Photo by David B. Smith. Courtesy Creative Time

Spectators peer into "Waterboard Thrill Ride," Coney Island, New York, 2008

Photo by David B. Smith. Courtesy Creative Time

"Waterboard Thrill Ride," August 15, 2008. Performance view, Coney Island, New York

Rita Ackermann A Paper Ball Rita Ackermann Slava Mogutin Puts Five Questions to Rita Ackermann Wunderkind Designer Brings Religion to the Runway

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

“Step up to the latest and greatest distraction in Coney Island: the Waterboard Thrill Ride!” A cement wall greets you as you climb three cinder-block steps and peep into a small, barred window. Put a dollar in the feeder, see the lights flash on, listen to the aggro music, and watch a robot pour water into the mouth of another robot that’s struggling against the restraints strapping him to a Khmer Rouge– approved slanted table. Endure the 15-second show and know that it’s no coincidence 15 seconds is also the length of time that the average Navy Seal can withstand being waterboarded. Afterward, walk back down the steps and notice a cartoon depiction of the technique: it’s Squidward Tentacles waterboarding his nemesis SpongeBob SquarePants. SpongeBob, yellow and porous as he is, seems to enjoy the technique. A word balloon emanating from his mouth bursts with the words, “IT DON’T GITMO BETTER!” Now go discuss what you’ve seen. Since you’re in Coney, you should do this over a pie at Totonno’s Pizza.

The roots of Waterboard Thrill Ride stretch back more than a year. In 2004, I founded the Coney Island–based Dreamland Artist Club (a project produced by New York’s Creative Time), in the service of which more than 40 artists—including Adam Cvijanovic, Tauba Auerbach, and Rita Ackermann—painted signs and rides in Coney Island to bring handcraft to Brooklyn’s famed oceanside community, whose distinctive visual identity was becoming homogenized and computer generated. In the second year, we opened a sign shop in the same building as the freak show, where the artists could work on signs and hang out. At the end of our first season there, I decided to keep the shop and become a full-fledged carny, right down to neglecting to tell the absentee landlord that I’d be staying another 16 months.

I stopped being a carny when the Bloomberg administration bought the building I was in for my friends at Coney Island USA [the not-for-profit arts organization responsible for all arts programming in the area, including the famed Mermaid Parade], ensuring the freak show would have a permanent home. Part of the covenant was that CIUSA was to have no rent-paying tenants, so I was evicted along with the US army recruiters and Mike the photo-booth guy. Since I went quietly, they offered me Mike’s booth to start an “art-related business,” which I would hopefully be able to move somewhere else in the neighborhood after the season. I visited the booth after they cleaned it out. All that remained of the previous tenant was a photo backdrop—a romantic beach scene—painted directly on the wall, and a cast-iron sink in the corner that looked like it hadn’t been washed since Weegee worked there. My immediate response was, “Let’s make it a torture chamber; we’ll waterboard people a buck a head.” And my friends all laughed. Then we got concerned about the implications, and then we laughed again. Waterboarding is an interesting word. It sounds innocuous, like wakeboarding or water sports, but it stands for weaponizing the basic element of life. It’s a perfect contradiction— a curiosity so rare and shocking, it deserves to be exiled from the real world and sent to live in that home of the weird: Coney Island. What fixed the idea in my head was my next discovery, concealed behind some wooden paneling, of another painted backdrop, this one of a prison cell, bars and all. Beach + jail = Waterboard Thrill Ride!

I came up with the idea for the booth in March of 2008. And even though we would be using robots in the roles of interrogator and prisoner, I thought somebody would bring reason to bear and say, “NO, you can’t do this.” But people kept saying yes. Most emphatic in this regard was Anne Pasternak, Creative Time’s artistic director. Although I called on her to be that voice of reason, it was like calling Nathan’s Famous and asking them if I should eat hot dogs. Anne allocated a budget and put a spine in my back. And so the ride took its rightful place next to the magic mouse guy and the world’s smallest lady.