Just How ‘Weird’ Is New Jersey?

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Think downtown Manhattan is weird? It just got weirder thanks to an influx of artists from across the Hudson. HERE Arts Center on Sixth Avenue at Spring Street hosted an opening for its show “Weird New Jersey: The Exhibition” on Sunday. It featured the work of 17 artists who draw inspiration from the Garden State, and runs through March 5.


Attending the opening was author Robert Heide, who is working with coauthor John Gilman and photographer Paul Johnson on a book about the back roads of New Jersey to be published by Voyager Press.


“What makes New Jersey weird?” the Knickerbocker asked. “You’re continually running into ruins,” Mr. Johnson said. “Unlike Long Island,” Mr. Heide said, “you’re really are in Middle America. Like Ohio. In Manhattan, we live here in a beehive. I think you can take a deep breath” when you enter New Jersey, he said.


Also present were Mark Sceurman and Mark Moran, publishers of Weird N.J. magazine, from which the title of the exhibition was derived. For more than a decade, they have been compiling unusual folklore and offbeat stories about New Jersey. Their magazine has documented a house that looks like a cookie jar, art placed atop telephone poles on Route 23, and a man who sat in a white plastic chair on Route 26 and waved at every car that passed by.


Recently, they hosted “Weird U.S.” on the History Channel, which took them to the foothills of Tennessee to meet the Melungeons and a journey in search of the remains of a Morristown man who was hanged and flayed in the 1800s.The History Channel program is a cross between “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” and “Ripley’s Believe it or Not!” The magazine and the show, Mr. Sceurman said, were “born out of a bored suburban life.”


Mr. Moran said their magazine endeavors “not so much to tell people what is weird but gather the ideas of different people as to what is weird.” He pointed to a bowling ball sculpture made by Roland George, part of which was at the HERE gallery.


What are the best calls they get, the Knickerbocker asked. “When you think they’re pulling your leg.” Mr. Sceurman’s staff were once told about a swamp in the Pine Barrens where dozens of starched white shirts had been placed in the trees. They wrote about it and titled the story “Shirtwood Forest” after Robin Hood’s Sherwood Forest. Mr. Sceurman said, “There’s not a lot of people doing what we do.”


“New York has become so Disneyfied,” the exhibit’s curator, Philip Buehler, said. “Its rough edges aren’t there anymore. New Jersey is continually reinventing itself.” Mr. Buehler grew up in New Milford, lived in Metuchen, N.J., and attended Rutgers. He is a longtime contributor to the magazine Weird N.J.


Mr. Buehler had a crane on call to drop a New Jersey Turnpike tollbooth into the art gallery, but it couldn’t fit through the door. The structure was meant as an homage to artist Tony Smith’s ride on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike between the Meadowlands and New Brunswick with a couple of students in the 1950s.


Upon entering the exhibit, a small “Hall of Fame” enshrined artists with ties to New Jersey, including Kiki Smith, Patti Smith, Robert Smithson, George Segal, Cindy Sherman, David Wojnarowicz, Allan Kaprow, Barbara Kruger, and Roy Lichtenstein.


Opposite the Hall of Fame sat a lawnmower decorated with digital watches, old Palm Pilots, and other high-tech castoffs. The sculpture was created by Stephen “Hoop” Hooper of Clifton, N.J., who calls the contraption “Hoop’s Handy Helper.” On the street outside, Mr. Hooper’s van was covered with clocks on one side and “techno trash” on the other: computer keyboards, phones, etc., bought at “a dollar a pound.” Wearing a blue lei and a World War I medallion attached to a towering purple headdress, Mr. Hooper spoke of other vehicles he has decorated including a “can-vertible,” and a “time machine.”


Mr. Hooper describes himself as a “techno visionary” and the “self-proclaimed king of art.” He told the Knickerbocker that following the death of Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol, an average American could no longer name a single living artist. “So I have stepped onto the throne in the art world,” he said.


Near a bar serving Ramstein beer – brewed in New Jersey, of course – was Greg Leshe’s “Personal Radar” consisting of a wheelbarrow filled with lumber juxtaposed by a video screen showing the artist pushing the wheelbarrow filled with burning materials down a road at a former missile base in Livingston, N.J.


He said the piece recalls the times he went flying with his father in a World War II airplane. In the piece, he said, he endeavors to become self-illuminated and turn himself into an anthropomorphic radar screen. He said, “The things that illuminate you, also destroy you.”


Zach Rockhill was also the subject of his own work: In his photographs he appears to do calisthenics with a chair. The chair, it turns out, had been bolted to the ceiling; the piece explores the inversion of rules and relationships. He said the piece was influenced by a Buster Keaton film, in which the actor spins inside a boat while the camera stands still.


Work by artists Lucas Kelly and Bryony Romer, both of whom studied at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, are on display. Faculty from the school such as professor Gary Kuehn and graduate director Hanneline Rogeberg came out for the opening.


Ms. Romer exhibited photos of a dollhouse she had built and taken around to different locations such as a vacant corporate office in Piscataway. Her work examines “the extra spaces that you find and imagining what it would be like to inhabit them.” In one picture, the backdrop is a housing project whose design “mimics nostalgic architecture” of the dollhouse. The resulting images are simultaneously playful and unsettling.


Environmental concerns united certain artists’ visions. Jon Birdseye of Garfield, N.J., displayed a panel from a 40-foot-long photographic mural of a toxic man-made lake off Exit 7 in New Jersey. The mural is now installed at a construction site at the southwest corner of Lafayette and Bond streets. Beth Krebs created an installation of the side of an oil tank, the kind seen along the New Jersey Turnpike.


Wearing a necklace she designed consisting of plastic eyeballs, Ms. Krebs said she used to look at the oil tanks while commuting from Jersey City to New Brunswick. She said she is interested in certain moments of attention in the urban distance. “Sometimes,” she said, “things can happen in surprising places.”


The New York Sun

© 2024 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use