Performers take to the football field in a ‘Drunk vs. Stoned’ Grudge Match

A number of artists, along with some friends and family members, said goodbye to the summer on September 17 by playing football in Montauk, NY.

It wasn’t the usual game. The participants split into two teams, Drunk and Stoned, and behaved accordingly.

The crazy sporting event was accompanied by an exhibition, ‘Drunk vs. Stoned 3,” which showcased the works of 70 artists at a Montauk gallery and the Ranch, a 26-acre horse farm and venue owned by art dealer Max Levai. .

The first “Drunk vs. Stoned” was held in 2004 at a gallery in Greenwich Village. The critic Jerry Saltz called it “one of the most entertaining group shows of the year,” adding that it was “also one of the craziest.” There was a follow-up the following year, along with a football match at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan. Legend has it that the Stoned team lost that match because it failed to notice that Drunk had added three players after halftime.

It’s no secret that painters and poets have long sought inspiration in altered states, and the show notes for the third ‘Drunk vs. Stoned” event compared and contrasted works seemingly inspired by alcohol and cannabis. Viewers were encouraged to think about how, as organizers wrote, “the lowered inhibitions and impulsive decisions of drunk people contrast sharply with the heightened sensitivity and methodical meanderings of the stoned.”

Artists participating in the exhibition included: Rachel Harrison and Laura Owens, who have been the subject of large-scale studies at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Katherine Bradford, who has works in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum; Jamian Juliano-Villani, whose paintings were featured at last year’s Venice Biennale; and Nate Lowman, whose works have appeared at the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

On the morning of the match, which was due to start at 2 p.m., 35-year-old Levai was not happy when he saw a black Hyundai parked in the gravel area near one of the goals. The car ruined the scene he hoped to create on the grounds and detracted from Matt Johnson’s five large sculptures, each strategically placed near the undulating expanse where the game would take place.

“A lot of the sculptures here are pink and white, and the barns are white,” Mr. Levai said. “The black Hyundai is a major interruption in this aesthetic trajectory.”

The car also did not fit in the recreation zone with a massage table and two makeshift bars. Mr Levai said he would have moved the vehicle himself, but it was locked and he could not trace the person who parked it. He went to his hilltop home, where he found a solution: toilet paper.

It seemed that Mr. Levai – who struck on his own after he did that expelled of the presidency of the Marlborough Gallery in 2020 – had ordered far too many industrial-quality rolls of Scott, which he kept in his pantry. Now he had something to do with it.

He enlisted two children, sons of people involved in the exhibition, and together they covered the eye wound with shaving foam as a binding agent. When the job was done, the Hyundai could almost pass for an art installation.

Mr Levai, the son of former Marlborough Gallery director Pierre Levai, has not always had a smooth time on Long Island’s East End since taking ownership of the Ranch in 2020, according to reports in local news media and arts publications. That was the case in July an argument with a neighbor, the gallery owner Adam Lindemann, owner of the adjacent Eothen estate. Last month, a supervisor for East Hampton, where Montauk is located, told the city could request an injunction to Mr Levai about the way he uses land set aside as agricultural land. (Mr. Levai had no comment on his dealings with the city or his plans for the Ranch.)

As showtime approached, artist Scott Reeder, curator of the first “Drunk vs. Stoned” shows, that Mr. Levai had mentioned the idea about a year ago to revive the concept. “I said, ‘If you want to stage it again, do it here,’” Mr. Reeder recalled.

As the Stoned players began warming up on the court, several Drunk team members drank shots and beer. Both teams had uniforms made for the occasion, with ‘Stoned’ or ‘Drunk’ printed on the back. The referee, Jose Martos, an art dealer, suggested he was open to bribes and told the players: “One hundred dollars, if you want to win.”

In the opening minutes of the match, Stoned was lively and focused. It had youth on its side: the two boys who had helped TP the Hyundai, aged 11 and 12, were in the queue. (They did not take part in the offerings in the makeshift bars.)

Drunken was sloppy, but had a secret weapon in his goalkeeper, Paololuca Barbieri Marchi, a filmmaker and founder of the art collective Alterazioni Video. Without his shot blocking skills, the game might have been a blowout.

The 12-year-old player scored the first goal. The artist Borna Sammak, a member of the Drunk team, collapsed on the field, although he was not injured. He spent ten minutes in the grass sipping a tequila drink.

Esteban Chacon, a surf coach in Costa Rica and Montauk, had the second goal for Stoned. “This is revenge,” said Mr Reeder, who had played for Stoned’s losing side in 2005 and was back on the same side.

“Come on, drunk, you got this!” said the drunken coach, Ellie Rines, who runs 56 Henry, a gallery in New York’s Chinatown. Seconds later, Alex Hubbard, a mixed-media artist, kicked in the team’s first goal.

In the final minutes of the first half – with Stoned ahead, 4-3 – the players could hear the sounds of Big Karma, a Grateful Dead cover band positioned about 100 yards from the field. As the musicians jammed for a long time, the Stoned team seemed to become enchanted.

During halftime, a tow truck backed up toward the Hyundai. Devin Troy Strother, a painter, confessed to leaving it in the gravel lot. The keys had ended up locked inside after a series of mix-ups, he said.

Nearby, Stoned players used a hookah-like bong. The Drunk team huddled with Coach Rines, who was in pep talk mode. “We have courage!” she said. “I think we can handle this!”

In the second half, many Stoned players moved with a kind of contented aimlessness. They seemed to wither when Billy Grant, an artist who played for Drunk, engaged in aggressive trash talk. “I thought I’d start shouting to scare them,” he said. Drunken won 5-4.

The next day, in a telephone interview, Mr. Levai expressed the opinion that the Grateful Dead cover band was a factor in the outcome. “Some people thought it would be a benefit to the Stoned team,” he said, “but I felt like it might have been a distraction.”