Set and Drift

Set and Drift, a set of site-specific art installations, radio transmissions, and video projections sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, opens this Saturday, July 16, with an evening of outdoor concerts and film screenings. The most interesting part: the venue, Governor’s Island.

Purportedly the exhibition was designed to stimulate public interest in the history and possibilities surrounding Governor’s Island. The artists use the island’s forts, mess halls, and officers’ housing as their exhibit space and conceptual material. Each piece deals with the site and its previous military uses in some way.

The detail above is from Jesse Bercowetz and Matt Bua’s “The Last House to the Left,” an architectural addition to a civil-war era officer’s house on Colonel’s row. Because of the historic nature of the site, the artists weren’t allowed to alter the structure, and had to construct the addition without attaching to the existing house. They had planned to use found materials to create their makeshift museum for objects, images, and sounds but were disappointed to find nothing to work with at the site. “There wasn’t any trash,” Bua told Time Out.

Using the island in this way puts me in mind of Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX. Judd envisioned his enclave there as permenant exhibition space for site-specific works by Judd himself and several of his contemporaries. This kind of use is by far the most interesting (but unfortunately the least likely) approach I’ve heard to development for Governor’s Island. Read more about the exhibition in Downtown Express.

The only way on to Governor’ Island is by ferry from the Battery Maritime Building just north of the Staten Island Ferry Terminal. The ferry runs Tuesday–Saturday and costs between $3–6.