Swept Away, Love Letter to a Surrogate Guild Hall, 2022

Swept Away: Love Letter to a Surrogate(s) takes place at the water’s edge in front of the Pavilion at Main Beach in East Hampton. Attendees can watch or be an active participant and enjoy the evening’s festivities. 

Warren Neidich notes “Swept Away: Love Letter to a Surrogate is a community oriented artistic project that aims to create a transcontinental heartbeat across America. It is hoped that through its combined gestures and performances, a sense of solidarity, so desperately missing today, will emerge with which to confront the ecological catastrophe at our doorstep.”

The syncopated sound of the surf will provide the background acousmatic. This poetic project in some ways harkens back to the Happenings staged by Allan Kaprow in 1966 all through the South Fork: https://alastairgordonwalltowall.com/2018/02/07/gas-i-am-a-happener-1966-east-hampton/

Artist Warren Neidich who created the successful Drive by Art event in 2020. The project is co-curated and co-coordinated by Christina Strassfield, Museum Director/Chief Curator of Guild Hall, Anuradha Vikram, Los Angeles based independent curator, and Los Angeles based conceptual artist Renee Petropoulos, plus administrative coordination by Julie McKim. 65 artists living in on the East End and 65 west coast artists are participating in this community and family-based Art Happening. In the spring the reverse will occur; with East End artists writing love letters to LA artists to be executed at Will Rogers State Beach, Santa Monica in conjunction with the 18th Street Arts Center.

At Main Beach, artists will create ephemeral performative gestures of immateriality or time-based works on the beach. This could be making a sandcastle, singing a song, reciting poetry, dancing, make a sculpture that interacts with the tide, collecting shells, doing a light projection on Main Beach pavilion, picking up garbage on the beach, etc.  The works could be political and deal with global warming and its effects on the water level or could be apolitical and talk about the natural beauty of the real in opposition to the digital and virtual.

The importance of biodegradable, non-toxic materials will be essential as well as leaving the beach pristine after the work. Each artist has been linked up to a west coast artist who will email instructions – a love letter – for a work of art that the local artist will incorporate into their performative piece, acting as a surrogate.