The greatest threat to democracy is stagnation and complacency. Dissidents, objectors, radicals and vigilantes are as necessary to a democracy as law enforcement officials and the keepers of order. - Duke Riley, Artist + Patriot
Duke Riley’s manifesto isn’t just bluster. He lives it. The Boston-born, Brooklyn-based artist has opened an unlicensed bar on New York’s Plum Island (the National Park Service crashed the party with guard dogs); almost managed to stow away on Robert Smithson’s Floating Island (the Coast Guard intervened); and was arrested for violating a security zone when he floated The Acorn, his handcrafted, wood-and-metal version of a Revolutionary War submarine, too close to the Queen Mary 2 cruise ship.
During the 2004 Republican National Convention, when security in New York was extra tight, he planted a giant glow-in-the-dark flag on Belmont Island in the East River, directly across from the United Nations, to claim it as a sovereign nation (the Coast Guard apprehended his boat). For a critically acclaimed 2009 performance event, Riley got members of New York’s art institutions to don togas, jump in a reflecting pool at the Queens Museum of Art and whip tomatoes at each other, all in the guise of staging a naumachia - a mock naval battle, of the diversionary breads-and-circuses variety, similar to those orchestrated by Julius Caesar in Rome two millennia ago.
More recently, Riley, 38, hopped trains from New York to Ohio (he was merely questioned by the New York State Highway Patrol) and navigated Cleveland’s sewer system (without police intervention) while making the wildly ambitious multi-media installation An Invitation to Lubberland, now on view at MOCA Cleveland. Featuring video, photography, mosaics, drawings, ephemera, engravings and site-specific sculpture, Lubberland makes it very clear that Riley is more than just geographic boundary–hopper, a provocateur who tests the limits of public and private space, or a even a talented multimedia artist. He’s also an amateur social scientist, a revisionist historian, a storyteller, a field naturalist (his words) and cultural critic. Spoiler alert: Lubberland is the most compelling show I’ve seen in Northeast Ohio all year. ARTnews included Riley in their 2010 list of “Artists to Watch”; Lubberland made Flavorpill’s list of must-see fall art shows. The critical buzz is well-deserved.
Like many of Riley’s previous actions and installations, Lubberland revisits a historical event, and takes place where land and water meet, the “urban waterfront,” where he says marginalized people tend to settle and build communities. At MOCA, Riley re-tells the story of Kingsbury Run and its role in a bloody, infamous chapter of Cleveland’s history that has been literally covered up - and mostly told from the point of view of institutionalized power. Until now.
