East Williamsburg Gets a Castle

In East Williamsburg, on a stretch of low brick and concrete warehouses, a pale-gray castle slightly taller than a bouncy house rises from the center of a paved lot. This is SHELL, a sculpture commissioned by the nearby art center Amant, which calls it an “interplay of toy and fortress.” It was dreamed up by Esben Weile Kjær, a 33-year-old Danish art star. Reed thin and blonde, with the slouch of a weary royal, Kjær spent Tuesday afternoon directing his troops: five amateur dancers, recruited from clubs, who will perform at an opening on Saturday in a piece modeled on the firework displays at Disney’s Magic Kingdom. (It will involve pyrotechnics, a pulsing soundtrack, and 1,000 white roses.) The group was meeting for the first time to figure out what the dance will look like, and Kjær asked them to move in ways that suggested violence. He started the music — a new piece by the electronic artist Croatian Amor — and the dancers slapped and punched the air like careful Tae Kwon Do students. “No, no,” Kjær interrupted. The motions needed to feel more personal, he said. “Think of your memories of violence.” They started again. A dancer slapped his own face. Another thrust his hips.

Kjaer, left, directs a performance by (from left) Cash, Ojulowo Mei, Jance Enslin, and Jack Powers.
Photo: Adriane Quinlan

Kjær tries to complicate how we think about objects, bringing the violence back to our Disneyfied cartoon castles. He grew up with a toy castle and wondered as an adult what would happen if he blew one up to a scale that he could walk through. He found a photo of his old toy and started designing. But the castle he came up with is not a straightforward copy. One tower looks like a concrete satellite, another like a Dyson fan, and the tallest is prickled with reflective lights, like the ones that keep airplanes off oil rigs. Shimmery flags in front have more in common with gas-station signage than a knight’s pennant. These fragments came from Kjær’s walks around the industrial neighborhood, and he collaged them together “so it looks like something that is not,” he said. “All my work is always in drag somehow.”

An obstruction light on a battlement and a satellite-shaped tower.
Photo: Marisa Hetzler

Curators at Amant recruited Kjær after seeing “Solar System,” a solo show that opened last year at Denmark’s Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, where car-size concrete structures that viewers could walk around looked like a cross between a skate park and the bunkers that Nazis built along the Danish coast — immovable monuments to the occupation, colonized by teenagers looking for places to party (including Kjær, who DJ’d there).

Kjær enjoys walking the line between fascism and fun, and outside the “Solar System” show he built a bronze-and-steel sculpture modeled on the Silver Surfer, a comic-book character, which he put on a weathered concrete base, aping a sculpture of a Stalinist hero. This year, Kjær researched mass-produced “magic wands” and blew up the most popular models to Claes Oldenburg proportions.

SHELL was a new challenge — he had never made a piece that big, but he had such a huge space to work with. Amant, the nonprofit art center founded by the collector Lonti Ebers, had owned the land since 2015 and had used it mostly as a parking lot until last year, when it staged a performance by the artist Joshua Serafin (“VOID”). Nearly 500 people showed up, and the curators got to work planning more programming. There are now book fairs and concerts. Ian Wallace a curator, thought of artists who could both make work that would be “durational” — or last under a summer sun — and make it lively through performance. He had met Kjær when the artist did a residency nearby, and knew “Burn!” — a performance that Kjær staged at the Pompidou, where dancers dressed as firefighters and alternated their movements between simulating an evacuation and simulating a strip-tease in a never-ending loop. Wallace liked the political feeling of Kjær’s bunker-inspired sculptures — and liked the idea of a play on a military fortification, which felt “in tune with the moment we live in,” he says. “It’s a structure that’s military, but if you shrink it down it becomes a toy, and when you blow it up to the original size, the resonances from the military come back.”

As for why Kjær initially latched on to the image of a castle, he suggested that maybe it was because America didn’t have any. At least not any real castles. Instead, there is the Central Park Belvedere, the Chateau Marmont, and the Bushwick White Castle — buildings using the forms of European castles as drag, a type of thrill he recognizes from a youth DJ-ing in bunkers. SHELL makes the fakery of the façade more obvious, Kjær says, since it was built like a film set with a thin veneer of concrete over plywood. It will last the summer, but maybe not much longer. “It’s just a surface imitating rock,” he says, and encourages visitors to knock. “You can hear how hollow it is.”

SHELL opens on Saturday, May 31, with a party from 5 to 10 p.m., and will host performances, concerts, and other events through September 28. Accessible during the opening hours for Amant: noon to 6 p.m. Thursday through Sunday. 316 Ten Eyck Street; amant.org 

Correction:  A previous version of this story incorrectly attributed a quote about the piece to Amant’s chief curator, Tobi Maier. That statement was provided by Ian Wallace, who conceived of the exhibition.