Adventures in Public Art

Couple items from HyperAllergic, which has fast become one of my favorite sources for news from the art world.

First this, (read it!) about the amazing Carol Highsmith's billion-dollar scuffle with Getty Images over them charging for images THAT SHE DONATED to the Library of Congress.

And then getting even closer to home, this one, about the controversy over some Mr. AbiLLity street art (commissioned street art, mind you) in Jersey City. This is a city dear to my heart, likely the place I'd move to if I were moving to the area today, but which needs to get its ish together stat.

photo: @lifeisamother/Instagram

Between this nonsense at the Newark Ave. pedestrian plaza, and the ongoing obstructionism over at the Loew's Landmark Theater in Journal Square... it hath made me mad.  I mean, ok sure: Getty Images, eff them, what do you expect? (let's hope the courts make them pay richly for their greed)  But Jersey City ought to be a place that looks after the people who live and work there.




I know Mayor Fulop has his hands full fighting with Chris Christie, and I won't argue with that, but come on - this?  Stymying the artistic voices - the local, homegrown or transplanted artists right there in the middle of the living, breathing city - that actually add to the community?  Step it up, JC.

Trifecta

Three Shakespeare plays over three nights, Thursday through Saturday.  One was free, one pay-what-you-want, and one was the opposite of free.  Each has something unique to offer to this summer's Shakespeare season (made a little extra juicy by this year's commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death.)

Troilus and Cressida from the Public/NYSF at the Delacorte; As You Like It from The Cradle Theatre in Prospect Park; The Merchant of Venice, which is the contribution to the Lincoln Center Festival from Shakespeare's Globe.

As I've said before (and will say again), I'm an actor, not a critic; no desire to pick these shows apart.  Dan Sullivan (whom I've known for a while) takes a really good swing at the very tricky pitch that is Troilus.  The curveballs of love and politics, the high heat of war, the secret signals that hold together the batteries of diplomacy and military intelligence.  Homeric Greece and Troy find their way to an Orwellian present of perpetual war.

Rebecca Etzine (whose tumblr I've admired for a while, and whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the show on Friday) delivered an As You Like It that is even more distinctly of today.  A young company of young artists turned a wooded part of Prospect Park into the forest of Arden - a few extra twists of gender and sexuality, plenty of playfulness, and a healthy dose of irreverence result in a show that is compelling, contemporary, and - most importantly - alive.  They're moving camp to Ft. Greene this weekend; check their website.  Cory missed this one, sadly; hey, this heatwave is a real thing, and not everyone's appetite for Shakespeare is quite as bottomless as mine, especially given that on the docket for the next night was...

Last and emphatically not least, Jonathan Pryce was Shylock in what is of the most brutal, and certainly one of the best, productions of Merchant I've ever seen.  While the staging and design is firmly in 16th Century Venice, the anti-semitism conjures all-too-current outbreaks in Europe and America.  Never (in my experience) has Shylock seemed so justified, never has Jessica been so disdained (even after her 'voluntary' conversion and marriage to Lorenzo), never has Antonio been such an asshole, and NEVER has Portia been such a snotty, snobby, vindictive prig (while still managing to be the smartest person in the room).  The final, added scene of Shylock's forced baptism was bitterly piercing.

Not much visual stimulation for you today, but here are a couple shots of Shakespeare's birthplace from our trip.  [What?? A side trip to Stratford-upon-Avon when we went to London?  Hey, he'll only have a 400th Deathiversary once.]

A couple exteriors of the gables.

A shot of a little one checking out the signatures scratched into the birthroom window.

And - why not? - a couple shots from Anne Hathaway's cottage, including Rudy, Cory, and Mol checking out the epic garden.

Pride

Pride March this past weekend, with the Anti Violence Project's group, particularly with Cat and Cleo, Cheri & Sadie, and of course Cory.  A good vibrant, loving group of people, and supporters for miles.  

The news reports talked about the somber tone in light of Orlando, and I won't pretend there weren't moments, or that there weren't tears.  But Stonewall had also just been declared a National Landmark, and love is love is love is love is love.

Tonight I was reminded at a screening of Neil Gaiman's exhortation (reminiscent of Bernstein's): in the wake of adversity, make good art.  A gathering like this, with family, friends, supporters, allies of every shape and size, counts as some version of that.

Zaha Hadid

One more image to add to the vast gallery appearing everywhere celebrating Zaha Hadid.

This is from the Guy Fawkes trip a couple years back.

This Is Not Disturbing the Peace

This is paint. Over a parking lot in Shoreditch.

Happy Monday

Women to women

That night, we went to see the Sa Dance Company perform.  The house was full and performance was full to bursting with life – streaks of color and movement that simultaneously pulse with celestial abandon and the down-to-the-finger precision of Indian dance.  So who am I to talk about Indian dance tradition? Nobody.  But it was fab to see this group of mostly amateur but highly trained and experienced women cover ground from strict classicism to Bollywood exuberance.

Then on Sunday we went to the Kara Walker “A Subtlety” exhibition at the Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg. As much great stuff as we'd read about this, it was more amazing than we’d dared expect.

The full title was: "A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant."

Sugar baby, tar baby, Sugar Mammie Sphinx - sugar and molasses sculptures standing, melting, decaying and laying in wait, accusing and celebrating and remembering the people who worked, lived, and died in the sugar harvesting & refining industries. 

A history that stretches from the triangle of trade in slave, cash, and cane cargo from Europe to Africa to the Americas and back finds one end in this defunct Domino plant in Williamsburg, up and running until less than a decade ago.

There's so much written out there that I feel I can't add a lot to the conversation, especially since it's scarcely my story to tell.

There was a performance artist there, in green and black tiger print spandex, with a 'hidden' videographer (I didn't see him until later) getting footage of people's reactions to her as she walked the space.

At one point after she'd been there I don't know how long she let out a piercing scream standing in front of the sphinx who dominated the space (and most of the coverage of the exhibition).

She had a partner (also in spandex, black and yellow I think), who gave a simultaneous scream - no words, just an outcry - from the other end of the sphinx sculpture.

I don't know who they are or anything about them.  It wasn't this guy, who seems to have done something along similar lines, but including verbal statement and follow-up. But they were there. They were there on that day, as this art work was there, as generations of factory work happened there, and the work that built this place - this culture, this nation, this economy - happened, in the physical universe, for better and/or for worse, for a few hundred years.

Serpentine Perspectives

In the wake of this weekends' amazing Neutral Milk Hotel show at BAM, and the fantastic Visual Aids Postcards from the Edge exhibition, which Cory has gone to the last few years, and which I experienced for the first time yesterday - really interesting, a combination of work that is moving, fun, poignant, provocative, and timely - here are a few shots from the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, new edition, circa All Saints Day, 2013.

Another day, I'll post some photos from the very good Adrián Villar Rojas show we saw in the gallery, but for now, these images of the Zaha Hadid structure.

And this, from the interior.

Hope you had a good weekend.  Enjoy the Grammys, if that's your thing.  [I may find a way to write the thousands of words warranted by the NMH and PfTE shows, but that won't happen tonight.]

Banksy in Chelsea

We're a few days into Banksy's New York residency.  I haven't been too engaged in the Painter Chase, but this piece is so close to Chome that I hunted it down.

Worth a look.  As all the press mentions, his pieces tend not to last too long before other taggers get to it.  If you review those press and online items, you'll notice that many of the images are different from each other in content as well as perspective: more or less in the way of images and verbiage, depending on when the taggers and photographers got to the spot.  You can see in the shot above that someone (who? a sympatico fellow tagger? one of the nearby gallerists?  Banksy himself?) has recently gone over "THIS IS MY NEW YORK ACCENT" to reinforce it, so that it is complete on the surface, above the other tags, at least for a little while on Friday morning.

And then there's the (slightly) greater context.  Again, this surface - like most un- or semi-sanctioned street art canvases - is continually evolving.  Some 'vandalizing' Banksy's attention-getting 'vandalism'; a Bronx record label making use of the attention; someone calling on (challenging?) Banksy to make use of his newly declared accent to use the megaphone of the attention to, you know, come out and say something; another stencil down left wondering out loud if the emperor's wardrobe is really all that impressive.  This could go on for a while.

What do you think?  Important urban art?  Commentary on the Gallery District/the Great New York Art Scene (now polished and sanitized for your protection and convenience!)?  A damn squit?

Look closer.  And keep looking - we should be getting more of these all month all over the city.

Ad to Joy

Maybe you're not susceptible to flash mobs.

If, however, you are a member of that portion of the population who occasionally enjoy life, you may wish to spend 5 minutes and 40 seconds viewing and listening to the following:



As far as I can tell, it is some kind of extended promo for a Catalan bank.

I don't think I care.

Winter into Spring

In Madison Square Park

Last from London

Well, for now anyway...

One last photo montage video from London.  It's a little longer than the others, but it's split into two parts, so that may help.  Think of it as an A Side and a B Side.

I had to resort to YouTube for this, but I was able improve the resolution a bit.  Enjoy.

A lot of this is pretty self explanatory - don't think you need me to say much about Big Ben, Westminster, the Houses of Parliament, or Richard the Lionheart.  I do want to mention, especially for the Rodin fans out there, the juxtaposition of the Burghers of Calais in the shadow of Parliament (as opposed to casts I've seen at the Rodin Museums in Paris and Philadelphia, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, all of which I have since found were cast after this one in London).  The placement in Victoria Tower Gardens is poignant in that these French business leaders and legal authorities are shadowed by one of the most important legislative structures in the Western World; and it calls to mind their story - offered as a sacrifice to save the citizens of Calais from Edward III's siege of their city.  (Remember Edward III's hunting palace from an earlier post, and the last video?)

It's worth mentioning are a couple of light art pieces from the Tate Modern that were as photogenic as they were engaging:

• Lis Rhodes' Light Music was the setting for the shots that come near the end of the first song.  It was part of the Tanks portion of the Tate Modern - which is amazeballs and you should definitely go there.  I think that Light Music has closed up and moved out of the space, but we were lucky to catch it while we were there.  The projectors practically dared you not to walk in and interact with the light.  Luminous and irresistible. 

• The sequence about halfway through featuring two light tables in the room with white walls is made up of shots of an Alfredo Jaar piece called Lament of the Images.  He's looking at the way people can be so saturated with media images (and words) that they can be blinded by the excess: so many images flood ones view that one stops seeing the content of what is actually being shown.  That blindness is revealed in that installation (as I interpret it) by the light that floods the room as the light tables spread apart (the tables become a light source, illuminating the people, objects, and walls themselves, but the light itself ceases to be an object of attention), and conversely by the darkness that pervades when the tables close in together (the beams of light become focal, but the darkness literally prevents one from seeing around it).  Beautiful, simple, this piece had a powerful, magnetic draw, and I also enjoyed the lucky arrival of a school group when I went back into the room to grab these shots.

Also part of the Tanks was Suzanne Lacy's The Crystal Quilt.  My photographs don't remotely do justice to the complex power of that brilliantly feminist activist piece [which had the added interest, to me, of having originated in Minneapolis, a city (and a landscape) dear to my heart, woven into this contemporary art exhibit in London].  The video embedded in that link does a better job, but if you come across an exhibition of The Crystal Quilt anywhere, you really owe it to yourself to check it out.

And I can't sign off without mentioning the shots from the Churchill War Rooms - including the color-coded phones, his cabinet meeting room, and the map room complete with a caricature of Hitler penciled into the middle of the Atlantic.  Fascinating. 

And then undercutting any sort of heightened thoughts or reflections on the living memory of War in London, and how vastly it differs from a sense of war in New York, we have shots of the Sherlock Holmes pub which I took for my Sherlock-fan nephew, Mols getting ready for her kayak final test in her wet suit, and shots of our time in Shoreditch/High Street.  All of which was fantastic!

As for the music: why can't Rudie fail?  Just because.

Piano Adoption

The comments thread on the article that revealed the video shared on that last post had some revelations of its own.  This link, about Piano Adoption, was of particular interest.  Good to know such things exist.

Piano

It is more than worth the 5 minutes it will take you to watch this video.

Sound on or sound off, it is gorgeous.  Pop it into full screen and take a look.  Fair warning: you might cry.

It was made by Anthony Sherin, and put out there by Times.  You can read more about it here (or click the Related Article link. I recommend you read the article after you watch the video).

Summer Sun

Lots going on as that ridiculously hot summer gives way to a much more temperate fall.  Some of what's going on falls into the Not-So-Good category.  Here are some shots to reclaim the joy a little bit. They're from a Chalk Art Festival we went to a couple months back.

Also on the 'things that make life worth living' side of the scale was the Fresh Grass bluegrass festival we went to at MASS MoCA last weekend.  I don't have many shots from that, but I'll post a couple here soon.  Meanwhile, I have three words for you that you should take very seriously: Carolina Chocolate Drops

Atticus, etc.

Just a few shots from my recent trip to Burlington.  Mostly of this year's entry to the 'World's Cutest Baby' competition, plus a couple pix of wall art outside the JDK Gallery, which had an extremely fun retrospective of a Printing Workshop they'd done with some local kidz.

The Ghost of Times Square Past

I am not a 'good old days' advocate (and I don't know that this would qualify for that at any rate) but I do sometimes miss this version of 42nd Street.

Wait a Minute...

"Echo" is still up in Madison Square Park. Not taken down two weeks ago, as it was scheduled to have been.

And I'm not disappointed by that circumstance, as I like the sculpture and I like the way it works into the park.

But... why must you lie to me, Mass Media? Why???

His Goal in Life...

...is to be an Echo, of course. (It's well known to all the visitors of Solid Sound.)

Which is also the name of the Jaume Plensa sculpture that's been gracing Madison Square Park for the last few months.

As in Echo and Narcissus. As in from the Greek myth of the beautiful nymph who is cursed to be able only to repeat what others say. Whose last day of residence in the park is tomorrow.

It's been a great sort of up-from-the-ground, "what's that?!" addition to the area, in my opinion. Little bit of mystery, little bit of mythology. If you haven't seen it and you're around, maybe run by and pay a visit.

And it's one of the corollaries of public art that it doesn't always get to stick around forever. And this Echo's farewell may not be as heartbreaking as the one she gave Narcissus, but it does mean that we won't be able to have this scene any more.

Or this one:

And with that, I give you a lovely little viddy of the song that gave this post its title. Enjoy.