Fifty years ago, Red Grooms and Mimi Gross set out to make a three-dimensional version of Manhattan—not a carefully-scaled model, but a whirling chaotic kaleidoscope of images and ideas and perhaps a little psychedelic vision. It’s been called a “sculptural comic book.”
It was supposed to represent all of Manhattan, but after 13 months, the Ruckus Construction Company—the pair and two dozen associates—ran out of time, money and space in Midtown. But what they had included a Statue of Liberty in high heels, the Financial District on fire, bizarrely distorted skyscrapers, the Staten Island Ferry, a 42nd Street porno peepshow and much more.
I had the good fortune to have a friend who knew about it when it went on display in a gallery of sorts in lower Manhattan. It threw me: So much was going on, so many literary and pop culture references, so many moments when it all seemed true despite the blatant unreality.
Portions of the assemblage have been shown at museums over the years; ‘Dame of the Narrows,’ the Staten Island Ferry ensemble was at the Brooklyn Museum some thirty years ago, and it’s there again, part of the museum’s celebration of its 200th birthday and the city’s 400th. On show with it are some of the background murals, and, appropriately hidden around a corner (with parental warnings) is the ’42nd Street Porno Bookstore.’
I was happy to discover the exhibit, but I left a bit disappointed. Displayed quietly in a large empty space rather than in a crowded gallery, it loses the spirit, the swirl, the chaos, and the feeling that you are in an altered-state New York. The exhibit—Dame more so than Porno—is just that. It’s exhibited rather than experienced, and that’s a shame. It feels almost as if the art has been confiscated, as if the city has been confiscated, and stored in the museum.
The exhibit is accompanied by a looped showing of Ruckus Manhattan, a documentary made by the Film Makers’ Cooperative/New American Cinema Group, who followed the project from its beginnings as Grooms and Gross began traveling around Manhattan gathering images. It uses speed-ups, slow-downs, abrupt zooms and a variety of other techniques to convey the controlled frenzy that produced the project. I haven’t found a free source, but you can rent it online for $5 at vimeo.com—I’d call it well worth the price.
While nothing is perfectly representational, the styles range from precise to, well… sketchy, as the two images above show. The ferry passengers, each one unique, are about 10″ high.
I don’t know what anyone else’s experience of porno bookstores in the 1970s was like, but I can attest that the one conjured up by Grooms, Gross and the rest is both wildly exaggerated, full of outrageous (and somewhat racy) puns and impossible confrontations, and yet it evokes memories of what inspired the design.
I suppose it’s too big a wish to hope that someday the entire project could be reassembled, in a suitably cramped space, but even with the limits of this exhibit, I’m glad to have had an encore with Ruckus and with the 70s.
