Duke of Hazards

The pre-contest exclamation “morutori te selutant” was first recorded at Claudius’s naumachia, a 52 a.d. battle before which the combatants thus saluted the emperor. But, Riley told me, it has another meaning with this project. He was referring to a pair of portraits at the lower corners of the eponymous print that depict, he claims, “the first two police officers ever killed by a terrorist attack on American soil.” On July 4, 1940, NYPD bomb squad detectives Joseph Lynch and Ferdinand Socha were killed by a bomb that had been removed from the Fair’s British Pavilion. The device exploded as they examined it. Suspects at the time included the Nazis, the IRA and, according to Riley, the British themselves. The combination of deadly terrorism and conspiracy theories brought to the artist’s mind the attacks of Sept. 11 and the “never forget” mantra that followed. Despite a massive investigation, the bombers were never identified. Some 24 years later, a plaque was erected in the officers’ memory beside a quiet path some distance from the Queens Museum; when I saw it with Riley last May, it was slightly overgrown and scattered with bits of trash.

Riley is perhaps best known for building and launching a roughly 8-by-6-foot submarine, the Acorn, into the East River in 2007 in hopes of approaching the luxury liner Queen Mary 2, which had put in at a newly constructed cruise ship dock in Brooklyn’s historically blue-collar but gentrifying Red Hook neighborhood. He drew up about 200 feet from its bow, but his craft never fully submerged, and predictably, he was arrested (and garnered widespread press coverage, with the New York Post designating him a “sub moron”). The vessel was included in a 2007 gallery exhibition at New York’s Magnan Projects, “After the Battle of Brooklyn.” Accompanying the Acorn was a video showing the submarine against the backdrop of the QM2, contrasting Riley’s tiny, scrappy vessel with the massive, gleaming cruise ship, echoing the juxtaposition of old longshoremen’s haunts and new luxury cars notable in Red Hook’s upwardly mobile streets.

Also on display at Magnan were faux scrimshaw (plastic, not ivory) and mock documentary videos in which bogus experts suggest that Riley’s Acorn is the long-lost sibling of a historical submarine, the Turtle, deployed in 1776 by George Washington in a failed attempt to bomb the English flagship, moored off Governors Island, south of Manhattan. The QM2 assumed the British role in the artist’s similarly doomed quasi-reenactment. The unlikeliness of Riley’s stunt, combined with the mock historical artifacts and the improbable fact of an 18th-century submarine, created a distinct sense of unreality.

In March 2009, Riley brought his playful treatments of history to foreign shores as part of “Chelsea Visits Havana,” a show associated with the 10th Havana Bienale. After discovering in the Cuban capital a prominent street called Calle O’Reilly (named after the Dublin-born General Alexander O’Reilly, who fortified Havana in the service of Spain and married into a Cuban family), the artist learned that there is a history of Irish immigration to Cuba. To highlight this obscure fact while also testing the host country’s tight rules governing public assembly, Riley planned a rogue St. Patrick’s Day parade featuring a handful of Cuban bagpipers. After word of the parade leaked out, the number of participants swelled to about 200, including bands playing American patriotic songs, all led by Farah, described by Riley as “the legendary drag queen of O’Reilly Street.” Among the signs and banners they carried was one touting the “First Annual San Patricio Parade,” one that memorialized Latin jazz musician Chico O’Farrill and another with the face of Che Guevara between the twin slogans “Viva Irlanda” and “Viva Cuba.”

On the night of the naval battle in Queens, free beer and liberally spiked lemonade flowed for hours before the battle started (heavy drinking is something of a constant at Riley’s events), and the rock band Hell-Bent Hooker warmed up the crowd inside the museum. Around 8 p.m., everyone walked a few hundred feet to the reflecting pool, which had been filled, for the first time since 1964, with 70,000 gallons of water. A backdrop painted with a Colosseum-style arcade concealed a backstage area at one end of the pool, from which the boats emerged one by one. The brightly lit Unisphere glowed in the distance under a dramatically cloudy (but mercifully rainless) sky. There was an announcer’s booth emblazoned with the ESPN logo, and scantily clad dancers teased the crowd from a floating platform. An impressive P.A. system blasted rock songs on themes of war and combat, with several from Queen (“We Will Rock You,” “Another One Bites the Dust” and, near the end, “We Are the Champions”), along with Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs,” Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” and the theme from Rocky.

Before the first boat appeared, unruly elements had prematurely opened the numerous boxes of tomatoes supplied by the museum to serve as projectiles during the battle, and crowds on opposite sides of the pool engaged in a tomato-throwing war. Audience members jumped into the water, and the announcer’s unambiguous orders (“Get the fuck out of the pool!”) proved ineffectual. Then the microphone malfunctioned, leaving the music as sole commentator on the mounting confusion and feeding a growing sense that all was dangerously out of control.

The Queens warriors emerged first, piloting a boat with a prow shaped like the head of some toothy bird, and they were pelted with tomatoes as they traveled the length of the pool; when they arrived at a far corner, their reed mast promptly broke. A gray battleship represented the Brooklyn Museum, a model of a Staten Island Ferry boat stood for the fictitious Fresh Kills Landfill and Garbage Museum (a vast former landfill in that borough is now being made into a city park), and a catamaran with two dragonlike heads was manned by Bronx Museum staffers. A salute to Emperor Riley was to precede the combat, but without an announcer to coordinate it, it was lost in the fog of war. Two hours after the audience began arriving, the planned battle finally commenced, with cannons firing confetti, smoke grenades bursting and combatants boarding opposing boats or even taking to the water in order to capsize them. Within minutes, all was wreckage.

Then the backdrop parted, revealing a hulking wood galleon in the shape of a pig (Townsend’s contribution) and featuring a sail made of T-shirts. Its crew were staffers from Manhattan’s El Museo del Barrio, and it entered the aftermath to the ominous strains of “The Imperial March: Darth Vader’s Theme” from Star Wars.After the galleon surveyed the scene and retreated, a reed-and-cardboard effigy of the Queen Mary 2 appeared and was set aflame—sweet revenge for Riley, no doubt. Next, Roman candles and other fireworks burst from the burning QM2’s top, even as local kids in soccer uniforms frolicked in the pool. Finally, the announcer, his mike working again, summoned the crowd to a Roman orgy/after-party at the museum. In a final tongue-in-cheek gesture, the P.A. played “Sailing,” Christopher Cross’s sappy paean to the open water.

As my friends and I conducted postmortem discussions on the subway ride home (Who the hell won, anyway? Is that tomato in your hair? Can you believe no one got hurt?), a fellow passenger acknowledged that the tendency toward mob mayhem is never far from the surface, adding, “I guess there’s a little more Roman in all of us than we might like to admit.” Other conclusions could be drawn. Speaking to a reporter from New York’s public radio station, Townsend pointed out that by comparison with some lavishly funded art projects of recent years, Riley’s recycled materials and modest budget ($12,000, not including Townsend’s galleon) prove that much can be accomplished with limited means. It could also be said that the project took an oddly lighthearted approach to the Romans’ cynical deployment of violence as a distraction from social ills. For my part, it brought to mind the departed federal administration, which aimed to divert Americans’ attention from rising deficits and crumbling infrastructure with two actual wars that seem as absurd and pointless as Riley’s melee—though of course far more tragic. But recalling the heat of battle, such analyses seem moot, for the produce flew, bombs burst in the air and Emperor Riley fiddled while the QM2 burned.

1 See Suetonius’s Life of Julius Caesar: “He gave entertainments of divers kinds: a combat of gladiators and also stage-plays in every ward all over the city, performed too by actors of all languages, as well as races in the circus, athletic contests, and a sham sea-fight. . . . For the naval battle a pool was dug in the lesser Codeta and there was a contest of ships of two, three, and four banks of oars, belonging to the Tyrian and Egyptian fleets, manned by a large force of fighting men.” Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1913-14, trans. C.J. Rolfe, pp. 54-56. 

2 Amid hectic preparations for what became an untidy battle, Staten Island was added at the last minute, and was represented by a fictitious museum, an odd if accidental near snub by the nautical-minded Riley of a borough that hosts Snug Harbor Cultural Center, housed in a former seamen’s retirement home.

Currently On View “Those About to Die Salute You” at the Queens Museum of Art, Nov. 1, 2009-March 2010.

Riley’s performance Those About to Die Salute You took place Aug. 13 in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens; an exhibition of the same name, organized by associate curator Hitomi Iwasaki as part of the museum’s artist-in-residency program, is on view through February 2010 at the Queens Museum of Art. Riley’s work will be featured in the festival Philagrafika 2010: The Graphic Unconscious, in Philadelphia, January-April 2010. The Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art will host a solo exhibition, September 2010-January 2011.