Submarine runs into trouble in Red Hook!

What began as an unorthodox art project has become a law-enforcement headache today and the talk of the New York blogosphere.

Duke Riley, a heavily tattooed Brooklyn artist whose waterborne performance projects around the city have frequently landed him in trouble with authorities, spent the last five months building a makeshift submarine — a partial replica of what may be America’s earliest submarine, an oak sphere called the Turtle, which saw action (not particularly successful action) in New York Harbor during the Revolutionary War.

The wood and fiberglass submarine, which was launched into the New York Harbor, made its way toward a far larger vessel — the Queen Mary 2, one of the largest ocean liners in the world, which was docked at the cruise ship terminal in the Buttermilk Channel off Red Hook, Brooklyn.

What happened next was a delicate mixture of performance art and domestic security.

The Police Department released the following statement from Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, who did not seem particularly interested in the artistic or historical merit of this project:

A makeshift submarine discovered at about 10:30 this morning by an N.Y.P.D. Intelligence detective on board the Queen Mary 2 in New York Harbor is the creative craft of three adventuresome individuals. It does not pose any terrorist threat..........(snip for brevity -M)

The Coast Guard issued two citations to Mr. Riley, 35, whose real name is Philip Riley. One citation was for having an unsafe vessel, the other for violating a security zone, The Associated Press reported. Two men from Rhode Island, who were artistic accomplices of Mr. Riley’s and were in an inflatable boat next to the submarine, were taken in for questioning, along with Mr. Riley.

The sub came within 200 feet of the bow of the Queen Mary 2, Petty Officer Angelia Rorison of the Coast Guard said, according to The A.P. “Basically, the vessel was not safe to sail,” she said. “It had no lights, no flares. It was not registered. Instead of safety violations, this could have turned into a search and rescue.”

Randy Kennedy of The Times was on the scene today and will have a complete report later.

In June 2006, Mr. Kennedy described an art installation by Mr. Riley in Plum Beach, near Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn: a bar “constructed entirely from found objects in a graffiti-covered cavelike opening in the concrete pilings that supported the humming Belt Parkway above.”

Last October in The Times, Ruth La Ferla noted “an experimental art-meets-fashion project” by Mr. Riley. For the project, Ethan Cohen, another artist, wore “a seersucker jacket perforated with what looked like re-embroidered cigar burns.”

Barnet Schecter, who wrote a detailed description of the Turtle (the original one, not the replica) in his 2002 book, “The Battle for New York: The City at the Heart of the American Revolution,” said the vessel was called the turtle because it was made from two pieces of hollowed-out oak wood placed together, the seam sealed with tar. “It looked like two turtle shells that had been fused together,” he said. “In that space there was just enough room for one mat to sit and operate the controls.”

Mr. Schecter said was designed and built by David Bushnell, an inventor in Saybrook, Conn. The colonials experimented with the vessel in the Long Island Sound, off the Connecticut coast. In the Battle of Brooklyn on Aug. 27, 1776, the British captured Long Island. The East River was now hazardous territory. The Americans took the Turtle by land from New Rochelle across Westchester County to the Hudson River.

The Americans took the vessel down the Hudson toward Lower Manhattan, which was still in American hands.

On the night of attack — sometime in September 1776 — Sgt. Ezra Lee, the pilot, got inside, and during the night, he floated and pedaled his way across New York Harbor, making his way toward the H.M.S. Eagle, which was Admiral Richard Howe’s flagship.