As we ran off the bus to 86th Street Beach at Far Rockaway, we made it just in time: The judging of the Creative Time’s second annual Artist Sandcastle Competition had began. Last year’s winners, artists Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw were surveying the largely conceptual sculptures. “We’ve been practicing judging for months,” they told us. “We love to judge. We take judging very seriously.”
The judging involved plopping down on differently-shaped aquarium-viewing stations, waiting for “the pancake” machine to catapult a pancake into the crowd and watching the mimes finish mime-building their invisible Tower of Babel-shaped sandcastle and subsequently falling and crashing it, naturally.
As Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw, collector Shelley Fox Aarons, actor and designer Waris Ahluwalia, and MoMA PS1 director and MoMA’s curator at large Klaus Biesenbach converged for a for a little mental pow-pow, the Ghost of a Dream team went for a dip in the ocean, golden suits and all. Paul Outlaw may or may not have told Klaus Biesenbach that his favorite was “Boring!” but a consensus was made: Jamie Isenstein’s team was the “dark horse” winner, liked by all. This sandcastle consisted of three pedestals — one with cubes of melting ice, one with soap bubbles softly popping in the sea-breeze and one with a saxophone player performing a medley of soft indie covers. It was a subtle, cohesive piece that really worked. Hurrah!
Watch our video highlights of the event above, minus crashing Klaus Biesenbach’s Far Rockaway backyard BBQ and the naked moonlight beach swim (minus Klaus Biesenbach). We also missed James Franco in a sweater, whom Paul Outlaw did not recognize and asked if he was cold. Repeatedly.
See a few more photos on our Facebook page. See Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw attached to a spinning wheel that repeatedly dips them into a wad of liquid gold here. (Video: Yossera Bouchtia/ANIMALNewYork)
