We saw Robert Smithson’s “Floating Island” on the Saturday when it opened at Pier 46. Most of the time was spent waiting. Pier 46 is covered with Astroturf, making it an ideal venue to wait for an artificial floating island. In fact the artwork seems to be about artifice. After several rounds of free virgin caipirinhas and tiny foie gras treats lavished on the crowd by expectant (and possibly misguided) restaurants, there were some unintelligible “remarks” by Smithson’s entourage. In the middle of the mumblings a tug appeared on the Hudson, with a tiny barge behind it. Several onlookers near us wondered aloud if that was “it” because it seemed rather small for all this fuss. But indeed that was it and as the duo approached the pier they didn’t seem quite so tiny after all. The rusty barge bobbed up and down in the waves behind the obviously neatly repainted tug. This was an exercise in both relationships and artifice.
We stood on an Astroturf pier, jutting out from the landfill-extended shore of Manhattan watching a renovated tug pull an artificially rusted barge of somewhat decrepit looking trees and shrubs around an island that’s been covered with so much concrete, steel and glass that almost no trace of the original island remains. Was it a demonstration of how we’ve completely turned nature inside out? There was talk of how the Floating Island represented Central Park. Indeed, some of the stones on the “Island” were Manhattan schist temporarily removed from the Park, and the trees and shrubs are slated to be installed in the Park when the artwork has run its course. However outside of sourcing and recycling, the Floating Island to me is less about the Park and more about our curious relationship with nature. Here we had placed the natural on top of the technological–the reverse of Manhattan. The barge had been rusted to make it look old. The tugboat had been quaintly repainted to make it look new. As the tug captain made a spectacularly complex maneuver to turn the barge around, all eyes suddenly turned to the sky, where a magnificent sunset-tinged cloud lit up with a crisp fringe of silvery orange. Everyone on the artificial turf around us, who had assembled for the carefully created floating island, commented on the clouds.