Fort Discomfort

Rice Gallery’s first fall exhibit, “The Re-creation of Fort Discomfort,” is an epic art installation cum clubhouse by Jesse Bercowetz and Matt Bua, two New York-based artists and long-time collaborators.

To realize their unwieldy and over-the-top 30–something version of a childhood hideout, they rented a 27-foot truck, filled it up with just about everything in their Brooklyn studio, and hit the road for Houston. Along the way, they collected even more stuff. “Fort Discomfort” is a show about haphazard, goofball construction and creative impulses run wild and unchecked. It also blends nostalgia for the unfettered joys of childhood with the angst of adulthood.

Like all artists invited to do installations at Rice Gallery, Bercowetz and Bua were given free rein of the space. This is the super-fort you would have built as a kid if you had adult’s ability to accumulate junk—and your parents would have let you. Imagine a 10-year-old given a truck to haul stuff from dumpsters, heavy trash day piles, and garage sales. But this is a thing you would never build as an adult because, by the time you can realize those childhood delusions of grandeur, you don’t care about them anymore. Bercowetz and Bua are an exception.

The glass wall of the gallery was selectively blacked out with paint, leaving lookout windows. An unwieldy, almost cubist construction of cardboard and tape was created to house the gallery attendant. The artists were inspired by the thematically shaped ticket booths in amusement parks—structures made like a Flintstone-style house or a tiny log cabin.

Inside the gallery a ratty wicker headboard and footboard stand on end like twin pillars marking the fort entrance. A tiny, handmade cardboard replica of U-haul perches here—a memento to the Brooklyn–Houston odyssey. An inverted picket fence stretches over the entry like the gate to a medieval castle. The exterior walls of the fort are cribbed together using everything from cardboard to old futon frames to wooden 1" x 4"s.

Past the gateway, the frenetic hodgepodge accelerates. There is a curtain of dangling strips of multicolored Pop-Ice packages, a silver Mylar wall, and a gurgling water feature crafted from a clear plastic sweater bin. Electrical cords and PVC pipe snake everywhere. A Plexiglas platform leads to a giant tower, high in the corner of the room. It is composed of layers of cardboard, Styrofoam, and other debris—all painted a gloopy white. More PVC pipe disappears into popcorn buckets stuck on the side, making it look like a prop engine from a low-low budget Star Wars clone.

Old mattresses arc overhead in the fort’s courtyard, creating an inaccessible bridge/triumphal arch. There is a stage fenced with chicken wire, like someplace the Blues Brothers might have played. Lights flash, and a bunch of guitars are stored inside. Audio feedback hums throughout the exhibit, mixed with an oceanic roar and a patter that unsettlingly calls to mind gunfire.

A low-ceilinged side hall, entered through a weighted swinging door guarded by a passed-out clown mannequin, has walls lined with gold lamé. One sports Halloween masks spookily lit from below with flashlights, and the other is embedded with an oddball collection—a bunch of knots, a giant hairball, a variety of teeth both real and fake, reminding one of a roadside museum in a gas station parking lot.
Crawling through a hole in another wall, you enter a dark den with two biohazard suits hanging on the wall and a millennial stockpile of Pop-Ice boxes. Copies of Workers World newspaper are stacked in the corner. It’s the August 28, 2003, issue, the headline reading “More Than a Power Failure, Capitalist Greed Short-Circuits Grid.” In a back room, a bank of monitors play TV reruns from a ’70s childhood—Land of the Lost, Godzilla, the Six Million Dollar Man. Viewing them in the cramped, bunker-like space, you wonder: Are they escapist nostalgia or news reports of a prehistoric parallel universe replete with giant dinosaurs and superhuman bionic men?

In the installation, you feel the artists’ yearning to return to the boundless optimism and creativity of childhood. But the environment is cut with unsettling, Road Warrioresque undertones. There is the sense that something horrible has happened and people are cribbing together a shelter as well as a life from the remnants of the outside world. “Fort Discomfort” manages to remind us of what we loved as a kids as well as what we fear as adults.

—Kelly Klaasmeyer