Gorgeous Parody

By ROBERT HUGHES

Inside the glazed lobby of an office building at 88 Pine Street in downtown Manhattan, another Manhattan has been hatched: a florid, jaunty and raucous chick, quite like its big mother.

In this mini-Manhattan, Wall Street is a few paces long, the aluminum-sheathed prisms of the World Trade Center are 30 feet high, and though you can get on the Staten Island Ferry and feel it shiver under your feet, it can only carry half a dozen riders at a time. The Woolworth Building leans crazily, canted forward like a gothic shed in the wind. Its terra cotta fac,ade has become a wedding cake of writhing mullions and bulging cornices; the windows glow green, and inside in plain view there are people yelling at file clerks, chasing secretaries and munching what are probably pastrami sandwiches. On the roof, like a lizard on a rock, there is a goofy dragon; its tail is dollar bills, its hide is plated with nickels for scales. As its pink wings flap, its head lolls over the fac,ade with a kind of maniacal sloth. Above this symbol of Capital, in the tower, sits the old five-and-tenner Frank Winfield Woolworth himself, observing the seagirt isle with the proprietary air of King Kong.

It all seems to be there: the gauzy profile of skyscrapers seen from the Statue of Liberty, the brokers and bums and cops, the lunatic bustle, the claustrophobic alleys and carnival vitality. This gorgeous parody, one of the largest environmental sculptures (other than earthworks) ever made in America, is called Ruckus Manhattan. The space for it was procured by a nonprofit organization, Creative Time Inc., which coordinated the six-month creation, and was donated by the Orient Overseas Association, a shipping company. The buildings, cars, trains, boats and people--from life-size effigies to tiny, comic-strip figures painted on vinyl --were made by the Ruckus Works, a team of 20 painters, carpenters, sewers and stuffers, electricians, engineers and gadgeteers, brought together and working under the amiable direction of two artists, Red Grooms and his wife Mimi Gross.

Art and Wit. Grooms, 38, was born in Nashville; Gross, 35, is a New Yorker born and bred. Both share an obsession with great eccentric architecture and spectacles--Gaudi's Art Nouveau buildings in Barcelona, the park of monstrous 16th century carvings near Bomarzo in Italy. They are also fascinated by "naive" and "primitive" structures like the Watts Towers in Los Angeles, by puppets, facsimiles and toys. Their studio loft in Manhattan's Little Italy is crammed with antique clockwork toys and fragments of gaudy Sicilian carts. (They once traveled together in a horse-drawn wagon from Florence to Venice, giving puppet shows en route to pay their way.) Such are not the tastes of formalists, and those who like only "high" art will have to find other places to look for it in New York.

For sheer energy, historical savvy, wit and scrounging invention, Ruckus Manhattan is unique. Over the years, Grooms, Gross and their friends have been making their robust tableaux, always on a shoestring but never on such a scale. If one could envisage a fairground produced by Robert Crumb and Krazy Kat out of Dr. Caligari's Cabinet, this would be it. The Ruckus group are omnivores, infatuated with New York, and you are never allowed to forget it. Archie Peltier, an artist from Minneapolis, was responsible for most of the engineering, and his handiwork is impressive. People can walk up inside the Ruckus World Trade Center, looking at its "tenants," finally meeting a diminutive figure of the funambulist Philippe Petit walking the rope between the towers.

Scarecrow and Seagulls. Despite the cost and difficulty of keeping 20 people employed and paid for the six months it took to make, Ruckus Manhattan is closer to the street than the museum. It is cobbled together from the lumberyards of So-Ho and hardware bazaars of Canal Street, permeated with the hoarse side-of-the-mouth loquacity of a kvetching cabbie, swarming with grim and gaudy figures who, says Mimi Gross, are true New Yorkers, being "nosy, curious and short." There is a gritty and lugubrious side to the Ruckus imagination. Some of the figures are gross ham-faced brutes; and the bum who presides over the entrance to Wall Street is a scarecrow fit to terrify children, a wadded mass of sacking perched on a cockeyed fac,ade with nails bursting out of his chin for stubble.

A lot of it, however, has the direct simplicity of a good toy. When one steps aboard the Ruckus Staten Island Ferry, it shimmies alarmingly; plumes of smoke, made of sheet metal, issue from its funnels and begin to waggle; a flock of seagulls suspended from the smoke begin to circle and dip. One succumbs at once to these lighthearted parodies of reality. But they are also extremely well researched. The Ruckus group spent months drawing in the streets of lower Manhattan, getting to know the buildings.

Few architectural scholars can boast such detailed knowledge of the place. When one walks along the sinister, switchback gully of Ruckus' Wall Street, past the dark banks ("Manufacturers Handover") and the pullulating Stock Exchange with its Big Board and some 500 gesticulating brokers, one senses that every crocket and finial on the wildly leaning fac,ade of Trinity Church is right.

Ruckus research even extends be yond the tomb. Under the graveyard of Trinity Church is a vault, in which plywood skeletons lie promiscuously jumbled. One, wearing an 18th century peruke and still clutching a dueling pistol, is Colonel Alexander Hamilton. Another is Robert Fulton, interred with his paddle-wheel boat. If you would know New York, visit its Ruckus offspring. One can only hope that some company or museum has the wit to keep it on public display downtown forever.

Robert Hughes

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