September 18, 2008
Deitch Day: Journeys
This past Saturday, I decided to visit all three Deitch Projects locations to make up for staying away from them all summer. Deitch Projects is by far my favorite gallery (galleries?) in the city because of their funky, uninhibited spirit. Founded by Jeffrey Deitch, near-legendary art dealer (a Harvard MBA man himself), the gallery’s launched a lot of brilliant careers, but has avoided the stodginess of other famous, personality-driven galleries (i.e. Barbara Gladstone?). I also love the way Jeffrey Deitch looks – serious but funny, with round spectacles. There was a lovely article profiling him in the New Yorker back in 2007, of which only the abstract is now available online (very sad).
Anyway, so Jeffrey Deitch had two locations in Soho – 18 Wooster and 76 Grand, for paintings, sculptures, and installations. Recently, he opened up another one on the waterfront in Long Island City – a MASSIVE space for installations he said wouldn’t fit in his Soho galleries. I visited once before to see Bjork’s new music video in 3D (Wanderlust), and it’s got the most beautiful location on the river, city skyline in the distance and all.
This past Saturday, we saw the installation and paintings at the Soho Deitch’s, then decided on a whim to make it over to Long Island City to see the last of the Deitchs. Somewhat coincidentally, this happened to be a rather particular Saturday for Deitch LIC. On top of their normal exhibition at the time, they were also hosting Swoon’s Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea as an installation. Swoon, being the performance/installation artist, and Swimming Cities being a flotilla of 7 wonderfully crafted river-worthy vessels.
The Switchback flotilla (photo from NYT)
Here’s what it says on their website:
Swimming cities of Switchback Sea is a flotilla of seven intricately hand crafted vessels that will navigate the stretch of the Hudson River between Troy and the New York harbor this August 15th – September 7th. Imagined as a hybrid between boats and bits of land mass broken off and headed out to sea, the Switchback vessels will make stops in towns along the river bringing performances and music. Over the course of three weeks they will make their way toward their home port – an invented landscape tucked into a niche along the East River in Long Island City, Queens.
Switchback vessel: the Alice (photo from the NYT)
They made anchor right outside Deitch LIC on the river. Each vessel had such character, and such life. And altogether, the flotilla really looked like a place true vagabonds could call home, permanent and transitory. I suppose all ships are, to a certain extent, but hope wasn’t nestled in the next harbor or rest stop; life aboard was complete in and of itself, with its own sociology, its own mythologies.
We caught the very last performance of the Swimming Cities, which turned out to be a play written by Lisa d’Amour: a series of monologues by characters on board. A few of the “crew” stood at the podium on the main vessel and spoke to the audience, while the rest of the crew went about their daily lives – eating, joking with each other, welcoming new members. There were conflicting stories about the origin of things – the origin of the voyage, the origin of the ships, the origin of the people who found it – though all ended with the promise of truth. Underground rivers spewing into real rivers, people who were alive but ghosts, the voyage itself – various themes were passed on, story by story, in the monologues. While I watched the performance, moonlit, the haunting sounds of the band Dark Dark Dark behind us, I thought this was about the evolution of stories, and the lives they represent. Bits and pieces, flotsam and jetsam, junk and valuable, land, boat, and river, all turn up here, then there, then once more later, in unexpected form. But once all the monologues are finished, when all have spoken, what you have left is something close to a truth. A story.
Switchback performance (photo from the NYT)
We listened under a full moon, sweating a little from the unexpected humidity in the air, which lingered though it had been raining earlier. Beautifully written and lovingly performed, the play came alive on the Switchback vessels. It took you there. And when I came back from the journey, I was a maybe a little changed. Maybe I had more wanderlust in me. Maybe I had more stories. Maybe I realized that the intersection between dreams and reality could be made more tangible. Who knows?
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