It’s hard not to be impressed by the massive scale of the archway under the Manhattan Bridge in Dumbo. Its large stone blocks create a majestic space while supporting one of New York’s most famous bridges and evoking the power of an ancient ruin. This was the site of artist Dread Scott’s one-time-only performance “On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide,” which took place yesterday.
A master of symbolic action and decoding the optics of oppression, Scott, in his new work, evoked the well-known images of 1950s and ’60s civil rights protests being interrupted by the violence of police water cannons. The mood of his Dumbo performance was stark and slightly somber, and it had the visual clarity of a Hollywood Western gunfight.
