I left Greenpoint on a beautiful windless day,
bound for Socrates Sculpture Park with an artist, Jenny Polak and an art historian, Ann Reynolds.
We passed through the intermittent shadows of the LIC condominiums around Hunters Point.
Jenny gave me a pin from the new website for Fall of Freedom, a gathering of artists and activists that she helped start with a group of artists including the playwright Lynn Nottage.
It’s a place for people to post artwork, actions, and resources about creative resistance to authoritarianism. Jenny says the ‘fall’ is not a warning but a time frame. It started last November with a wave of 600 events, and it’s building toward an even bigger push this October 2–4.
We passed the Pepsi sign in LIC, and I asked how the area looked when Jenny lived here in the 90s.
“Empty lots,” said Jenny. She and her friends used to crawl under a fence around the Pepsi sign and watch fireworks over the East River.
We passed a derelict floating restaurant right beside shining new towers,
and thought about how investment and crumped disinvestment can sit side by side here.
The current was pushing us 5 or 6 knots, but it was hard to tell,
until we got to the Queensborough Bridge and we could see the water pushing against the bridge piers as though it was a moving barge.
We floated past Roosevelt Island,
and the Ravenswood Power Station,
and up to the drainage pipe just south of Socrates, looking up at the Mark di Suvero sculptures.
As we floated into the sewer, Ann told us about Primary Structures, the 1966 exhibition at the Jewish Museum.
This was when sculpture was considered the vanguard of all cultural production, and the debates that surrounded minimalism reverberated through society.
She said someone like Robert Morris might not have even called his work sculpture at the time. For him, objects were primary units of information.
Di Suvero was the opposite: building from assemblage, collaging things out of the actual world, using remnants of industry with all their messy references.
Ann narrated the whole argument as we rounded the cove of Socrates Sculpture Park.
I thought about how an art object outlives its argument, and goes on making new ones for new generations.
We landed on a beach near Socrates to take a look around.
I think of Socrates Park as one of di Suveros’ great works, because it’s not just one kind of object, but many. It continues the debates of his generation, but in many different ways.
Jenny showed us an image of her piece, which was there in 2024, Offshore, made from letters by incarcerated people.
She started working on it during the pandemic, and she’s still thinking about new forms that it can take.
We sat on the beach and talked about more things, the slippery nature of language, etc.
I was inspired by Jenny and Ann to be braver,
not just about water and boating, but about everything.
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