Word: ruckuses
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...sheer energy, historical savvy, wit and scrounging invention, Ruckus Manhattan is unique. Over the years, Grooms, Gross and their friends have been making their robust tableaux, always on a shoestring but never on such a scale. If one could envisage a fairground produced by Robert Crumb and Krazy Kat out of Dr. Caligari's Cabinet, this would be it. The Ruckus group are omnivores, infatuated with New York, and you are never allowed to forget it. Archie Peltier, an artist from Minneapolis, was responsible for most of the engineering, and his handiwork is impressive. People can walk up inside...
Scarecrow and Seagulls. Despite the cost and difficulty of keeping 20 people employed and paid for the six months it took to make, Ruckus Manhattan is closer to the street than the museum. It is cobbled together from the lumberyards of So-Ho and hardware bazaars of Canal Street, permeated with the hoarse side-of-the-mouth loquacity of a kvetching cabbie, swarming with grim and gaudy figures who, says Mimi Gross, are true New Yorkers, being "nosy, curious and short." There is a gritty and lugubrious side to the Ruckus imagination. Some of the figures are gross ham-faced...
...however, has the direct simplicity of a good toy. When one steps aboard the Ruckus Staten Island Ferry, it shimmies alarmingly; plumes of smoke, made of sheet metal, issue from its funnels and begin to waggle; a flock of seagulls suspended from the smoke begin to circle and dip. One succumbs at once to these lighthearted parodies of reality. But they are also extremely well researched. The Ruckus group spent months drawing in the streets of lower Manhattan, getting to know the buildings...
...architectural scholars can boast such detailed knowledge of the place. When one walks along the sinister, switchback gully of Ruckus' Wall Street, past the dark banks ("Manufacturers Handover") and the pullulating Stock Exchange with its Big Board and some 500 gesticulating brokers, one senses that every crocket and finial on the wildly leaning façade of Trinity Church is right...
...Ruckus research even extends be yond the tomb. Under the graveyard of Trinity Church is a vault, in which plywood skeletons lie promiscuously jumbled. One, wearing an 18th century peruke and still clutching a dueling pistol, is Colonel Alexander Hamilton. Another is Robert Fulton, interred with his paddle-wheel boat. If you would know New York, visit its Ruckus offspring. One can only hope that some company or museum has the wit to keep it on public display downtown forever...