the purely visual to the theatrical and participatory. That explains why I approached a small group of Civil War re-enactors, certain they were part of the show. I was wrong: they were real fake-soldiers, not fake fake-soldiers, and it was just a strange, but telling coincidence. Governors Island, with its defensive, patriotic architecture and military monuments, is the perfect setting for war re-enactments, a practice conflating artifice, violence, and folklore.
Military history–glorified or forgotten–also influenced many of the works in "Set and Drift." Serge Spitzer’s Thousand Islands, installed in the damp, subterranean artillery bunker beneath the fort, consists of two large, facing, video projections showing writhing masses of people drenched in–and throwing around–a mysterious thick red pulp. Inside this damp chamber pitted with rust and peeling paint, the recorded sound of an anxious, metallic scraping adds to the sense of unease. The videos’ speeds were manipulated: when slowed down, they present a visceral battle of surprising ferocity, but when sped up, the threat vanished. Wait–is it just a food fight? Now a toothless guard dog, Governors Island similarly vacillates between its dangerous past and defunct, mild present, a theme echoed with light-handed humor in several of these artists’ works.
Branching to Broadcast, a project by the duo neuroTransmitter, consists of a radio broadcast of found sounds mostly gathered from the island. Broadcasting from a futuristic, cocoon-like treehouse designed by Daniela Fabricus, the neuroTransmitter’s special radio station is played through several military radios in a cavernous brick arcade across the lawn. Mixing air raid sirens with the sounds of helicopters, boat horns and birds, they create a fictional ambiance layered over the real-time sounds of the island. The artists, Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere, mix all the sounds while perching in the geodesic treehouse, whose triangular sections are covered with screen and mylar (aka emergency blankets). The sounds, now deliberate instead of accidental, remind us that despite the calm pastoral views, this base was poised for crisis.
Jennifer Zackin’s simple piece, Taps, also uses sound, albeit inaudibly. Wrapping fluorescent rope around the trunks of trees, she maps the melody "Taps," the bugle call used in military ceremonies. The trees become a page of sheet music, again revealing the landscape’s indelible history.
Art is often called in to investigate or illustrate a transition, to create pauses before "solutions" are implemented. Last year, the Municipal Art Society put on an exhibition of photography of Governors Island, depicting the eerie atmosphere of abandoned places: an empty bus stop, or a bowling alley with balls sitting motionless in the lanes. "Set and Drift" goes a step further, not just documenting, but inventing and mining the past. Let’s hope this strange island’s lost time won’t disappear with the inevitable redevelopment.
