Summer Arrives: Rose Kallal's "Lady of the Lakes" at Ramiken Crucible

Excerpt of Rose Kallal, Joe Denardo, and Mark Beasley, Lady of the Lakes performance, at Ramiken Crucible, New York, June 21, 2011. Video: 16 Miles

Paula Cooper Gallery used to mark the end of each year with complete, non-stop readings of Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans or James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. "[P]eople have been reading ... aloud nonstop since Wednesday evening and should finish the 925-page novel this evening," the New York Times wrote, on January 2, 1981, of a reading of the former, advising those planning to catch the end of the marathon: "Bring cushions and dress warmly."


Joe Denardo and Rose Kallal

That tradition ended in 2000, but artists, their dealers, and curators have continued to consult the calendar for reasons to celebrate and perform. The summer solstice, for instance, has provided a few memorable art moments recently. In 2009, Frank Haines presented a series of appropriately occult happenings at P.S.1. on the pivotal day, and this year the Socrates Sculpture Park held its 10th annual solstice celebration, staying open until sunset. Further downtown, at Ramiken Crucible, Canadian artist Rose Kallal waited for night to fall to begin her performance, Lady of the Lakes.

Four 16 mm films were arrayed in a diamond on one wall, their projectors clicking and purring away from across the room as they looped. Each showed the same work, each slightly out of sync from the others. In the films, a gleaming sword spins smoothly across one frame, and returns moments later in another. Squares and rectangles — all pale yellows and salmon pinks — grow and recede. A body shoots quickly out of a pool of water. An accompanying soundtrack provides one gigantic, sensual, industrial throb — like that of a high-voltage early-sci-fi forcefield or the machinery of some sinister, secretive munitions factory.

As the soundtrack pulsed with disconcerting regularity, Kallal sat down at her drum kit, just below the films, and began stroking her cymbals with padded mallets, building huge waves of metal that shocked the crowd into realizing the show had started. Mark Beasley, the curator at the helm of Performa 11, strode up to a microphone and began reciting long streams of verse, incantations that were almost entirely indecipherable against Kallal's cascades. He faced toward the projections, as if he was addressing them.


Mark Beasley

Joe Denardo, of the Olympia, Washington, noise band Growing, approached the stage next and took up his guitar left handed, sending prickly, jagged loops through a spread of pedals and out into the room. He kept his back to the audience as well, as Beasley sauntered to the back of the room. Like the films, Denardo and Kellal seemed to be playing the same piece, but out of sync, despite being right next to each another. Their parts connected and then collided and then spun apart again.

After roughly twenty minutes, one of the projections shifted suddenly to a pure and brilliant white, blanketing the room with a warm, celestial glow. But it was an accident: one of the films had slipped from its projector. Kallal sprang from her seat and set to fixing it. Beasley returned and offered a few more lines, joined this time by only the films' soundtrack. After a few minutes Kallal switched off the renegade projector, ending the performance as informally and unexpectedly as she had begun it. The other three films continued looping as New York tilted into summer.

PLOT09: This World & Nearer Ones - Part 2 of 2 [Review]

Guido van der Werve, Number Seven: The clouds are more beautiful from above, 2006. Photo: 16 Miles [more]

Part 1 of our PLOT09 coverage, a series of photographs, is also available.

In the press release for their 1978 exhibition Art on the Beach, Creative Time quoted O. Henry’s on Manhattan: “It’ll be a great place if they ever finish it.” They were showing art on the Battery Park landfill, the center of the island’s latest transformation, created with dirt excavated for the building of the World Trade Center. Thirty years later, the organization has organized PLOT09 on Governors Island, just four hundred yards away from Battery Park in New York Harbor. A former Army and Coast Guard site, it is everything that Manhattan is not: pastoral, isolated, and historically static.

Curator Mark Beasley invited nineteen artists to contribute work for spaces on the island, and, perhaps not surprisingly, many of their responses attempt to puncture the island’s impermeable cultural wall, challenging the bureaucratic structures that underpin much of its past. Teresa Margolles contributes a bullet-ridden wall from her hometown of Culiacán to a quiet field. In a great photo-essay on the show Carefully Aimed Darts describes it as “bloodstained post-minimalism,” which is a neat summation. Violence, weapons, and death, all absent from this former military complex are brought into view.

Video scores the greatest triumphs and failures. In the former category, Bruce High Quality Foundation’s zombie film Isle of the Dead, shot on the island, is hilariously sublime, as is Judi Werthein’s The Land of the Free, which shows Colombian musicians, who have fled drug violence, singing their own translation of The Star-Spangled Banner. Presented inside an old Victorian house a quick hop across the water from Ellis Island, it merits repeat viewings. On the other hand, Adam Chodzko’s documentary about an imagined potlatch among children of military families stationed on the island, is a mess of ideas that never quite coheres.

Reviewing PLOT09, Roberta Smith wrote, “The world has an endless supply of sites, but more and more the specifics look very much the same,” arguing that some of weaker entries amounted to “garden variety Conceptualism … a tad obvious or exploitative." This could include Edgar Arceneaux, who channels low-frequency sounds through subwoofers, gently shaking the walls of one of the old mansions. Experiencing it is as exciting as listening to a washing machine run.

Insular Act, a piece by the collective Tercerunquinto, is at least a bit more curious. The three artists decided to throw a rock through the window of one of old administrative buildings for their contribution, documenting the act in drawings and a video. Happily, they first dutifully received all of the requisite governmental permissions. Institutions once vigorously resisted such institutional critique, as when the Guggenheim rejected Hans Haacke’s 1971 exposé on its trustees. Now they know it’s better simply to play along with the harmless fun. The window was replaced at a cost of $2,500, and the work amounts to a farce on the way in which bureaucratic institutions have come to operate in the service of purportedly radical, often-banal conceptual agendas. One hopes the satire is intentional.

One of the best moments comes from Tue Greenfort’s Project for the New American Century. To view it, one walks or bikes through Brick Village, a condemned field of tract housing straight out of Dan Graham’s Homes for America. Rounding the corner of one brick house, in the middle of this manufactured suburbia (slated for demolition to make way for recreation grounds), one encounters the logo for William Kristol’s organization emblazed across its side, along with a plaque celebrating its cause. It is a perfect tribute to its location and our uncertain time.

The real surprise, though, comes from Patti Smith and her daughter Jesse Smith, who proffer a fifteen-minute recording to listen to while exploring the exhibition. Over a slow, drifting piano accompaniment, Patti Smith recites a panegyric to the beauty of Governors Island, the soldiers and families it held in isolation, and the sacrifices those that passed through the area over the past centuries endured. In a field enamored of dissonance, it is a rare call for a sincere commitment to engaging the island’s complex historical legacy. This seems essential. Crowds from across New York are flooding the ferries. Large swaths of buildings will be razed over the next few months. The artist’s interventions will be removed and shipped away. Governors Island is finally changing. There are things worth remembering.

PLOT09: This World & Nearer Ones - Part 1 of 2 [Photographs]

Lawrence Weiner, AT THE SAME MOMENT, 2000. Photos: 16 Miles [more]


Teresa Margolles, Muro Baleado / Shot-Up Wall, 2008.


Guido van der Werve, Number Four: I don't want to get involved in this; I don't want to be part of this; talk me out of it, 2005.


Edgar Arceneaux, Sound Cannon Double Projection, 2009. CD players, subwoofers. Dimensions variable.


Tue Greenfort, Project for the New American Century, 2009.


Brick Village on Governors Island, site of Tue Greenfort's Project for the New American Century, 2009.

AA Bronson and Peter Hobbs, Invocation of the Queer Spirits (Governors Island), 2009.


Mark Wallinger, Ferry, 2009.

PLOT09: This World and Nearer Ones
Curated by Mark Beasley
Governors Island, New York
Summer 2009
Photographs: 16 Miles [more]