Parrish Art Museum, Watermill, NY
May 8–July 24, 2016
Curated by Andrea Grover
Radical Seafaring is a multidisciplinary group exhibition of twenty-five contemporary artists working in waterways in the United States and Europe. It features works that range from artist-made vessels, to documentation of creative expeditions, to speculative designs for alternative communities on the water. Directed by Andrea Grover, Century Arts Foundation Curator of Special Projects, the exhibition argues that the increasing number of artworks created on the water in the last decade is approaching the critical mass of a movement like Land art, only at sea.
The exhibition begins with conceptual and performance art of the 1960s and 70s and extends to recent phenomenological research and site-specific works that involve relocating the studio, the laboratory, or the performance space to the water. The exhibition places Swoon’s multi-year river projects, including Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea (2008) and Swimming Cities of Serenissima (2009) into this larger context of water as a site for speculating new forms of collective living. Hickory, the floating vessel Swoon built to navigate from Koper, Slovenia to the Venetian lagoon to crash the 2009 Venice Biennale, is installed inside the museum, as a cornerstone to the exhibition. Along with the other artists featured in Radical Seafaring, Swoon’s work figures prominently in a universal, yet contemporary, inquiry: how do we live in a natural world from which we are detached not only physically but emotionally and intellectually. Her contributions apply direct engagement strategies that remove this distance and reignite a sensual, heuristic, and watchful understanding of the water.
The exhibition is divided into four themes: Exploration (the quest for new experiences, the ineffable, and living in an exhilarated state), Liberation (self-reliance, freedom from terrestrial social contracts, the desire to shape one’s world, and Utopian impulses), Fieldwork (hands-on, methodological intelligence gathering about the environment, such as an artist laboratory at sea), and Speculation (waterways as a tabula rasa on which other realities can be built).
The phenomenological works in Radical Seafaring represent a new form of expression that is especially powerful and timely as climatologists anticipate the effects of rising sea levels, changes in weather patterns, and the impact on coastal zones—especially when one considers that half the world’s population lives within 200 miles of a sea coast.
The notion of the artist’s studio in the world, rather than separated from it, descends from art movements since the 1960s, including land, environmental, and conceptual art. Its forebears include Gordon Matta-Clark, Dennis Oppenheim, and Robert Smithson. The artists in Radical Seafaring are a continuation of these interdisciplinary, collaborative, and site-specific approaches. By narrowing this vast area of inquiry to projects on the water, Radical Seafaring provides focus and clarity to widespread creative strategies that embrace the world outside.
Artists
Bas Jan Ader, Ant Farm, Atelier Van Lieshout, Scott Bluedorn, George Brecht, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Chris Burden, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Steve Badgett and Chris Taylor, Michael Combs, Mark Dion, R. Buckminster Fuller, Cesar Harada, Constance Hockaday, Courtney M. Leonard, Mare Liberum, Marie Lorenz, Mary Mattingly, Vik Muniz, Dennis Oppenheim, The PLAY, Pedro Reyes, Duke Riley, Robert Smithson, Simon Starling, and Swoon
Exhibition Catalogue
Press
Jane L. Levere, “Review: Exhibition at Parrish Museum Celebrates Rule-Breaking,” The New York Times, June 6, 2016.
Allison Meier, “Navigating the Recent Wave of Renegade Seafaring in Art,” Hyperallergic, July 1, 2016.