theartsdesk in New York: Over the Sea to Art Getaway Island

When it’s 33 degrees and rising, boarding a ferry in New York has to be a good plan. One of the newest and weirdest of the city’s watery destinations is Governors Island (no apostrophe - it was removed in 1783 when the British, who used it to house His Majesty’s Governors, surrendered it to New York state). It’s just 800 yards and 10 minutes away from Battery Park, with a terminal next to Staten Island’s, though the free ferry only runs on Fridays and weekends, when the island is open to the public. When the last ferry boat to New York leaves at seven - that is when there’s no evening concert: Roseanne Cash, She and Him and MIA played recently at the poetically named Watertaxi Beach - the island is completely empty.

So near and yet so far. This ain’t New York. No shops, and so much real estate with no one living in it. Once an army base, then a coastguard centre, now turning itself into a public park, the 172 acres of Governors Island are home to many disused buildings. I’d glimpsed some of them when taking the ferry to Ikea in Red Hook, Brooklyn and wondered who lived in those posh-looking waterfront houses. Answer: no one. Sort of Shutter Island crossed with Picnic at Hanging Rock. No permanent housing (or casinos) are allowed, though a high school and a marine science centre open in September and a hotel may eventually follow.

There’s a huge red-brick barracks, as long as the Chrysler building is high, that housed 2,500 men in the 1930s and 1940s; many electric generators; 19th-century houses where generations of military and coastguard families lived - there were 3,500 people living there until 1996, when the coastguard left - and newer clapboard houses and apartment buildings too. It’s a realtor’s dream: Victorian terraced houses with porch and pillars, plus priceless original features such as cast-iron radiators and fireplaces, all tragically unavailable. However art installations, admission free, are everywhere.

Near Watertaxi Beach - its fake palm trees are artworks in themselves - in a long, low former munitions warehouse called Building 110, 20 artists-in-residence have their studios. Some of the work is site-specific, like photographer Matthew Jensen’s images of buildings that are off-limits to the public, Seaching for Something Previously Unknown or Forgotten on Governors Island; Jessica Bruah’s rack of tourist-style photographs (pictured right and below) - she describes the island as a strange, layered anomaly, "like a post-apocalyptic space but a comforting one", and plans to bring an alternative post office back to the island so you can post her cards - and David Colosi’s written and performed work The Life and Thoughts of a Retired Apostrophe (the one that dropped off Governors). Others, such as GH Hovagimyan’s amazing see-saw-controlled showing of the 1962 film Two for the See-Saw, starring Robert Mitchum, Shirley MacLaine and a downtown loft, are more New York-specific.

A little further along, a terrace of Victorian houses opposite the barracks has been taken over by No Longer Empty, an art organisation that was created as a response to the recession and revitalises vacated premises and boarded-up shops with the aim of attracting punters. Its exhibit is called the Sixth Borough, celebrating the "proximity but seemingly different states of being" between the city and the island, with its feeling of abandonment and loneliness. These little houses are hot and stuffy - no a/c, only fans - and the small rooms, with their narrow polished floorboards, are given over to surreal installations. Men’s shirts completely fill one room, echoing the concept of "men as governors". In another, mirrors are angled throughout the twisty-turny ground floor in such a way that you suddenly come upon yourself and for a displaced minute have no idea who you are. And you scream quite loudly. If it were after hours, there’d be no one to hear you.

As it is, there are hordes of schoolchildren outside, also screaming as they swerve around and fall off the sturdy, old-fashioned pale blue bikes that you can rent for free on Fridays from Bike'n'Roll. Though you can walk to all the art exhibits, if you want to explore the rest of the island the best way to do so is by bike, as there are no cars. It’s liberating to whizz along the two-mile circular promenade, racing the Staten Island ferry. You get fabulous views of the Manhattan skyline and the Statue of Liberty, looking much closer and more imposing than I’d ever seen it (this is where Bloomberg just gave his stirring speech applauding the decision to build a mosque near Ground Zero).

There’s mini-golf (designed by artists, of course), a farmstand where you can buy fruit and veg produced by Added Value Farm, and kite-flying. At Picnic Point, there are hammocks and Adirondack chairs for lying back and looking.

Which may be the most sensible activity on a boiling hot day, but after my hour’s bike ride I set off on foot, in desperate shopper mode, looking for the only spending op, a pop-up craft store run by the NewNew, a group of New York artisans. I immediately got lost. One minute a woman in charge of a large group of frisbee-playing schoolkids was asking me where she could find the first-aid post, the next I was tramping, sweating under the merciless sun, over ghostly, parched acres of grass with not a soul in sight. Then I entered a low tunnel beside a dry moat where people in blue T-shirts were preparing for Water Day by leaping about using huge water bottles as weights. A uniformed park ranger pointed me in the right direction for the yellow clapboard house where you can buy jewellery, applique pillows, silk-screen T-shirts and tea towels printed with Governors Island icons.

Beside the ferry, there’s an exhibit of Post-It notes with visitors’ comments. "I want to quit my job and stay here eating and riding." "Biking is a bomb." "Don’t build that hotel." Governors Island, where no one lives but everyone can visit for free, is still evolving, 373 years after it was sold to the Dutch by its Native American owners for two axe heads, a string of beads and a few nails. Who knows what it will be like in 10 years’ time? Right now, it’s special.

• Governors Island is open Fridays (10am-5pm), Saturdays and Sundays (10am-7pm) until 10 October. Free ferries leave from the Battery Maritime Building (10 South Street) in Lower Manhattan