Here are some more photographs of the wonderfully chaotic public art event, Those About to Die Salute You, at the Queens Museum of Art. Conceived by artist Duke Riley, we noted yesterday that the event was a Roman-themed naval battle that also involved tomato throwing, baguette battles, watermelon cannon balls, warriors in togas and other museums—the Brooklyn Museum, El Museo del Barrio and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Oh, and the madness did make the Queens Museum's director a little nervous.
Reuters' Felix Salmon called it "utterly insane and hugely enjoyable," and compared the low-budget effort to an expensive Museum of Modern Art public art offering, Doug Aitken's Sleepwalkers: "The expensive Manhattan-based project was somber and highbrow and quiet; the cheap chaos in Queens was raucous and bloody and quite probably illegal, especially when the fireworks started exploding at the end... The MoMA project was organized to the finest detail, and projected onto Yoshio Taniguchi’s pristine walls; there was a vague plan behind the Riley event, but it started going awry at roughly the time that the toga-clad crowd started throwing tomatoes at each other before the boats had even appeared, and it all went magnificently downhill from there." Check out his video and, below and after the jump, are videos from ranjit:
Riley, who gained notoriety for his turtle submarine stunt two years ago, told the Times, which remarked on the three-foot high flames on a mock-up of the Queen Mary 2, "You never really know what’s going to happen. Nobody got hurt, and I’m not in jail." New York magazine's Jerry Saltz has a detailed description of the battle and oohed, "I had witnessed something special, and also glimpsed one of the ways that artists from everywhere are taking matters into their own hands and righting the ship that is the New York art world."
