Welcome to Dreamland
Megan Heuer

With the assistance of Creative Time, a collection of artists under the moniker The Dreamland Artist Club is giving Coney Island a facelift by hand-painting signs and murals for local rides and businesses, integrating art into Brooklyn’s mythologized seaside neighborhood.

Weegee Coney Island at Noon, Saturday, July 5th, 1942, (1942) Black and white photograph © Weegee/International Center of Photography/ Getty Images

Weegee’s iconic image of Coney Island—a sunny, sandy beach packed with people, the half moon of the Ferris wheel, and the attractions of the boardwalk miniaturized in the distance—is one of a popular getaway, a mass escape from the heat of the city on a summer day. From poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind to anonymous photographs of the annual Mermaid Parade, artists have mined the carnivalesque terrain of this south Brooklyn neighborhood, with its salty air of liberation and pleasure, since the development of the neighborhood in the mid-19th century.

While the physical environment hasn’t changed much since then, a visit to the beach today bears little resemblance to mythical scenes of a thriving seaside district engaged in the summery celebration of rides, games, food, entertainment, and leisure. Rather, the nostalgia of black-and-white photographs of Coney Island in the 1950s is only heightened by the faded, sometimes dilapidated reality of the neighborhood’s architecture, the old-fashioned quality echoed by attractions like the Dime Toss, the Spiritual Reader, and the El Dorado bumper cars and arcade. Yet one glimpse of Keyspan Park, the Brooklyn Cyclones’ minor league baseball stadium a few blocks from the boardwalk, decorated with red, yellow, and blue plastic signs like any Wal-Mart, attests to the unbridgeable distance between nostalgic collective memory and the current reality of Coney Island.

When Steve Powers (a.k.a. ESPO), an artist who works on the border between art and design, often in public spaces, found inspiration in Coney Island’s old hand-painted signs advertising everything from hot dogs to tarot readings, he stole freely from the visual milieu of the boardwalk. But “to return the favor,” he also began painting signs for the business owners he befriended in Coney Island, to help keep plastic at bay.

Steve Powers Painted cars for Cyclone roller coaster, Coney Island (2004) Courtesy Creative Time

This summer, Powers’ informal service has been transformed into The Dreamland Artist Club, a public art project produced by Creative Time, and includes signs, murals, and resurfaced rides by over 20 contemporary artists in collaboration with local business owners. Gazing at Powers’ freshly painted, red, white, and blue Cyclone roller coaster cars—a slightly off-kilter combinations of 1940s graphic decoration and 1970s graffiti—the soullessness of computer-generated, Disney-fied graphics hits home, as does nostalgia’s potential for social improvement.

Composed of artists from a wide variety of visual art practices, The Dreamland Artist Club’s confluence of design and contemporary art, a sometimes-fraught relationship in galleries and museums, seems natural given Coney Island’s geographical and historical specificity. Dana Schutz’s sign for the Shooting Gallery bears four stiff, thickly painted figures strikingly similar to characters from the paintings in her 2003 solo show at LFL Gallery, while David Humphrey’s Water Gun Fun marquee employs the same slick cartoon landscapes as the paintings from his recent show at Brent Sikkema. The stylized seriality of each painter’s work becomes a legible graphic for games of impotent, childish violence. Dearraindrop’s psychedelic installation, last seen at Deitch Projects, seems more at home as a customized backdrop for the spinning arms of the Spider ride. The hand-painted Water Racing and Basketball Game signs by Morning Breath (the design team behind album covers for Eminem and Jay-Z, among other projects) Basketball Game use an inventive personal iconography announcing the artistry of design through the semotics of color and form. The brilliant mural for the Clam Bar by Gents of Desire, an L.A.-based design team and party crew, applies their stylized hybrid of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mexican gangs to entice customers to eat Coney Island’s version of Proust’s madeleine. The usual divide between design and art, between high and low, becomes irrelevant in a landscape of imagination, or as Creative Time curator Peter Eleey remarked: “In Coney Island, it doesn’t matter who shows in Chelsea and who designs album covers.”

Considering Coney Island’s long history of aesthetic nostalgia, The Dreamland Artist Club’s lament against the use of cheaply produced vinyl signs may seem overly romantic. But Powers professes a matter-of-fact outlook on the possibility for preserving or rejuvenating the artistry of sign painting: “The reality of the situation is always going to be economic. And we fit neatly into that equation. You couldn’t beat our prices.” Pragmatism tempers the project with a social awareness that transforms nostalgia from an interior, private engagement to a truly public experience that considers visual art in its relationship to commerce and entertainment.

While the concept of public art posits site as an aspect of visual experience, the pieces in The Dreamland Artist Club are site-specific in more ways than one. All the signs, installations, murals, and designs are tied to the social space of the boardwalk, to the businesses they adorn, as well as to the history and myth of Coney Island. Integrating art into this romanticized landscape visually alters, refreshes, and conceptually transforms it. Compared to the nostalgia of artists like Christian Holstad and Jeremy Blake, whose work in the 2004 Whitney Biennial operates on memory’s fetishistic relationship to objects and nostalgia as a private, psychological experience, The Dreamland Artist Club engages with history and social reality, albeit in a place dedicated to fantasy.

Megan Heuer is a New York-based critic and managing art editor of The Brooklyn Rail.

For more information on The Dreamland Artist Club, visit:
www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2004/dreamland/new/
www.coneyisland.com
www.villagevoice.com/siren