Interview

Tue Greenfort, Project for the New American Century, 2009. Photo by Charlie Samuels, courtesy of Creative Time

Governors Island has long held the psychic space of New York at its most unresolved. The island, a former military facility, has been virtually unoccupied for years; various attempts to figure out what to do with it have proven less than triumphant. Finally, there is a project that both honors the island's history and reframes its landscape, and previously inaccessible buildings, to more peaceful ends. This summer, Creative Time has inaugurated a new public art quadriennial (that means every four years) PLOT, to celebrate the island's landscape and architecture. PLOT's first edition, the Mark Beasley-curated This World and Nearer Ones, explores some of the island's more moribund themes. Adam Chodzko's video installation depicts the imaginary discovery of a game played by the island's former residents; Edgar Arceneaux's ghostly sound piece is a poem of remembrance. Taken together, the the works signal an exaltation of the spiritual life of the island, and perhaps of the artists themselves, coupled with the dueling imperatives of looking back and moving forward.


AIMEE WALLESTON: All the works presented in this exhibition are site-specific. When you were planning the layout of the show, did you incorporate the artists in the process of deciding where each of their works would be shown? Or did the work itself kind of dictate where it would best be shown?
 
MARK BEASLEY: When you're out on the island and you have only two hours to look at everything and plan what you want to do, it just made sense for me to have two or three buildings where I just said, "OK, well these artists make work about this, so, this work could fit." In the case of the work of Krzysztof Wodiczko, the Magazine Building in Fort Jay just seemed like a perfect marriage. He'd shown me a version of the work, Veteran's Flame, which is a projection of a naked candle flame with a voiceover of Iraqi and Afghanistan veterans. If you're going to have a work that's as loaded as that, than the site should equally suggest some way of reading the work. With A.A. Bronson and Peter Hobbs' Invocation of the Queer Spirits [a séance ritual held two days before the show's opening], we basically sat in a little cart and drove around the island, and we were led by A.A.'s response to the spirit life of the island, which was quite an incredible experience in and of itself. And with Klaus Webber's Dark Windchime [the work has been tuned to the diabolus in musica tritone, a musical interval which has been believed to summon the devil]—that was very much led through a remote discussion, where I took pictures of different sites and then sent it to him.

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In books like Intelligent Life in the Universe and his television series "Cosmos," astrophysicist Carl Sagan made the universe a lovable, learnable entity. Apparently, he wasn't content keeping his didacticism to mere humans. In one of the more cosmically irreverent projects ever undertaken by NASA, Sagan (with the help of fellow Cornell astrophycist Frank Drake, and artist Jon Lomberg) chaired the Golden Record, a space time capsule. Sagan's team compiled 115 disparate, quotidien images in the spirit ifmid-century Life Magazine, and audio information (mostly "natural" sounds, like birdsong and surf), to produce a summary of human existence. Their intended audience? Aliens. The team compressed the sounds and images, put them on a gold-plated copper disk equipped with a needle and instructions, and sent it into space on two unmanned spacecrafts, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. The Voyagers are still relatively close to Earth (if one considers Jupiter a neighbor) and both are still a long way from reaching another solar system. When they do—the approximate timing is 40,000 years from now—a curious space dweller might just discover the Golden Record and learn all about our Earthly existence. And our passion for soft noise. (LEFT: RELUCTANCE OF A GOVERNMENT AGENCY TO SWIM IN THE WATERS OF HUMAN SEXUALITY, 2009)

Inspired by both the imagery and conceptual premise of this project, Los Angeles-based artist Violet Hopkins created a body of ink on paper works, currently on view at Foxy Production. "Afraid He Might Be Mistaken for a Centaur," the artist's second solo show at this location, is named for a descriptive caption created for the Golden Record to accompany an image of a man riding a horse on a beach. The presumed logic of the statement, that an alien would bewell-versed in human mythology, is a sticking point for Hopkins, whose work endeavors to piece out the dichotomy between the project's vanguard spirit and its "humancentric" assumed knowledge. The inclusion of 55 greetings in different languages on the Golden Record, when seen through a contemporary lens, only serves to underscore the subtle naiveté in the assumption that another galaxy's extraterrestrial life would possess a physicality, culture or experience that would somehow mirror our own.

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