Catch It While You Can: Art in the City

Labrouste at MoMA

El Anatsui at the Brooklyn Museum of Art

El Anatsui, Gli Wall, 2010, Brooklyn Museum of Art, detail

But as spectacular as his individual pieces are, seeing them in the top floor galleries of the Brooklyn Museum, where they have room to breathe and expand to their fullest, is a moving experience.

El Anatsui, Gli Wall, 2010, Brooklyn Museum of Art

El Anatsui, Conspirators, wood, 1997

El Anatsui, Drifting Continents, 2009, detail

El Anatsui, Red Block, 2010, detail

You have a bit more than a month to schedule a trip to Brooklyn to see Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui.  The show closes on August 4, 2013.

But if you want to see an outdoor piece by him in Manhattan, he did that wall of mirrors and pressed, corroded tin ceiling panels on the High Line between West 21st and 22nd Streets. Here is a shot of that work.

El Anatsui, Broken Bridge II, 2012, The High Line, Chelsea, NYC

Red, Yellow & Blue–Outdoor Art at Madison Square Park

For approximately ten years, the Madison Square Park Conservancy has commissioned art installations in the park. Among its previous contributors are such recognized artists as Mark di Suvero, Antony Gormley, Sol LeWitt, Roxy Paine, Alison Saar, Ursula von Rydingsvard and William Wegman.

The newest installation, which you will have until September 8 of this year to visit, is by the Brooklyn sculptor Orly Genger, who often makes colossal sculptures through a process of knitting, knotting and crocheting.

Orly Genger, Red, Yellow & Blue, Madison Square Park, New York City, May 2-Sept. 8, 2013

Orly Genger, Red, Yellow & Blue, Madison Square Park, New York City, May 2-Sept. 8, 2013

The rope is what is known as “ground line,” which fishermen use to string together multiple traps at the bottom of the ocean. This ground line, no longer viable for purposes of fishing, is usually burned or dumped overboard.  Thus, Genger’s re-use of it as her artistic medium promotes a healthier ecosystem while also bringing visual excitement to Madison Square.

The Madison Square website on Red, Yellow and Blue suggests a connection to Barnett Newman’s series from the 1960s, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?   But Genger’s installation, as it curves and undulates through the Park, and its blue section, which  seems to dissolve right into the grass lawn, owes less to those large, flat, color-field paintings of Newman and more to Christo’s Running Fence, which undulated through Sonoma and Marin Counties in California, finally to disappear–in this case–into the Pacific Ocean.

Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Running Fence, Sonoma/Marin Counties, CA, 1976

Against the Grain–Contemporary Artists Work in Wood

The Museum of Arts and Design, located at 2 Columbus Circle, consistently mounts some of the most interesting shows of art and design in this city of great museums and major art exhibits. This show, Against the Grain, presents a wide range of objects created since 2000 that use wood as the main material.

One or two photographs can’t possibly convey the range of this show.  For this reason, I refer you to the Museum’s web page for an overview of the show and concentrate on a couple of pieces that I found primarily intriguing for conceptual reasons.

Matthias Pliessnig, Thonet #18, 2007, NYC, Museum of Art & Design

Matthias Pliessnig is a Philadelphia furniture designer whose work mainly focuses on the process of steam-bending wood.  In the work illustrated above, he has taken a traditional Thonet chair (the first chairs made with steam-bent wood, beginning ca. 1830) and then wrapped it with many layers of his own steam-bent ash strips.

By this conversion, Pliessnig masks the sensual curves of the original Thonet chair and turns the chair into an apparently functionless and seething tangle of wooden strips.   Can we even be sure (without turning it over) that a real Thonet chair hides under this tangle?   Some may state that the chair has lost its function and the resulting form is no very pretty, so it isn’t really even art.But, indeed, this is art, and a deeply conceptual work of art at that. One can grasp its rich genealogy just by considering its sources in the art of the previous century.  Think of this process as analogous to peeling back of the layers of an onion.

First, there is Christo and Jeanne-Claude again, but this time with their wrappings, as in their wrapping the century-old German Reichstag in over 1 million square feet of aluminum-colored fabric.  This bold work offers many interpretations, among which is to see the fabric operating as softening the edges and corners of a building symbolic of the Prussian State that built it: unyielding, obdurate, and war-like.  It offers Berlin a chrysalis from which the newly-unified Germany (that will embrace a larger and peaceable Europe) is to emerge.

 

Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, 1995

Then, there is Robert Rauschenberg who, in 1953 asked Willem de Kooning for a drawing, which the young Rauschenberg laboriously erased.  He, along with Jasper Johns, then matted, framed and labeled the work with these words: Erased de Kooning Drawing   Robert Rauschenberg   1953.  One might argue that this was blasphemy, an act of philistinism, iconoclasm without even any countervailing principles of belief.At least we could free the Thonet chair if we wanted; its “erasure” is reversible. The de Kooning drawing is lost forever.  But what is gained is a new work by Rauschenberg, and so the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art purchased it for its permanent collection in 1998.

Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953, San Francisco, MoMA

And then we work our way back to the father of all of these perverse and impious artistic activities, Marcel Duchamp.  In 1913, he made his first of a series of works that he called Readymades, in which he took a mass-produced object and, by an act not unlike that of a king who changes the status of a person by conferring knighthood, Duchamp–as artist–transforms the object into a (unique) work of art.  His first was the Bicycle Wheel, and since he mounted it on top of a mass-produced stool, he would call it a Readymade Altered or an Assisted Readymade.This, in essence, is what Pleissnig did in his Thonet #18.  In other Duchamp Readymades, the artist did nothing but sign the work (as in his famous urinal: Fountain) or simply put it on display (as in his snowshovel: In Advance of the Broken Arm, 1915).

Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1913, (1951), New York, MoMA

So, one can argue that, exactly a century ago, Marcel Duchamp gave the world of art the most radical ideas about how art might be defined and practiced.  Neither Rauschenberg, Christo nor Pliessnig peeled all the way down to the core of Duchamp’s “onion.”  As I sometimes told my classes ‘back in the day,’ you can trace the roots of every art movement and artist of the later 20th century (and even now, the 21st century) to the work and ideas of three artists from the first decade:  Picasso, Matisse, and Duchamp.I hope that all my onion-peeling hasn’t brought you to tears.

Yuya Ushida, SOFA_XXXX, 2010, detail,  NYC, Museum of Art & Design

Yuya Ushida, SOFA_XXXX, 2010, NYC, Museum of Art & Design

The Japanese-born industrial designer, Yuya Ushida, studied mechanical engineering until realizing that he really preferred to make practical things that contributed to people’s happiness and daily lives, more than designing machine parts.

His SOFA_XXXX certainly introduces an unexpected level of play into one’s living room, even as it imparts a totally new meaning on the idea of convertible sofas.  Rather than converting into a bed, this sofa converts into an easy chair.  Watch this fascinating video which shows how one can simply pull it apart or squeeze it together, like an accordion, to make the transformation.

I am sure that Ushida’s training in mechanical engineering contributed to his design assembly of SOFA_XXXX.  As he admits, simple geometries and repetitive forms fascinate him, and those are most certainly concepts that inform all great engineering designs.  The sofa gets its name (and its ability to expand) from the “X-joints” of its structure.   In this case, his entire assembly is made up of four different lengths of recycled bamboo chopsticks joined together by stainless steel rings.

I often wonder how many chopsticks we use once and then discard. Apparently, China throws out 90 billion each year.  For one sofa, Ushida uses some 8,000 bamboo chopsticks.  Watch this video to see the assembly process for Ushida’s sofa.

Maria Elena Gonzalez, Skowhegan Birch #1 Roll Display, 2012,  NYC, Museum of Art & Design