Truckloads of Freaks, Strippers, Art and Noodles Drive NYC’s Lost Horizon Night Market

Turns out there really isn’t anything illegal going on at the renegade art event called Lost Horizon Night Market, an ongoing participatory project with an elegantly simple idea: “Proprietors” rent a truck and do something creative in it, with public interactivity a central element.
There are no admission fees. Participants mainly provide enthusiasm (or homemade jam, or lap dances, or ukulele serenades), and get to soak in a hot tub or share a smoke in the Jesus Christ Hookah Bar. The proprietors exchange their time, money and artistic energy for the distinctive euphoria of seeing people interact with an environment of their own creation.
“For one night, we make an autonomous neighborhood,” said Lost Horizon Night Market co-founder Mark Krawczuk, who enjoys spurring people to act on their creative desires. “I get a kick out of seeing people do stuff. I’ve got 40 people into the game … got people who’ve never done installation art before to do it.”
Part 21st-century street carnival, part Burning Man-style artgasm, the Night Market is an empirical example of the participatory culture movement. To potential proprietors, the scale of a project in a 10-foot by 14-foot or 24-foot space is liberating in its constraints. It’s small enough to visualize a project, big enough to do something with impact, and open-ended in a way that seems to immediately spark flurries of ideas from those who hear of it.

Third Time’s a Charm

Last weekend’s Night Market was the third. Prior gatherings have included an erotic pastry truck, a 3-D Twister truck, a sock hop, a tea house, a pinhole-camera studio, a little big-top circus truck and a blindfold robotic gamelan truck. Aboard the Happy Birthday truck, participants entered a psychedelically joyous little world where everybody got a cupcake, a party hat and a rendition of the familiar song that never failed to crack up people waiting outside.
There’s been an actual strip club with mirrored walls, brass pole and real-deal strippers taking fake dollars in their G-strings. And the racket never ended in the Smash Truck, where a throng on one side of a thick Plexiglas wall screamed “Smash! Smash! Smash!” as participants on the other smashed the bejeezus out of televisions, Hummels and computer parts with a baseball bat.

Lost Horizon Night Market co-founder Mark Krawczuk serves noodles in the truck that started it all.
Photo: Rebecca Letz

The most recent Night Market took place Saturday. By 9:15 p.m., an otherwise desolate street along a freight-rail line in Bushwick was alive with the squeal of screw guns, banging lift-gates and urgent directives. Rental-truck roustabouts in cowboy outfits and wedding gowns pull-started generators, and as the last of the trucks arrived, Krawczuk, 37, finished up his duties as head parking attendant. He took off his orange vest and put on a chef jacket. It was time for him to start cooking noodles. The Night Market began with one truck Krawczuk used as a prank on the 2008 Burning Man Decompression event in New York. Intrigued, Krawczuk’s co-conspirator Kevin Balktick, 26, was drawn in, and together they grew the Night Market to an 11-truck affair in September 2009, and then to more than 20 trucks in last January’s event. Neither claims control of the event, calling themselves only “Those Who Choose the Place and Time.”
As communications chief, Balktick sets a high bar for proprietors by example, turning informational symposiums for potential proprietors into mystical and adventurous gatherings set in church attics and historical society libraries. For attendees, the bar is set by proxy. In an e-mail to proprietors about soliciting donations he writes, “Please don’t turn anyone away for want of funds. Ask them to sing you a song, do a silly dance, make you a picture, help you move next weekend, etc. Create an exchange of some kind.”