In conjunction with our Battle Ground exhibit, performance artist Paul Benney and author Robert Sullivan (My American Revolution) will join forces in this interdisciplinary meditation on the Continental Army’s not-well-remembered retreat from Brooklyn to Manhattan, from loss to not-loss. In addition to Paul Benney’s ethereal choreography and Robert Sullivan’s words and song, the performance will include quilts by Suzanne Sullivan and music by Louise Sullivan. Time past and present will merge as guests are transported down our alleyway to the performance in a wooden boat.

Robert Sullivan is the author, most recently, of “My American Revolution”, a book about the American Revolution described by Sam Roberts of the NY Times as “a provocative Baedeker for a landscape of loss, Gen. George Washington’s route from Brooklyn to “the very first Middle America” and back…” Other books by Sullivan include “Rats”, “The Meadowlands”, “A Whale Hunt”, “How Not To Get Rich Or Why Being Bad Off Isn’t So Bad”, “Cross Country”, and “The Thoreau You Don’t Know”.  His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York, A Public Space, Runner’s World, Condé Nast Traveler, GQ, Rolling Stone, The Independent of London, The London Times and Vogue. He was born in Manhattan and lives in Brooklyn with his family. 

Paul Benney lives and works in Brooklyn, N.Y. He studied Theater Arts and Dance at U.C. Santa Cruz and co-directed OnSite Dance Company in San Francisco with Jessica Lutes for twelve years before moving to New York in 2002. He was a Movement Research Artist in Resident in 2003, and he continues his performance related work with the performance art group, TRYST. His varied performance experience includes stints with the underground Rock pioneers The Residents, Joe Goode Performance Group, Zaccho Dance Theatre, David Neumann’s Advanced Beginners Group, and The Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. Paul has also performed on several occasions at Proteus Gowanus. He is a Gym Teacher and Coach at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn.

One of the first tide mills in America once stood not far from where Proteus Gowanus stands today. Brouwer’s Mill, built in the mid-17th century, used the power of the Gowanus Creek’s rising and falling tides to turn wheat into flour.  During the Battle of Brooklyn, the mill and its bridge burned, forcing soldiers to cross the rising waters of Gowanus Creek. This workshop will uncover the little known history of tide mills in Brooklyn, as families work together to build their own miniature mills.

Join us for a presentation by vintage fashion and fabric expert Janice Everett on battle wear of yore.

What has the charge of the light brigade got to do with cardigans? How did French soldiers’ underwear become a multi-billion dollar industry? Why did an article of World War I airmen’s military uniform end up on fashion runways? And what is the connection between Napoleon, rubber boots and Billy Connolly? Find out more about the relationship between battle and fashion at this fascinating presentation. 

Janice Everett has an MA in design from the Royal College of Art, London, and a BA from Hornsey College of Art, London. She is a designer of knitwear, accessories and printed textiles, a vintage fashion and fabric expert, and an adjunct professor at LIM College teaching the business of fashion.

Please join us for opening reception of Battle Ground, the third and last exhibit of our yearlong Battle theme. Battle Ground will explore the pathos of the Battle of Brooklyn, stimulating our collective memory, evoking parallels between past and present, while focusing on the complexity, moral ambiguity, and devastation of this important Revolutionary confrontation. Historical imagery, rendered meaningless by over-use and political manipulation, will be revived in new forms.

The word “revolution” circles around us, forming the early consciousness of our country. History, also cyclical, repeats itself, and when it is forgotten, it haunts us, lying dormant in our collective memories. In 1776 one such haunting unfolded across a wide swath of what is now Brooklyn. Perhaps the battle is often forgotten (relative to others) because it was, in the words of Walt Whitman, a “resolute defeat.”

The battle-haunting still rages around us at Proteus Gowanus. Its culminating events took place just feet from our gallery location, along what was then the Gowanus Creek. The fields and marshes of 1776 are now a post-industrial urban landscape, and the Gowanus Canal is a hotly contested Federal Superfund and development site.

Maryland Willow, Robert Gould

Battle Ground is curated by Sasha Chavchavadze with help from Robert Gould, Angela Kramer and Eva Melas.

Battle Ground participants include artists, educators, urban planners and writers:

Paul Benney, Peter Bonner, Sasha Chavchavadze, Eymund Diegel, Robert Gould, Katarina Jerinic, Andrew Keating, Christina Kelly, V. Komar & A. Melamid, Angela Kramer, Robyn Love, Eva Melas, Duke Riley, Robert Sullivan.

*Special thanks to the restaurant and bakery, Runner & Stone, which takes its name from tide mills that operated along the Gowanus Creek in the 18th century.

At 7pm, join us for a final ‘surveillance’ under the watchful eye of spies, cameras and avian informers, present, of course, for your own good and the Homeland’s too. There will also be spy music  and wine to loosen lips.*

*We are required to inform you that your words and actions may be documented and used against you. No warrants required.

At 8pm, David Goren, Secret Wars contributor, will present the radio-inflected soundscape, The Short Attention Span Audio Theater, featuring excerpts from Antimatter, a sci-fi noir tale of shortwave radio espionage written by the mysterious C.M. Stanbury.

Spy music mix created by the polymusicologist Friese Undine.

Led by artist Eva Melas, this workshop explores the important role ships played in the Battle of Brooklyn. In the summer of 1776, Red Hook residents could see the imposing fleet of more than 400 British ships bearing down on Brooklyn. Gen. George Washington later rounded up humble vessels to make his retreat to Manhattan from Brooklyn Heights.

Participants in this family workshop will  make their own improvised armada from objects found in Brooklyn today, such as coffee cups and cardboard packaging. Weather permitting, the toy boats will be test launched from the deck of the Waterfront Museum barge. 

This workshop is part the Battle Pass Project, a Proteus Gowanus initiative exploring ideas of conflict, history and memory by marking sites of the Battle of Brooklyn. This epic battle, sometimes forgotten in the very neighborhoods where it occurred, was the largest confrontation of the Revolutionary War. The Battle Pass Project presents a series of multimedia, interdisciplinary installations, performances and family workshops. All are free.

Secret Wars artist Bryan M. Wilson will discuss his ongoing, multidisciplinary project, The Atomic Priesthood, and the two attendant installations at the Proteus Gowanus space, The Canticle for Sebeok and Vestments for Ten Millennia. Wilson will address the ecological stewardship, strategies for deep-time communication, and ritual inherent to the project and how an artistic practice can bridge seemingly disparate conditions.  The talk will be a survey of The Atomic Priesthood’s genesis, status, and potential future as it expands to collaborate with other potent collectives such as Smudge Studio and The Mildred Complex(ity).

The Atomic Priesthood is an ongoing, multidisciplinary art project that draws from the unique history and conditions of nuclear waste management. These byproducts of nuclear weapons and energy manufacture remain volatile to human life and ecosystems for tens of thousands of years. Noted semiotician Thomas A. Sebeok was commissioned by the US Office of Nuclear Waste Management to address the complex problem of long-term, geologic stewardship of nuclear waste materials.  He produced a report entitled “Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millenia”, proffering a potential solution to spanning these enormous gulfs of time that went far beyond creating systems of marking and practical infrastructure. He proposed that a select group of individuals be indoctrinated into a secret network of information whereby the particulars of nuclear waste, it’s repositories, its dangers and its management be sustained over millennia through ritual and allegory. Sebeok dubbed this group the “Atomic Priesthood”.

Attracted to this poetic notion of engaging time and materials, Wilson has taken inspiration from Sebeok and the history of nuclear science to illustrate the duties, rituals, and material culture of this imagined Priesthood.

The battles fought at night between white and black witches. The battle fought at bedtime between a newly married royal couple. The battle fought in subway stations with poisoned chewing gum. The battle fought with children in a dream. The culture war fought as an emergent species struggles for recognition as a civilized kind. The key battles of such “secret wars” will be the matter read aloud from translations of Czech, Japanese, American, Italian, and Old Irish crypto-military histories. Organized by Wendy Walker, editor of Proteotypes, the publishing arm of Proteus Gowanus.

As part of our exploration of Secret Wars, Proteus Gowanus is very pleased to present David Kahn, the world’s leading expert on the history of codes and cryptology. Dr. Kahn will discuss how the frantic race to break enemy codes helped bring about an earlier end to World War II.

Kahn’s monumental 1967 book The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing is the definitive account of secret writing from ancient hieroglyphs through the 20^th century. The book was a finalist for the 1968 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction, and was republished in a revised edition in 1996. Other notable books include Seizing the Enigma: The Race to Break the German U-Boat Code, 1939-1943; Hitler’s Spies: German Military Intelligence in World War II; and The Reader of Gentlemen’s Mail: Herbert O. Yardley and the Birth of American Codebreaking.

Dr. Kahn holds a doctorate in Modern German History from Oxford University. Although the National Security Agency (NSA) attempted to suppress the original publication of The Codebreakers, he was later selected as the NSA’s scholar-in-residence. His lifetime collection of cryptologic books, memorabilia, and artifacts is permanently housed in the agency’s National Cryptologic Museum.

Saturday, March 2, 5pm

As part of our yearlong theme, Battle, Anna Halberstadt and Mikhail Iossel will read their poems and stories.

Halberstadt will read poems that touch on the legacy of second-generation Holocaust survivors from the former Soviet Union. Iossel will read stories that deal with the interconnected nature of memory and imagination, past and present.

…

Mikhail Iossel, a professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal, is the author of Every Hunter Wants to Know. He is the co-editor of the anthologies Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States and Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia. His stories have been published in literary magazines in the US and abroad, translated into several foreign languages, and anthologized in Best American Short Stories and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the Guggenheim Foundation and NEA fellowship, among other awards.

Anna Halberstadt is a clinician, teacher and administrator of mental health clinics specializing in the adaptation of immigrants, with a special interest in immigrants from the former Soviet Union and other Eastern Block countries. As well as many publications in her field, her poetry has been accepted by Cimarron Review, St. Petersburg Review and Tiferet, as well as translated for Lithuanian journals like Literatura ir Menas and Shiaures Athenai.