Fort Greene artist Dread Scott buckles under pressure, then gets back up again.
On Oct. 7, the provocateur had a fireman spray him with a fire hose beneath the Manhattan Bridge archway for a performance with the heavy-duty title On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide.” The blast crumpled him onto the wet cobblestones, but Scott stood up to face it again, photos show. Scott’s soaking was meant to evoke iconic images of civil rights workers being hosed for their activism in the 1960s, but the message is universal, he said before staging the piece.
“Fundamentally, it’s about the struggle for freedom,” he said. “The people who have fought for freedom have been battered and brutalized. And that struggle is vital and important.”
As he faced down the torrent, Scott raised his hands in a gesture made internationally recognizable during the ongoing protests over the police killing of unarmed teen Michael Brown in the town of Ferguson, Missouri.
Scott has lived in Fort Greene since the ’90s and is currently working out of a studio in Dumbo. His connection to the neighborhood is part of the reason he chose the archway as the location for the performance. But he also considered Walt Whitman’s connection to the area, and the poet’s vocal support for the emancipation of slaves.
“There’s a history to this,” he said in his pre-show interview.
