A Happening on the Edge of the Tide
Guild Hall in East Hampton is asking the community to join them at Main Beach on four consecutive Saturday nights — Sept. 10, 17, 24 and Oct. 1 from 7 to 10 p.m. for a series of unmissable happenings, “Swept Away: Love Letter to a Surrogate(s),” at the water’s edge in front of the Pavilion. Attendees can watch or be an active participant and enjoy the evening’s festivities.
“This community-oriented artistic project aims to create a transcontinental heartbeat across America,” says artist Warren Neidich, who is organizing the event. “It is hoped that through its combined gestures and performances, a sense of solidarity, so desperately missing today, will emerge with which to confront the ecological catastrophe at our doorstep.”
Seventy artists living on the East End and 70 west coast artists are participating in this community and family-based happening. Each artist has been linked up to a west coast artist who will email instructions – a love letter – for a work of art that the local artist will incorporate into their performative piece, acting as a surrogate. They will create ephemeral performative gestures of immateriality or time-based works on the beach. This could be making a sandcastle, singing a song, reciting poetry, dancing, making a sculpture that interacts with the tide, collecting shells, doing a light projection on the pavilion, picking up garbage on the beach, etc. The works could be political and deal with global warming and its effects on the water level or could talk about the natural beauty of the real world.
