By Bob Powers

Underground

Art Moles

It’s about 68 degrees on this Sunday in November, possibly the last gorgeous day of the year. And I’m waiting to climb down a manhole to go underneath the city.

It’s the inaugural event for Ars Subterranea, a multidisciplinary group whose stated purpose is to create an intersection between art and the architectural relics in New York City. Today the architectural relic in question is the abandoned Atlantic Ave. subway tunnel. Built in 1844 by the LIRR, and sealed up in 1861, it’s the world’s oldest subway tunnel. Bob Diamond, president of the Brooklyn Historic Railway Association, found an entrance to it in 1980. The BHRA was formed to spearhead the tunnel’s restoration and has maintained its preservation ever since. This afternoon, there’s an art show down there.

Down the manhole and through a narrow passageway, I descend a giant wooden staircase into the tunnel. The floor is loose dirt, the walls are stone and the arched roof is sky-high and all stretched-out beautiful brick dripping with moisture. It’s jarring to suddenly be someplace so majestic with the Atlantic Ave. traffic passing just overhead. The air is very damp down here and the shirt I’m wearing is wafting up to my nose a fetid smell of damp laundry left in the washer too long. Lightbulbs have been strung along the roof, spaced far enough apart to pull me in and out of darkness as I walk. Along one side of the dirt floor are deep indentations where train tracks must once have lived. I can hear trains actually. Not some ghostly echo, but a soundtrack of locomotives and clanging bells that’s being pumped from the white computer speakers sitting every 20 feet or so at the base of the left-hand wall. For a long stretch, the pumped-in sound is the only apparent manipulation of the space, perhaps to let the space establish itself as its own piece in today’s show.

The installations begin deep in the tunnel and are few and far between. There are some junk sculptures, one composed of "all parts scavenged from a landfill created by the digging of the 4 tunnel," according to the information plate. A little farther in and out of the pools of light and I find several series of photos, all of underground spaces and finds.

In the middle of the tunnel I find one guy in front of a laptop manipulating the 10 different samplers that send the sounds out into the PC speakers throughout the space. "Little less horns right now," he tells me. "Making it a little more train-y." At the far end there is a film projected on a screen, pixelvision images of trains and tracks and ghostly men with flashlights. But the silhouettes of people milling about before the screen is the far more cinematic image. It’s after 3 p.m. and everyone’s gathered around a microphone on a mound of dirt where Sxip Shirey is about to begin his opera, The Walled-In Woman. With crisp enunciation, Shirey tells the legend of the locomotive said to have been buried behind the far wall when the tunnel was sealed up in the 1800s. His piece, he says, was inspired by the Albanian legend of a young woman being buried alive in a fortress wall to ensure its impenetrability.

Shirey sounds bells and flutes overtop a recording, at first bombastic, that morphs into what could be a kind of Arabian processional, soon bending in on itself before galloping away. Latecomers who just climbed down the manhole are milling about behind me. Weary couples are cuddling in each other’s laps at the edge of the dirt mound. And not far off a shitload of people are having a very lively and distracting conversation.

Shirey next leads us all to the far wall where the Nimbus choir awaits in the faintest of light. Their pale faces look still enough to be clouds of erosion on the wall behind them; ghostly flashes of that woman in the wall. Their wordless song veers from a rooftop wail to pretty harmonizing.

When the choir finishes we all trudge back to form a line to exit. The feature piece today was not the live performance but the event as a whole. It was all of us finding our way around this secret world underneath a Brooklyn street trying to figure out how something like this should play out for us, how to crunch so much disparate and unexpected data. When I finally get outside, I’m stopped on the sidewalk by a guy who was unaware of the event, but spotted us all being helped up from the manhole by staffers in orange vests.

"What happened?" he asks me. "Are they evacuating the subway?"

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