By CAROL VOGEL
NY Times News Service, NEW YORK
As giant billows of smoke began filling the cavernous drill hall of the Seventh Regiment Armory in Manhattan one recent evening, there was no panic. Rather, there were shouts of exultation, along with what sounded like a chorus of foghorns.
"Look, it's going in the right direction," said Doreen Remen, a founder of the Art Production Fund, a nonprofit organization that presents unusual public art projects. She, her co-founder, Yvonne Force Villareal, and the artist Aaron Young, gazed upward with relief as the smoke began filtering out the open windows along the rafters.
Four smoke machines had been brought in to simulate the conditions that could develop as 10 motorcycles drive around the 5,109m2 drill hall simultaneously. For last Thursday evening's test run, the belching, thunderous machines had some competition: Wink 1100, a professional stunt rider who performed the trick sequences in the 2003 movie Biker Boyz. Wearing Tom Ford sunglasses, baggy blue jeans and a red-and-blue sweatshirt, he was enveloped in his own haze of smoke as he spun the wheels of his Honda CBR 954 on a designated patch of painted plywood.
It was the prelude to a turning point in the Seventh Regiment Armory's 128-year history: the first performance-art piece ever presented there, masterminded by Young. On Monday night, 10 motorcycle stunt riders wearing sunglasses rode for seven minutes on 288 panels of painted plywood covering the drill hall floor as 500 invited guests, including members of Hells Angels, watched from the bleachers above.
With neon lights attached to the undersides of their bikes, the riders followed synchronized movements choreographed by Young. The burnouts from their tires yielded colorful swirls, zigzags and snake patterns on the plywood panels, which have been coated in seven layers of fluorescent reds, pinks, oranges and yellows and then sealed with two coats of black acrylic.
Titled Greeting Card, after a 1944 Jackson Pollock painting that has its own tangle of spirals, the work is described as both a performance piece and an action painting. The riders have created a giant fluorescent multicolored floor piece that will remain on public view through Sunday. A film of the performance will be shown on a plasma screen in the hall.
It is the first in a series of art exhibitions and performances planned for the building by a new nonprofit group, the Seventh Regiment Armory Conservancy, which in December took over management of the crenellated red-brick behemoth on Park Avenue between 66th and 67th streets from New York state.
The group still plans to hold the art and antiques fairs that have attracted throngs for decades, but Rebecca Robertson, the conservancy's president and chief executive, suggested that the armory could become even more of a cultural destination.
"The armory is neither a white-box gallery nor a proscenium stage," she said. "Here you make it up. Luckily this space allows work that can't be seen anywhere else in the city."
Workers have been cleaning the neglected building, and air-conditioning has been installed in the drill hall for the first time, eliminating the need for trucks that once piped in cool air during art and antiques fairs. The US$150,000 budget for Greeting Card is being covered by a group of sponsors that include Tom Ford, the fashion designer, and Sotheby's.
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