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Gospel of Fleeting Archives

Part artist, part urban geologist, Robert Wogan speaks of
deserted industrial facilities and neglected artifacts with religious reverence. "I'm attracted to what most people consider obsolete relics," says the Stone Ridge resident. Describing his project Riverboat Junction, for which he used the most powerful electric light available to illuminate a derelict vessel rusting on the Hudson's banks off New York City, he testifies, "I try to pick out abandoned buildings and sites that have a soul. I see something there-sometimes it's the location, sometimes it's the object, sometimes it's both." As if bestowing blessings on the ephemeral nature and uncertain afterlife of his subjects, Wogan's sculptural installations typically last merely hours.

Consider one of the artist's early attempts to reanimate what he terms "detritus". Starflyte-the model name for a Shasta trailer, his hallelujah to a camper axed by vandals and left for dead in rural Stanfordville-involved replacing smashed windows with green plastic corrugated awning, waiting for darkness to fall and then radiating the entire piece with interior lighting. Viewed from the vantage point of Route 25, the overall effect (as documented by Wogan photographically) suggested an aqua-indigo, stained-glass chapel. "For four hours, neighbors and travelers saw an aberration in the woods," Wogan says. "Imagine if you lived there and never noticed the place and then drove by one night and suddenly saw it green."

Wogan's gospel of fleeting artifacts begins with what he characterizes as "nostalgia". He wants his artistic practices to enable people "to see and experience old objects in new ways, focusing our attentions on radical changes affecting society." He claims that growing up in Manhattan as well as inheriting his father's love of boats left him wondering how the Hudson River made its relatively recent transition from industrial to commercial landmark, and why it continues to harbor obsolete ships and piers.

Wogan laments that since the 1960s the river's derelict condition has attracted derelict behavior, including the city using it as a garbage dump. Thus his first big illumination target became a full-size, half-sunken passenger ferry, tethered to a weathered warehouse and pier. Overlooked or forgotten, "anonymous as the people who built the structures and worked in them during their prime time", according to Wogan, their forms and "brilliance" were revealed on the longest day of the year when he shone a humongous beam on the site from across the Hudson. The brightening source, trucked into Riverside Park on a six-wheeled trailer, requiring a film permit to operate and capable of lighting up the Palisades, tied up traffic on the West Side Highway for four hours. Wogan underwrote Riverboat Junction out of his own pocket. "But if I didn't do it I'd regret it," he confesses.

Tracing his calling to installation art (a defining term Wogan has reconciled himself to for lack of a better word) to a "core childhood memory" of seeing Manhattan Ruckus (a small-scale model of New York City subways, trains, and towers manufactured by sculptor, painter, and showman Red Grooms), the then-budding multimedia artist eventually found inspiration in traveling the country. After sleeping in Death Valley and descending into the Grand Canyon, Wogan returned to his urban homeland and earned a scholarship to study geology at Columbia University. But his practical aspiration to become an earth scientist or archeologist faded when, enraptured by his longtime dream of being an artist, he enrolled in studio-art courses. His first thesis project, a throwback to Grooms called Tar Land, was an interactive environment featuring domestic objects, such as a La-Z-Boy and TV covered with roofing tar and arranged in a tar cave built within a fabricated room. Evoking carnival as well as kitsch, Wogan advertised its opening with buttons and posters meant to echo billboards that count down the miles to South of the Border witnessed by drivers along Interstate 95.

Finishing college in the 1980s, Wogan turned to construction work to finance his artistic vision, celebrating what British art critic and curator David Thorp has come to call "the former grandeur of past industrial culture and the thrill that comes from exploring inaccessible, dangerous places by means employing hazardous methods." A break came for the installation artist when he earned exhibition space in PS1 Interior's grand reopening in New York City.

"They said, 'If you can find a spot, you can have it, and we'll give you a thousand dollars,'" Wogan recollects. "The most remote spaces interested me, and I found a metal staircase that repairmen used to fix the ventilation system at the peak of the building." The steps became the entrance to a shallow canal passage he constructed (reminiscent of the half-story floor in the film Being John Malkovich), leading to a low-light, pyramidal room where the chambered sounds of a videotape shot by Wogan at an abandoned military hospital in Germany issued from within slippery Masonite walls. Viewers who stumbled upon the staircase and had the gumption to climb and crawl experienced significant sensory alterations. The gallery ended up keeping the installation titled Interior for five years.

Around the time the PS1 Interior exhibition was mounted, the project director of London's Henry Moore Foundation began following Wogan's career. In 1999 the artist embarked on United Radiance, a plan to illuminate the stacks and document subterranean unlit passages of the SS United States, using a camera he built and mounted to his head while recording.

An $82 million steamship ocean liner built in 1952 as a challenger to the Queen Mary and meant to last a century, the SS United States-the fastest ocean liner ever built-operated for only 17 years, quashed by the advent of airplane travel. It is now permanently docked in Philadelphia harbor. A year after Wogan laid hands on the ship, the Henry Moore Foundation came calling with $15,000 and an invitation to participate in the Liverpool Biennial, an international exhibition held in an abandoned English school. Wogan pledged to reproduce the off-kilter experience of walking the maze of the SS United States' bowels by making his infrared video footage of its boiler room the centerpiece of the installation, christened Below.

Choosing the school's courtyard as his space, Wogan worked with a crew of five assistants to build a 28,000 square-foot labyrinth of galvanized stainless steel sheets. Serendipitously assembled in a meaningful layout on top of hopscotch and snake-game numbers and words (including a perfectly stationed "END") still intact, its reflective surfaces suggested being lost in a funhouse. At the same time, the act of navigating the overall pattern summoned both the terror of the mythic Minotaur (the bull-headed monster imprisoned in a labyrinth) as well as the spiritual dimensions of walking a labyrinth, such as inlaid on the floors of medieval Christian churches, or on the grounds of Falling Waters convent in Saugerties. Solving the puzzle of the maze-like structure led viewers to an enclosed room, where thumping, clinking, and clanking noises-like a ghost rattling chains-recorded on board the SS United States boomed through four surround sound speakers.

Currently the subject of a solo show which opened March 29, a scaled-down version of Below may be viewed in New York City at a Chelsea gallery. "People who walk the labyrinth will have a different experience than touring a museum," Wogan prophesizes. "I want to take their ocular and spatial senses away to reproduce the feeling of being inside something abandoned, where you can fall through the floor or something can fall on you; where a homeless person could be living or gangs might attack you." Pronouncing a possible outcome of an encounter with Below as if vested with divine authority, Wogan avers transcendence, "allowing freer thought to take place."

-Pauline Uchmanowicz