Autumn 2004- Coney Island: The Dreamland Artist Club
Review C109 Coney Island: The Dreamland Artist Club Since its development in the mid-nineteenth century far from the concrete and skyscrapers of Manhattan, Coney Island has been a popular getaway for city dwellers: beaches and boardwalks, hotdogs and cotton candy, amusements and rides, all only a subway ride away. Woody Allen immortalized the neighborhood's 1950s heyday of burlesque and bumper cars in Annie Hall , and Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poetic cycle A Coney Island of the Mind celebrates a magical romance with the slightly seedy, carnivalesque world at the edge of the city. In recent years, however, the area has fallen on hard times, largely neglected by preservation and redevelopment efforts. The current reality is far from the postcard photos of beaches packed with idle pleasure seekers that still feed a collective nostalgia for a lost era. Despite recent dilapidation, artist and designer Steve Powers found inspiration in the hand-painted signs that still adorn rides and arcades in Coney Island, as yet untouched by corporate plastic. In honor of his muse, Powers began painting signs for business owners he befriended while in the neighborhood. This summer, in collaboration with the public-art organization Creative Time, over twenty contemporary painters and designers transformed Powers' informal service into a site-specific display that also functions as critical urban renewal. Powers himself repainted the cars for the Cyclone, the oldest roller coaster in America, in a slightly off-kilter combination of 1940s graphic decoration and 1970s graffiti, at once nostalgic and fresh.  | | Rita Ackermann: 50-foot mural next to the Wonder Wheel sign on Jones Walk, from The Dreamland Artist Club , a Creative Time project produced in association with Coney Island USA; photo charliesamuels.com © 2004; courtesy Creative Time | This balance between individual artists' styles and their collective purpose to reenergize the site aesthetically and economically runs throughout the work of The Dreamland Artist Club . The brilliant mural for the Clam Bar on the boardwalk by Gents of Desire, an L.A.-based design team and party crew, applies their stylized hybrid of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mexican gangs to entice customers to savor Coney Island's adaptation of Proust's madeleine. Brooklyn-based painter Adam Cvijanovic's sign for the Water Race depicts a mass of blue bunnies hopping out of the way of the spray of water guns in front of the black silhouette of the Cyclone. Its seems rather absurd unless you know that "coney" means "bunny" in Dutch-the first settlers called the place Coney Island because of all the bunnies they found there. Ellen Harvey, an English artist who lives and works in New York, painted a custom interior for the Spiritual Reader: light blue walls, carpet, and curtains are adorned with kitschy icons of fortunes and futures. Composed of artists from a wide variety of visual-art practices, the confluence of design and contemporary art, a sometimes-fraught relationship in galleries and museums, seems natural given Coney Island's geographical and historical specificity. Dana Schutz's sign for the Shooting Gallery bears four stiff, thickly painted figures strikingly similar to characters from her paintings on canvas, while David Humphrey's Water Gun Fun marquee employs the same slick cartoon landscapes as the pictures in his recent show in Chelsea. Dearraindrop's psychedelic installations are shown at Deitch Projects, but as the customized backdrop for the spinning arms of the Spider, the collective's spiritual yet comic neon doodles can be experienced rather than merely looked at. The Water Racing and Basketball Game signs by Morning Breath (the design team behind album covers for Eminem and Jay-Z) use an inventive personal iconography with a retro twist, both stylized and expressive. The usual divide between design and art, between high and low, becomes irrelevant in a landscape of imagination.  | | Adam Cvijanovic: marquee for a water race on the Bowery, from The Dreamland Artist Club , a Creative Time project produced in association with Coney Island USA; photo charliesamuels.com © 2004; courtesy Creative Time | In addition to signs advertising attractions, some works function solely on an aesthetic level. Rita Ackermann's mural of snake charmers and sword throwers hovers above Jones Walk, an omnipresent demonic carnival. The artist and designer SSUR created a large banner for the side of a building: a photograph of a child's face is 'tattooed' with a voluptuous burlesque dancer with a sad clown's face and the outline of the Ferris wheel and the Cyclone. Above a vacant stall, Jack Pierson's marquee crafted from thousands of glittering colored metal tags reads 'Someday', a gorgeously nostalgic sentiment for the future. Public art and site-specificity are two critical concepts in the vocabulary of contemporary artists. Yet despite a shared attention to the significance of location, public art too often fails to achieve a symbiotic relationship with its site-favoring monuments in plazas over aesthetic transformations of the landscape-while site-specific work has become increasingly located in the museum. The Dreamland Artist Club presents a public site transformed by art consciously integrated into the landscape. The art does not dominate; rather, the overall effect is subtle, yet palpably present in the contrast between the hand-painted signs and the intermittent use of plastic or faded graffiti. All the signs, installations, murals, designs are tied to the social space of the boardwalk, to the businesses they adorn, as well as to the history and myth of Coney Island. Working with the proprietors of roller coaster rides, arcade games, and greasy food stands to integrate art into the landscape it romanticizes, the place itself is unquestionable altered, visually refreshed, and conceptually transformed. Megan Heuer is a New York-based writer and an art editor of The Brooklyn Rail . The Dreamland Artist Club , Coney Island, 12 June - 6 September 2004; coordinated by Creative Time; see also www.creativetime.org/ programs/archive/2004/dreamland/new
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