The People’s Pool at Coney Island transcends era. Possessed by ritual, the sacrosanct strife towards purity of body and soul, the players, swimmers and other believers indulge themselves to the point of complete immersion. In a momentary lapse in time the rites performed at the Pool galvanize the breakdown of “duration” and minutes, hours, days, years, centuries pass and collide between events. Inspired by a spectacularized interpretation of phenomena preceding the present moment, these rituals have at least one thing in common -- they aim towards the reversal of time, a pull to an anterior period of existence, a reset, a breakdown of the fourth dimension, a renewed experience of a pre-social anatomy. Attendance to hygiene, physical fitness, and the release of real and metaphysical toxic waste drive the masses to facilities advertised to provide the materials, spaces and practitioners necessary to simulate a deep cleanse as such. [Does this extreme scrutiny of the body truly preserve or stave off degradation (is that what we really want?), or is it an excuse to delay succumbing to belief in an inevitable future? What are we really imagining when we purge and disinfect? Clarity from the confusion of the undifferentiated biological and technological mass we accrete, or a return to a comfortable ignorance? Here, at the People’s Pool, the past, present and future intermingle and aggregate, form composites and release deposits. Its visitors perform ablutions for absolution.
Anything goes in dreamland. The Pool takes a break from reality, sunbathes on the beach, revels in the myth the place produced for itself. Even as time passes and natural disasters sweep clean the fragile coast, like Coney Island as a whole, the Pool subsists on fantasy independent of its form. This fantasy, however, is anything but nostalgic. There’s no remorse for programs past and no attempt to recycle old dogmas for new generations. Rather, history’s remains leave clues for present functions, which are then constructed, reexamined, and reconstructed by the program’s subjects themselves. “When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.” No form is quite a copy, no action is exactly a repeat, but a linkage persists from century to century. Highly specific program once built for highly specific proceedings gets readapted as the cultural context morphs around the Pool’s follies. Coney Island knows what it means to pair contradictions just as the programs understand that no single identity defines them or its subjects.
The site is an entry (a portal) as well as a point of secretion/excretion where the sacred and the profane cross paths, where ritual is ignited, but also where the system is mysteriously pragmatic. Here the Pool teeters on the edge of reality and fantasy, this world and that world. It is both a time-stream distribution terminal and an extension of the city’s infrastructural network. History’s detritus flows out from the Pool through pipes with other wastewater (to a treatment plant) and saturates the underbelly of the five boroughs. Sometimes it seeps inexplicably into our senses through steaming manholes and subway air vents, or surfaces where other similar follies emerge from the urban texture.
Back at the entryway to the Pool, waste exits as newcomers arrive ready to rid themselves of their own toxins. Upon entry, the subject immediately succumbs to the multitude, a whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts. (As we know, Coney Island the destination is distinct from Coney Island the community, but this is a distinction without difference.) A culture of congestion culminates at the crossing of concrete, sand, and salt water. This place thrives on disorientation and overlapping action in space and time.
SILENT PRESENTATION VIEWS
Archeological Artifact
Archeological Artifact
Whale Man
Basketball Court
