Dash Snow and Dan Colen's Nest

Ever since Led Zeppelin’s 1969 “Mudshark Incident” at the Edgewater Inn, hotel debauchery has been de rigueur behavior for the belligerent and famous. A consistently popular form of conspicuous destruction, it’s surprising that it’s taken so long for the practice to hit the gallery circuit. (Adam Dade and Sonya Hanney’s “Stacked Hotel Rooms” don’t count.) Enter Nest, Dan Colen and Dash Snow’s tribute to counterculture heroics, an installation at Deitch Projects re-creating their ritual “hamster nests,” in which the artists get a hotel room, tear up phone books, roll around in their mess, and do drugs until they feel like hamsters. Deleuze and Guattari would surely well up at such earnest commitment to “becoming animal.”

Last Tuesday’s private preview of Nest was an unusually intimate affair, the result of a tightly monitored guest list—fifty people, no switcheroos, no gate-crashing. By official accounts, that’s just five more than the number that actually worked to build the exuberant installation. Photographs of its construction had been popping up for weeks on Deitch director Kathy Grayson’s MySpace blog—from documentation of the thirty Pratt students who shredded twenty-five hundred New York yellow pages to provide the nest’s foundation, to the antics of the “fifteen fellow artists” (such as Jack Walls and Aaron Bondaroff) who infused it with mirth and (literal) spirits. “Isn’t it great?” Jeffrey Deitch, relaxed in jeans and a blue cotton dress shirt, asked me on entering the relatively snug confines of his Grand Street space. “It’s hard to keep the crowd this small.”

Read the full diary on artforum.com here.

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