Pablo Escobar was loose. He darted across a noisy warehouse, searching for a corner to loom in.

He's "kind of a bully," said Duke Riley, the Brooklyn artist who trained him, watching Pablo flit around before landing on a ledge near the ceiling. Pablo Escobar is a homing pigeon, and an accessory - or an accomplice - to the latest exhibition by Mr. Riley, whose work often flouts both laws and common sense.

"Generally, I do things that don't really seem that feasible," Mr. Riley explained, "and then they tend to work out."

But even by his standards, the pigeon project, "Trading With the Enemy," strained credulity. In utmost secret, Mr. Riley trained a flock of homing pigeons to fly one way from Havana to Key West, Florida. Half the birds were flat-out smugglers, running Cuban cigars to the United States. The others were documentarians, outfitted with special cameras to record their 160-kilometer journey across the Straits of Florida.

The idea was to highlight the long history of pirating on the southern border of the United States, and to belittle, artistically, the cutting-edge spy devices that may monitor the coast. Drones don't care about pigeons.

"I wanted to subvert this billions-of-dollars high-tech system with things that were being used in ancient Sumeria," said Mr. Riley, who researched pigeon history. In the early 20th century, they were regular messengers between coastal authorities in Cuba and Florida. "They would let a pigeon go," he said, to signify safe arrival.

With objects, video and live birds, "Trading" is part of his show, "See You at the Finish Line," opening at the Magnan Metz Gallery in New York on November 1.

Mr. Riley, 41, calls himself a patriot, and he often sets his work on the waterfront, exploring the boundaries of institutions and authorities. In 2007, he was arrested after he floated a homemade replica of a Revolutionary War-era submarine too close to the Queen Mary II. A 2009 performance in a reflecting pool in the Queens section of New York, a staged naval battle, ended in a drunken, fiery melee.

This avian performance was riskier, Mr. Riley said, and he was coy about his methods. "How those cigars end up on the birds, I can't say," he said, carefully choosing his words. "If a bird ends up in my pigeon lofts, that happens to have a cigar from Cuba, and there also happens to be a pigeon that has a video camera on it, that shows footage of birds flying from Havana to Key West with cigars - yeah, I can't really say how that happened."

Mr. Riley did say he started the training in Florida last year with 50 pigeons; 23 went on the first mission, this summer. Only 11 returned. That's normal with racing birds, he said, as he pointed out the colorful pigeon loft that once was command central in Key West. It had been shipped back to Brooklyn and stored in a friend's metal shop.

The cigar-carrying birds were named for notorious smugglers, like Pierre Lafitte, of New Orleans, and Minnie Burr, from Memphis, Tennessee, who transported supplies under her skirts during the Civil War. The documentarians were named for directors who had trouble with the law, like Roman Polanski and Mel Gibson. Mr. Riley painted portraits - or, depending on your perspective, mug shots - of all 50, which detailed their efforts.

Also on view: the pigeons' harnesses, fashioned from bra straps with adorably embroidered smuggling pockets; the half-dozen Cohiba cigars they held, cast in resin; and a split-screen bird's-eye documentation of the flight.

The pigeon-cam footage is shaky but mesmerizing. Mr. Riley and his team labored for years to lighten the cameras, doctoring them to record at intervals from multiple angles. The birds shot hours of video, and made quite a few stops. A well-trained pigeon could make the flight in five hours. Some of his took two weeks. At least one landed on a Florida party boat, where it was quickly spotted, with cameras rolling. "It's wearing a bomb!" a woman says, as a Jimmy Buffett song plays in the background.

One pair of smuggler birds is for sale, for $100,000 apiece; the flock will be shown at Magnan Metz in the loft he built of wood salvaged from shipwrecks. Dara Metz, an owner of the gallery, said the piece, four years in the making, quickly appealed to her.

It was, she said, conceptual, performative, political and funny - all hallmarks of a Riley work. Not that she knows how he does it. "When it comes to Duke's projects, he's always candid about what his intentions are," she said. "He does not get into the details about how he executes them."

"Trading With the Enemy" "might be bordering on illegal and pushing the envelope," but, she added, "I don't think he's ever putting anybody in jeopardy, besides himself."

Mr. Riley, who makes a living as a tattoo artist and has birds inked on his body, was first entranced after he rescued a pigeon as a boy.

"I let it go and it came back," he said. "You feel sort of connected to the animal after that."

The New York Times

(China Daily 10/27/2013 page9)