Orien McNeill, artist/pirate prankster who made merry mischief on the water, dies at 45

Boston Globe

2 days ago

Soon, a cohort of street artists and dumpster-diving freegans -- the anti-consumerist foragers of the late aughts -- who might otherwise have been squatting in Brooklyn warehouses, were drawn to the same lawless territory. It was a last frontier and haven in the ever-gentrifying New York City boroughs. They made art from scavenged materials and held events that harked back to the Happenings of their 1960s predecessors, although the events were intended for no audience but themselves.
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No critics were summoned, and not much was documented. Mr. McNeill was their pied piper, guru, and pirate prankster, who hatched extravagant, loosely organized adventures involving costumes, flotillas of handmade rafts, and, once, a pop-up bar on a sinking tugboat.
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When Caledonia Curry, otherwise known as the artist Swoon, began to conceptualize 'Swimming Cities' -- winsome floating contraptions built from salvaged materials that she launched on the Hudson River in 2008 -- Mr. McNeill, her classmate from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, was an inspiration, project architect, and co-pilot.
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'Some of the funniest and proudest and most exciting moments were with Orien, just making things," said Duke Riley, a fellow traveler in art and antics.
Duke Riley/NYT
The following year, when she reimagined the project for Venice, Mr. McNeill played the same role. With a crew of nearly 30, Curry sent her materials to nearby Slovenia, where customs inspectors initially held up their shipping containers: They were confused by the contents -- they thought it was garbage.
The crew members built their fantastical crafts in Slovenia and sailed to Venice, where they crashed the annual Biennale, enchanting the assembled art crowd as the vessels floated through the canals. Mr. McNeill served as the escort and advance guard, scooting about in a battered skiff in case someone fell overboard.
'Orien introduced me to world building,' Curry said in an interview. 'He was living this beautiful, feral existence on the water -- the center of this artist community. He shied away from the limelight, but his spirit informed everybody.'
She added, 'With artists, there's always this thing about what's art and what's life, and nobody held that closer to the bone than Orien.'
Duke Riley, an artist known for releasing thousands of pigeons outfitted with LEDs into the night sky above the Brooklyn Navy Yard, as well as building a wooden replica of a Revolutionary War-era sub and launching it at the Queen Mary 2, was a co-conspirator on a variety of adventures.
One was the sinking bar, which Mr. McNeill persuaded Riley to help him build in a half-submerged tugboat with a rusted-out floor. The bar opened at low tide, and as the hours passed, guests eventually found themselves waist-deep in water. They swam out before the tide rose too high.
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'He never let personal safety get in the way of a genius idea,' Riley said.
He added: 'Some of the funniest and proudest and most exciting moments were with Orien, just making things. . . . Maybe, in time, people will look back and realize what an important catalyst he was.'
Mr. McNeill was irresistible, said Dan Glass, a fellow artist and frequent collaborator. He was like a combination of Auntie Mame and George Carlin -- or like a Martin Scorsese character but in a Wes Anderson movie, he added, noting Mr. McNeill's singular style. (Mr. McNeill favored blazers and jaunty feathered hats.)
He made meals into performance art. He once served a roasted alligator to Riley in lieu of birthday cake (there were candles). Another event featured martinis made from Pepto Bismol and garnished with Band-Aids (surprisingly drinkable, by all accounts).
He conceived an annual adventure he called 'The Battle for Mau Mau Island,' named for a lump of landfill circled by a creek near Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. Hundreds of intrepid people would organize themselves into themed gangs and set out in homemade crafts of dubious seaworthiness through Jamaica Bay to compete, 'American Gladiators'-style, with various props and pseudo-weapons.
The 'boats' disintegrated once the shenanigans were over. For McNeill, the intent was to highlight the potential of the city's waterways 'as a frontier of temporary arts and theatrics,' he told Gothamist magazine in 2016, while pointing out the scarcity of free creative space on land.
Mr. McNeill's most ambitious project was inspired by Curry's 'Swimming Cities.' He wanted to do the same thing, but bigger, and conceived a 500-mile trip along the Ganges River to Varanasi, the sacred city and pilgrimage site in northern India. He called it 'The Swimming Cities of the Ocean of Blood.'
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Mr. McNeill and a group of collaborators built five metal pontoon boats in Brooklyn -- three of them powered by motorcycles, one by sail and oars, and another by paddle wheel -- which he would captain. The boats were designed to lock together for camping on the water.
In 2010, they shipped the components to a small Indian university in the city of Farrukhabad, which had agreed to host them while the collaborators reassembled their crafts. Though they had spent two years raising money through events that Mr. McNeill orchestrated, they were still underfunded and under-provisioned.
It was an arduous monthslong trip. Marauding monkeys attacked their camp. They often saw bodies floating in the river. At one point they encountered a quarter-mile-wide concrete dam -- a terrifying 'Class 5 rapid,' said Porter Fox, a participant who knew his waterfalls (he had been a white-water guide).
Mr. McNeill tackled it first. Fox went next, his boat flipping end over end as it plummeted over the torrent. Clearly, it was not going to be possible for the rest of the boats, or their crews, to survive the dam. Mr. McNeill single-handedly disassembled the remaining boats on shore, somehow found a tractor for hire, and set off on land to bypass the dam.
'I remember seeing him coming over a rise, like Lawrence of Arabia, waving from the tractor,' Fox said. 'It was just so herculean. No one else could have sallied their spirit enough to think about getting out of this jam. Everyone just wanted to go home, and he's, like, 'No, we're not done.''
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Orien McNeill was born Dec. 7, 1979, in Manhattan, the only child of Van Cleve, a filmmaker, and Malcolm McNeill, an artist, author, and television director. His mother and father are his only immediate survivors.
Mr. McNeill's godfather was author William S. Burroughs, with whom the elder McNeill had collaborated on a graphic novel. Burroughs baptized Orien with a dab of vodka from his afternoon drink. He also turned over the lease on his loft in Tribeca to the family.
By age 10, Orien was drawing, painting, and sculpting 'as well as any mature artist,' Malcolm McNeill said. He taught his son how to use an airbrush at 12 and a vacuum forming machine, for molding plastic, at 13, because Orien wanted to build a spaceship.
'Otherwise, I got out of the way,' McNeill said. 'He could make anything.'
After graduating with a degree in industrial design from Pratt in 2001, Mr. McNeill spent a year traveling, stopping in New Zealand, Borneo, India and Ireland. When he returned, he bought the Chris-Craft, parked it in the Gowanus Canal and began homesteading there.
He later lived on a sailboat, which he reconfigured by cutting the mast off to make room for a massive deck -- the kind one might build for a house, cantilevered over the boat's bow -- so that he could host more people. 'He would do anything to create the ecosystem he wanted,' Fox said.
For his 10th birthday, Orien had asked his parents to get him business cards. His father still has a few.
'Orien McNeill,' they read. 'All your dreams made real.'
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