DUKE RILEY: GRAND MASTER TRASH
Artist shares his concern of plastic pollution by transforming waste into art at the Brooklyn Museum
Artist Duke Riley isn’t exactly sure why he had the idea to turn a plastic tampon applicator into a fishing lure, but he knows one thing for certain: It works. He put it to the test one summer day on a buddy’s boat in Block Island Sound, and, with his pastel bait bouncing along the ocean floor, pulled up a sizable fluke. It was a keeper. “I definitely ate it,” he said.
The applicator tube had first washed up ashore, part of the many tonnes of seaborne trash that Riley, a Brooklyn artist known to scavenge New York’s waterways for materials and inspiration, has collected over the years. Putting this spent plastic product to use as fish food — that was some DIY upcycling. Putting it into the Brooklyn Museum of Art: That is Riley’s wild and singular artistic ingenuity.
There’s a film of the fishing endeavour, done in the style of a crusty YouTube tutorial. The lures — displayed on pegboard, as in a real bait shop — join other plastic detritus that Riley has repurposed, including straws, dental floss picks and vape pens, in “Death To The Living: Long Live Trash”, an exhibition opening at the Brooklyn Museum. Across multiple rooms and settings, it confronts the calamitous environmental impact of the plastics industry and the ways in which unchecked consumption, for personal convenience, has polluted waterways.
Its centrepiece is more than 200 works of painstakingly hand-drawn scrimshaw that Riley has spent three years making. Instead of the whale teeth and walrus tusks that 19th-century sailors once etched, he uses a contemporary, dispiritingly abundant, analogue: discarded plastics. Lotion tubes, squirt bottles, brushes, a honey bear, solo flip-flops, a Wiffle ball and a legless lawn flamingo now stained bone-white, all provide the canvas for Riley’s patterned mariner drawings in India ink.
As whalers often depicted the leaders and profiteers of their day, Riley portrays the CEOs of chemical companies, plastic industry lobbyists and others he deems responsible for producing the devastating tonnages of single-use plastics that are engulfing our oceans and threatening our ecosystems. It’s a downer, but if you look closely, there’s often a Riley twist of humour, such as the seagull shown relieving itself on the head of a water bottle magnate.
“This is an artist who I always refer to as a modern-day pirate,” said Anne Pasternak, director of the Brooklyn Museum. “He’s not just an aesthete pointing to something passively, he’s working to actively spur change — you have to be in it with an artist like Duke. He’s not going to hold back.”
Calling out corporate titans and politicians — particularly when institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum depend on them for donations and support — comes from a fearless ethic and “a wit that is hilarious and unforgiving”. She added: “I always think of him as the George Carlin of the art world.”
For Riley, who turned 50 on Thursday — he plans to celebrate with a nude-beach cleanup — the exhibition is a serious high point in a career full of winks, awe and mischief.
Best known for Fly By Night, a 2016 performance in which 2,000 trained pigeons outfitted with LEDs lit up the New York sky, or for launching his own home-made Revolutionary War submarine into the path of the Queen Mary 2 cruise ship, Riley has mostly succeeded by navigating around the commercial New York art world, although he holds degrees from some of its prestigious feeder institutions (a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from Pratt Institute). Celebrated for audacious public works and his sense of spectacle, he has also been perfecting an instantly identifiable, dense yet meticulously fine-lined style of drawing since he could hold a pen.
His mosaics offer one of the biggest wows of the show. Inspired by sailors’ valentines, a nautical souvenir traditionally made of shells, Riley’s are enormous and quite beautiful. Only on close inspection do you notice that the perfect, shiny seashells are interlaid with a rainbow of bottle caps, cigar tips, bits of mechanical pencils, and bread bag clips, all harvested from New York streets and waterfronts.
Although he has long worked with found objects — he was painting on, and with, garbage in art school — recently, Riley said, “the environmental focus has been more intense”, as he has watched the shorelines breached by more, and ever tinier, junk.
“As artists, we’re going to have to start thinking differently about the materials that we use,” he said, a few days before the exhibition opened. We were sitting in his studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a pair of female pigeons, Tofu and Asta, rustling in a cage nearby. It’s a cleanish space, stacked with neatly bagged, colour co-ordinated trash. A trailer outside was filled with more refuse.
Pasternak, the museum director, has known him since her days leading Creative Time, a public art organisation. “He would propose ideas constantly that were just way too ambitious or absolutely illegal,” she said. (Just after her tenure ended, Creative Time presented Fly By Night.)
In a new monograph for Rizzoli, Riley documents some of his high jinks: the speakeasies he built and the time he may or may not have infested a presidential-affiliated hotel with bedbugs. For his core group of collaborators, no project is too brazen or too labour-intensive. “We always pull it off,” said Nicholas Schneider, a New York City firefighter and a longtime member of Riley’s crew. Through all the fun, “there is always a somber or very serious component that I think he’s always been the most focused on and proud of”.
For Riley, the effort is the point. If you want people to give a damn about what you’re saying, at least make them feel like you busted your butt for the message, he said (though in much saltier terms).
Still, the fact that he filled an august museum with garbage — that visitors will now pay to see — is not lost on him. It may even be the most gratifying part, he said.
“I knew, when I was a kid, that I either wanted to be a garbage man, an artist or a thief,” he said. “And I think I became all three.”