knock knock picnic

Knock Knock Picnic is a fistful of renegade strays from across the European continent and the far reaches of Brooklyn. Four are collaborative teams and two, lone wolves.This is an exuberant laissez-faire summer curation of 95% famously unpredictable artists. What they will do is anybody's guess. That said...*

Parfyme Deluxe has built a pair of Street Canoes--one extremely big and a baby--out of garbage they rescued from underneath the Queensboro Bridge. Stills are projected of their voyage through the city, pulling themselves forward with hookers grabbing onto stationary street signs poles and pushers for asphalt and cars. Parfyme (pronounced Parfum and a deliberate misspelling of it) is a three member team from Copenhagen, active since 2000. They have launched their raggedy vehicles and habitats throughout Europe, in Denmark, Poland, England, Germany, France and Finland (visit Parfyme.dk). Here, they join forces with New York's own Deluxe to become Parfyme Deluxe (as in, figuratively, with lettuce, tomatoes and fries). The four first worked together in Paris in Radioproject earlier this year.

Assocreation (founded 1997) is a five-member experimental collaborative team from Vienna. Assocreation's Walk of Fame works on both "ends" of the gallery, creating phenomena of rise and decay. At the entrance, a red carpet guides both visitor and artist into a sacred space of the art world. The installation also refers to the artists' big expectations coming to America. But the carpet is made out of coarse street brooms lying downside up on the pavement. Walking inside the space that defines itself as a vessel for the arts becomes a balancing act honored with a new kind of grace and cleaned shoes. The summit should be discovered at the exit of the gallery where the visitor can observe in the gallery toilet the 1932 sinking of an American ship. The team is well known and has exhibited widely throughout Europe (visit assocreation.com). FREEDOM - A Public Hanging , 2005, in which volunteerswere hung onto a meat rail at Atlas Meats in New York City's Meatpacking District, was their US debut.

Conceptual artists Ondrej Brody (ondrejbrody.org) and Kristofer Paetau (paetau.com) team up to produce the three-channel video Auticko . The first channel shows the two of them on cell phones directing a well-dressed older man and younger woman (on the second channel) in the Jiri Svestka Gallery (the Czech Republic's leading private gallery) through a variety of pornographic encounters. On the third channel, we see their cell phone interlocutors, like gallery or auction administrators, taking their instructions and conveying them to the actors and crew.** The tone is dry and dispassionate. Brody and Paetau are frequent collaborators. They have independently and as collaborators exhibited their provocative and often ethically-challenging works throughout Europe. Paetau had his US premier last year in "Past/Present/Forward" at the Buia Gallery.

David Henry Brown Jr. (davidhenrybrownjr.com) and Marc Grubstein from Brooklyn are The Fantastic Nobodies. Their extensive installation This Ain't No Picnic (after the Minutemen) stages a sprawling dyspeptic picnic, the dark side of the American idyll. It includes a large model of a gigantic graffiti rock at the Sand Street Projects near Dumbo. The words "Jah is the rock" have lasted on the original unchallenged for many years. With swathes of Astroturf riding the gallery's floor and walls, the artists create the ripples of rolling hills. Grubstein's enormous sewn-felt American flag is a hasty, ill-formed scrawl, which appears to be 'falling apart' from the inception. A tricolor basketball is frozen to the backboard of the hoop, frozen in time and unable to swish through. A garden blooms composed of plants borrowed from their friends, surrounded by generic urban detritus. And a pinhead Donald Trump hangs like a piñata from his feet. For The Fantastic Nobodies, all this is a backdrop for their provocative situational antics, which will unfurl through the course of the show, as their installation expands and adapts.

knock knock picnic

mit Ondrej Brody, The Fantastic Nobodies , Marc Ganzglass, Kristofer Paetau, Hampus Pettersson ...