Governor's Island: Artistic Festival

Upon Governor's Island this past Sunday was the end of a weeks long (weekends only) art festival promoted in part by the same promotion team that brought out the actress dressed as the Milkmaid--a celebration of 400 years of Dutch involvement in the area. Once we disembarked from the quick ferry ride (it took far longer waiting in line than it did in crossing), we walked past a few military settlements and into a large field littered with metallic Items. The Items looked like part chez-lounge and part metal butterfly, and all had paintings on them. Here's a picture to get the scope.

They were everywhere in this field, quite a sight from a distance, or directly in the midst. Some of the paintings were good, some great, some fantastic, and eventually you got the sense that we were being invaded by alien robotic butterflies.

Once passed the field, we were into another military type dormitory zone, and in the distance between two sets of austere housing buildings was a fair of some type, put on by Amstel and Heineken. This might have been The Fair; it had small booths like a Renaissance Fair, with performers coming out occasionally to perform their skills. There was a raised platform--a wooden catwalk basically--bisecting the fenced in "fair-grounds" that patrons were encouraged to walk across by wooden steps at regular intervals. Behind one of the performers, a young long-haired pianist (she was pretty good, also pretty good at shooing away curious patrons from her piano when she wasn't playing) were a pair of statues. One was large and bulbous, looked almost womanly, and the other was very skinny, male, and both were in begging type poses. I got a good picture of the skinny fella.

I graffito-tagged a pillar that was meant to be tagged--they had glow-in-the-dark markers attached to it--and then we left and saw a performance artist doing some interpretive dangling from a tree to some spooky music.

We explored some of the other installations in some of the open houses, mostly of a historic nature, and not necessarily of the artistic nature. It was a pretty neat artsy-fartsy outing, even if that hadn't really been our initial motivation for going. Here's my tag (re: Norm).