Governors Island becomes summer art oasis

Anthony McCall, "Between You and I" (Photo: Creative Time)

Summer can be a disappointing season for contemporary art lovers in New York. Given the choice between organizing new shows or going to the beach, many gallery owners and curators pack up their sunscreen and head to the L.I.E.

But if you're looking for new art, don’t despair. A show of site-specific work at Governors Island offers viewers the best of both worlds: a day in the sun and encounters with art.

Curated by Mark Beasley, “This World & Nearer Ones” is the first edition of PLOT, Creative Time’s new public art quadrennial. Nineteen public art projects are on display throughout Governors Island, which is a short (and free) ferry ride away from downtown Manhattan and Water Taxi trip from Brooklyn.

Governors Island was a military base for over two centuries until the Coast Guard mothballed the island in 1996. In 2003, the federal government sold most of the island to the city of New York, and a new public park was born. Fort Jay, a structure built in 1797, still stands, as do most of the more recent Coast Guard buildings.

The organization of the work is a welcome respite from art consumption at the mall of Chelsea and the exhaustion from the larger art museums. Because most of the island is green park land, with lots of bike paths and shade in which to relax, visitors can experience the work at their own pace without feeling rushed or overwhelmed. All of the pieces were made for their specific environments, and there is a dialogue between the island and the art.

Artist Anthony McCall has created a mysterious piece called “Between You and I” at the St. Cornelius Chapel, one of three former houses of worship on the island. Visitors enter the stone church into total darkness. Proceeding further, one sees two bright cones of light descending from the ceiling. Smoke mingles with the darkness and wafts through the shafts of light, which create two mysterious patterns on the floor. As their eyes adjust to the darkness, visitors see a red stained glass window subtly glowing from the wall of the church, creating a fluid space where light seems to have mass and every movement is connected with time.

With a very different piece, the Bruce High Quality Foundation has a movie about art world zombies coming to Governors Island in search of new space. “Isle of the Dead” is a satire of baby boomer culture, including art heroes like Bruce Nauman, that ends with the final words of Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ‘69”: “I think about you / Wonder what went wrong.”

National gem Patti Smith, the punk rock poet and multimedia artist, collaborated with her daughter, Jesse Smith, on an audio piece in which visitors are invited to listen as they stroll the island. Their piece, “Message in a Bottle,” connects the various histories of Governors Island with a thread of yearning for escape from the old drudgeries into a new way of thinking. From the revolutionary war era to today, visitors to the island have been looking to feel free and unencumbered. Back then, soldiers brought “pen and sword” to the island, says Smith. Now, it’s more likely to be bread and cheese.

Much of the work in PLOT/09 addresses the island’s history as a military facility or plays off its location in the mouth of New York harbor, which has been a gateway for immigrants coming to the United States. Judy Werthein’s and Teresa Margolles’s pieces draw on the history of New York as a welcoming harbor for visitors from foreign lands.

Werthein’s sly, catchy piece explores cultural translation as Columbian restaurant musicians perform a literalized version of “The Star Spangled Banner” in Spanish. The group created their own music for the song, and the lyrics take on subtle shifts when translated back into English. Instead of "O say can you see," for example, the chain of translations produces "You say, you can see."

Margolles transplants an entire cinder-block wall from her home city of Culiacán, Mexico to the green quad between former Coast Guard officer’s homes on Governors Island. The wall is riddled with real bullet holes from a deadly shooting linked with narcotics trafficking. At each hole is the evidence marker of a police force investigating the shooting. It’s a grisly and provocative artifact of a trade that connects the United States with our southern neighbor.

Pieces by Edgar Arceneaux, AA Bronson & Peter Hobbs, Tue Greenfort, and Nils Norman all relate to the current condition of Governor’s Island as a place in transition, using its abandoned land and buildings as stages to ask larger questions about American history and our landscape. As a visitor, it’s worth spending a day to join in the conversation.

“This World & Nearer Ones,” at Governor’s Island through September 20. The artists included are: Edgar Arceneaux, AA Bronson and Peter Hobbs, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Adam Chodzko, Tue Greenfort, Jill Magid, Teresa Margolles, Anthony McCall, Nils Norman, Susan Philipsz, Patti Smith and Jesse Smith, Tercerunquinto, Tris Vonna-Michell, Mark Wallinger, Klaus Weber, Lawrence Weiner, Judi Werthein, Guido van der Werve, and Krzysztof Wodiczko.