Art Hijack

(2003-2007)

Art Hijack was the creation of artists Trong Gia Nguyen and Elana Rubinfeld. Launched in early 2003 as both an art collective and a PR firm serving arts and cultural organizations, it proudly made its mark with a blend of wit and subversion.

PRESS

2004 – The Art Collection of Rick Haatj

The duo’s first major project, The Art Collection of Rick Haatj, debuted in November of 2004 in the penthouse of the Roger Smith Hotel. Invited guests – largely art-world insiders – encountered an opulent yet peculiar collection featuring works attributed to Rubens, van Gogh, Picasso, and Duchamp. In reality, every piece was a meticulous forgery painted by the artists themselves, each replicating a masterpiece known to have been stolen and still missing. The result was a sly performance in which the audience believed they were witnessing something extraordinary, if possibly illicit.

2005 – Art Los Angeles

For the inaugural edition of Art LA, organized by Stephen Cohen, the artists were given a complimentary booth at the Santa Monica art fair to present The Art Collection of Rick Haatj. Half of the works sold – purchased by collectors who were fully aware that the paintings were deliberate fakes. Later that year, Art Hijack was invited to participate in Waterways, a collateral exhibition of the 9th Istanbul Biennial, extending the young collective’s reach to an international audience.

2006 – All You Need Is Love / All You’ll Need Is Love

By invitation of the ISE Cultural Foundation, Art Hijack produced All You Need Is Love, a live “dating game” performance that paired real contestants in a playful experiment on miscommunication and chance connection. Taking place simultaneously in SoHo at ISE and a nearby restaurant, the event featured the artists as hosts, while diners and collaborators acted as audience and intermediaries in facilitating romance. The motifs included not only inspiration from Shakespeare, but also the mythological love life of Marcel Duchamp.

Using the early streaming platform Ustream (a kind of proto-Zoom) the two venues interacted in real time, employing multiple “love languages” such as dance, music, and nascent technology to bridge gaps of “lost in translation.”

Two further iterations of the performance followed, one in Montreal at Articule and another in Brooklyn at New General Catalog.

Guest matchmakers included: Dance Gang (choreographers Will Rawls and Kennis Hawkins); musicians Fred Thomas (Saturday Looks Good to Me), Athésia, and Jeremy Linzee (Summer Lawns); artists Marci MacGuffie, Megan Ghiroli, Jason Irwin, and Kelly Cline.

2006 / 2007

At the beginning of 2006, Nguyen and Rubinfeld decided to end their collaboration, by simultaneously firing each other. In typically tongue-in-cheek fashion, they issued a joint press release attaching copies of their respective termination letters, each outlining their reasons for parting ways. Identical letters were mailed to select collectors, postmarked “February 29, 2006” – a date that did not actually exist in that non-leap year.

But rather than dissolve Art Hijack, the duo took their conceptual firing one step further. They placed a job advertisement on Craigslist seeking their own replacements. During Art Basel Miami, they conducted a series of filmed interviews to “hire” their successors – ultimately choosing artist Eric Doeringer and art advisor Renée Vara.

Art Fag City even published an article about the firing and succession plot.

At Monkeytown in Brooklyn, Nguyen and Rubinfeld hosted a final dinner-performance to ceremoniously pass the torch to Doeringer and Vara. The evening featured a screening of a short comedic film documenting the interviews and the duo’s journey, complete with video well-wishes from family and figures in the art world. Vara and Doeringer concluded the event with a PowerPoint presentation outlining their vision for Art Hijack 2.0.