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Governors Island, located just off Manhattan’s southern tip, was used solely for military purposes until 2003. This past summer the nonprofit Creative Time set its public-art quadrennial "PLOT: This World and Nearer Ones" there, displaying 19 site-specific commissions throughout the island’s 172 acres.

In Bruce High Quality Foundations short film Isle of the Dead (shown in the abandoned Fort Jay movie theater), the artworld and its players, killed off by the current economic crisis, reemerge as zombies promoting a nostalgic art movement. The film culminates in an uprising on Governors Island, ending with a zombie sing-along to Bryan Adamss "Summer of ’69." In a neo-Gothic chapel, Anthony McCalls installation You and I made and remade geometric shapes when artificial light encountered a gauzy mist being dispensed by haze machines.

Preoccupied with dead composers and fired by a love for classical piano pieces, the Dutch artist Guido van der Werve makes films saturated in melancholy and leavened with slapstick. His beautifully shot vignettes Number Four: I don’t want to get involved in this; I don’t want to be part of this; talk me out of it and Number Seven: The clouds are more beautiful from above evoked what the critic Jörg Heiser has termed van der Werve’s "Romantic Conceptualism." A musical score and ambient guide to the island, composed by Patti Smith and her daughter, Jesse, served as affective ear candy, and Klaus Webers 13-foot-tall Large Dark Wind Chime (Tritone Westy) offered a moody tritone set against an equally dejected backdrop: the Financial District.

"PLOT: This World and Nearer Ones" originally appeared in the October 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2009 Table of Contents.