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Steve Powers, Democracy in America,
“Waterboarding Thrill Ride”, a side show at Coney Island.
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Tucked neatly inside the Coney Island Boardwalk is Steve Powers Art Installation, “Waterboarding Thrill Ride”.
On the surface of the installation a mean Squidward is pouring water over top of the all to happy Spongebob. The scene almost makes me think that this installation is a spoof on torture, that it is somehow funny, that it is somehow acceptable.
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“It Don’t Gitmo better”
says Spongebob as he readily absorbs water like a sponge. But as you peer through the window. Two figures act out the play in a more ominous scene. One figure pours water over the face of the other in an attempt to simulate drowning.
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All of this for a dollar.
The payment activates the two robots that are the central characters of Steve powers art installation.
I ran across a story about this piece a couple days ago, but had not decided if I wanted to write about it or not. I felt that the installation was perhaps too too over simpified and lacked in the smart artistic, metaphorical language that would really make it serious art.
I am still not sure about Powers work. He said, “ I wanted to use real people, waterboard them and they then could water board the next”.
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Powers himself would have been the first.
But his wife mindful that Steve powers is a husband and father thought that this approach might be a little too risky and over the top. I guess she wants him to come home after work and not drowned himself with his art, even if it is a simulated drowning as is waterboarding.
The Waterboarding Thrill Ride installation is safe and a little to removed from the emotional carnage of the actual torture events that it represents taking place in Guantanamo Bay Cuba, Gitmo.
The premise of the installation provokes thought for me, not only about the issue of torture but about the limits of the installation itself.
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Back in the late 1970’s I met and worked on several installations by the Artist Vito Acconci. http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2002/nov/23/art
At the time Acconci combined performance art with installations. His intent was to interact with the viewer who shared in the experience of the art, became part of the installations.
At the old Akron Art Institute we built a series of walls, like long hallways in an apartment building where the viewer could listen to the inmate conversations, through the wall as they walked down the hallway. Much like you might do in any old building. The sounds of voices and related noises offered sometimes shocking details of what was going on on the other side of the wall. Imagination took over and the viewer was now caught up in the experience.
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Seedbed perhaps still one of the most shocking Art Installations ever conceived and executed was Acconci’s signature installation of the era.
Acconci hid under a false floor constructed in a New York gallery and followed the footsteps of visitors as they made their way up a slanting floor, where once they found Acconci or he them. He would masturbate and engage the visitor in a dialogue of related thoughts, sexual, dirty, erotic thoughts.
The visitor became part of the installation, the installation only worked because of the visitor interaction. Vito Acconci never pulled punches, he went for it all the way, he let the marbles fall where they lay and that is what this installation is missing, the punch.
I am not suggesting that Powers hurt anyone but I wonder if he couldn’t engage the visitor in a more profound way, in a way that would really get the point across. Still the mechanical robots carry out the procedure of Waterboarding and gives the viewer an image of Waterboarding. Even if it lacks the horror that the true victims must feel as they become to believe they are drowning. Still I think Steve Powers is on to something, Art as Power, Art of Politics, Art of Consequence.
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After all as Powers says, “What do you want for a buck”!
Check Out the Waterboarding Thrill Ride at Coney Island yourself
http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2008/democracy/powers.php
As a foot note, What will the New President do about Torture?
Filed under: Art, Art News, News, On Art, Politics, Uncategorized , Art as Power, Art Installations, Gitmo, Political art, Preformance Art, Steve Powers, Torture, Vito Acconci, Waterboarding
