For Creative Time’s final staging of Art on the Beach at the Battery Park City Landfill, several artists’ collaborations emphasized the recreational quality of the site and the vacation from polemics that it offered those who pursued it.

Sculptor Jody Culkin’s subterranean, brightly painted Vacation Homes of the Future, for one, was created with the assistance of engineer and earthquake specialist Guy Nordenson. Built to accommodate one or two people, these small pits in the sand were radically transformed by Uwe Mengel’s participatory spy thriller, Mushrooms, during which audience members listened to a talking and singing corpse, a victim, and six other characters as a story unfolded.

Photograph by Lawrence I. Lesman

Multiple Artists

Art on the Beach 7

Manhattan

1985