JULY 7 THROUGH AUGUST 6, 2006 Assocreation Vienna, Austria Ondrej Brody & Kristofer Paetau Prague, Czech Republic The Fantastic Nobodies      Brooklyn Parfyme Deluxe             Copenhagen, Denmark + Brooklyn Hampus Pettersson             Gothenburg, Sweden Marc Ganzglass Brooklyn

Knock Knock Picnic is a fistful of renegade strays from across the European continent and the far reaches of Brooklyn. Four are collaborative teams and two, lone wolves.This is an exuberant laissez-faire summer curation of 95% famously unpredictable artists. What they will do is anybody's guess. That said...*

Parfyme Deluxe has built a pair of Street Canoes--one extremely big and a baby--out of garbage they rescued from underneath the Queensboro Bridge. Stills are projected of their voyage through the city, pulling themselves forward with hookers grabbing onto stationary street signs poles and

pushers for asphalt and cars. Parfyme (pronounced Parfum and a deliberate misspelling of it) is a three member team from Copenhagen, active since 2000. They have launched their raggedy vehicles and habitats throughout Europe, in Denmark, Poland, England, Germany, France and Finland (visit Parfyme.dk). Here, they join forces with New York's own Deluxe to become Parfyme Deluxe (as in, figuratively, with lettuce, tomatoes and fries). The four first worked together in Paris in Radioproject earlier this year.

Assocreation (founded 1997) is a five-member experimental collaborative team from Vienna. Assocreation's Walk of Fame works on both "ends" of the gallery, creating phenomena of rise and decay. At the entrance, a red carpet guides both visitor and artist into a sacred space of the art world. The installation also refers to the artists' big expectations coming to America. But the carpet is made out of coarse street brooms lying downside up on the pavement. Walking inside the space that defines itself as a vessel for the arts becomes a balancing act honored with a new kind of grace and cleaned shoes. The summit should be discovered at the exit of the gallery where the visitor can observe in the gallery toilet the 1932 sinking of an American ship. The team is well known and has exhibited widely throughout Europe (visit assocreation.com). FREEDOM - A Public Hanging , 2005, in which volunteerswere hung onto a meat rail at Atlas Meats in New York City's Meatpacking District, was their US debut.

Conceptual artists Ondrej Brody (ondrejbrody.org) and Kristofer Paetau (paetau.com) team up to produce the three-channel video Auticko . The first

channel shows the two of them on cell phones directing a well-dressed older man and younger woman (on the second channel) in the Jiri Svestka Gallery (the Czech Republic's leading private gallery) through a variety of pornographic encounters. On the third channel, we see their cell phone interlocutors, like gallery or auction administrators, taking their instructions and conveying them to the actors and crew.** The tone is dry and dispassionate. Brody and Paetau are frequent collaborators. They have independently and as collaborators exhibited their provocative and often ethically-challenging works throughout Europe.   Paetau had his US premier last year in "Past/Present/Forward" at the Buia Gallery.

David Henry Brown Jr. (davidhenrybrownjr.com) and Marc Grubstein from Brooklyn are The Fantastic Nobodies. Their extensive installation This Ain't No Picnic (after the Minutemen) stages a sprawling dyspeptic picnic, the dark side of the American idyll. It includes a large model of a gigantic graffiti rock at the Sand Street Projects near Dumbo. The words "Jah is the rock" have lasted on the original unchallenged for many years. With swathes of Astroturf riding the gallery's floor and walls, the artists create the ripples of rolling hills. Grubstein's enormous sewn-felt American flag is a hasty, ill-formed scrawl, which appears to be 'falling apart' from the inception. A tricolor basketball is frozen to the backboard of the hoop, frozen in time and unable to swish through. A garden blooms composed of plants borrowed from their friends, surrounded by generic urban detritus. And a pinhead Donald Trump hangs like a piñata from his feet. For The Fantastic Nobodies, all this is a backdrop for their provocative situational antics, which will unfurl through the course of the show, as their installation expands and adapts.

		Hampus Pettersson from Gothenburg, Sweden (hampuspettersson.com) will employ a multiplicity of genres and media including painting,
	photography, found objects and acapella noise to spontaneously create and digest his experience here during the course of the show. His poetic
		and subjective engagement will circulate throughout the gallery in an ongoing
			series of idea nodes, expanding through the course of the show. To begin, he'll explore his fascination with New York as a kid growing up
in Sweden, from the old-school CBGB's punk rock to Sonic Youth, the downtown jazz/experimental/noise scene to the AbEx painters, Warhol, Fluxus, Basquiat, Graffiti, Hip Hop and a million other things. He envisions, "Gothenburg and New York, merging, intertwining, dissolving, recontextualizing each other. The city as a self-portrait and vice-versa."

The show's finale is the premiere presentation of Marc Ganzglass's Meteorite Water Fountain, 2005, installed off on its own in Jack the Pelican's Salon Room. It is a working standard-form water fountain,resembling a generic institutional fixture. But he cast it at the Kohler Foundary with a special alloy from a meteorite that landed in the Soviet Union in 1948. And it is slightly radioactive. This work continues his investigation into the sublime ironies of material and industry, evidenced in such projects as his core sample displacements at the Socrates Sculpture Park, 2005. Its subtle, conceptual elegance immediately suggests a play on Duchamp's Urinal.

This exhibition was made possible by the generous support of the Austrian Cultural Forum, New York.

*Most of the works are site- and/or situation-specific and interactive. The two poles of reference offered up for consideration were: 1) the epic General Slocum disaster. The ferry boat that sank in the East River in 1904 (resulting in the drowning of the wives and children of New York's German immigrant community) was on its way to meet the men folk at the Grand Street Piers for a Williamsburg picnic). 2) Manet's masterpiece Dejeuner sur l'Herbe , a painting once considered tremendously shocking and radical, now tamed to the polite status of calendar art. To what extent the artists in the show will choose to embrace these topics or ignore them remains to be seen in the exhibition's unfolding. Also, how well they might serve as useful references for interpretation is at this time unclear.