Counter Culture paired six contemporary New York artists with small businesses and organizations around the Bowery, the future home of the New Museum, to explore the commerce and cultural diversity of the surrounding neighborhoods.
The Flux Factory collective presented Secret Spaces, an installation in an area of Bowery Martial Arts (246 Bowery) not usually accessible to customers.
The piece ran as a spy game. Visitors who knew the password became “infiltrators”: at a command center hidden inside the martial arts school they chose a mission level (easy, intermediate, difficult, or impossible), received a briefing by telescreen, and set out with a mission pack. Missions ranged from neighborhood errands to gathering intelligence from payphones and composing photographs; the impossible level was never disclosed. Flux Factory’s own archive lists the piece as Secret Places.
Organized by Melanie Cohn, with Raul Vincent Enriquez, Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga, Jean Shin, Julianne Swartz, and Marion Wilson.