“Black Acid Co-op” at Deitch Projects

“You never really discover a counterculture until it’s commodified,” says Justin Lowe, who is standing amidst tin foil, broken bottles, singed cushions, wood shavings, and shrapnel in a fire-bombed trailer inside the Deitch Projects annex on SoHo’s Wooster Street. On Wednesday night, Lowe and his collaborator, Jonah Freeman—two young artists who periodically work together—and some two dozen interns armed with saws and drills were racing against the clock to complete their hyper-elaborate installation in time for tonight’s opening party. 

“Black Acid Co-op” is an extension of Freeman and Lowe’s “Hello Meth Lab in the Sun,” commissioned by Ballroom Marfa in Texas in April 2008, which saw a smaller incarnation at December’s Art Basel Miami, in a show curated by Shamim Momin and Nate Loman. “As we worked on Marfa, we became interested in communities and rituals,” explains Lowe. It is a theme that unfolds here in a cinematic sequence of rooms, from hippie commune to Chinese pharmacy to Upper East Side apartment to university library, each leading into the next through hallways and thresholds punched through walls. The result is a highly interactive experience, as visitors—after signing a release form—climb stairs and explore corners, traveling through the installation to investigate the connections between its wildly disparate rooms. 

Deitch’s huge space not only allowed Freeman and Lowe to enlarge and develop their previous installations, it also provided them with a fitting environment in which to examine the juxtaposition of subcultures. “We see Deitch as a place of convergence,” says Freeman, “between SoHo, Chinatown, and the art world.”