Aesthetic Grounds

MOMA and PS1 prepare the public for the "Watersfalls" later this month in NYC.  The the scaffolding has been constructed under the Brooklyn bridge. Photo taken on May 26.

From the Bay Area and Boston emerge artworks that are mainly science projects overlaid with pretty colors so they can be called "art".  The interaction is fun for ten minutes and we like to take new visitors as they will marvel.  We fake enthusiasm based on a memory our our first time so that we can truly enjoy their reaction.  But the work fails to provide any personal thrill again.  And for all the statements by the artists and curators, no significant thought comes to mind at all - except the terror of the possible future.

Olafur Eliasson moves between public science project and public art.  Many are science tricks directed toward internal artworld reflections.  A moving colorfield painting in light, the live black&white 3-D movie or the invisible white gallery box inside the white gallery box.    Some are little silly like the reverse cascading waterfall where he sprays the water up from one pool to the next.  

The genius of Eliasson emits from his stubborn battle with the photographic record: still or moving.  He seeks to make works that can only be completely appreciated through "being-in" the artwork.  (I have written about "being-in" regarding the architecture in the northwest USA - a place grounded in Scandinavian culture like Eliasson).  Yet, many of Eliasson's best installations "The Weather Project" at the Tate Modern in London and the 360 Degree Room of All Colours at MOMA generate "artistic" amateur photos in the same way as Gromley's work.   His is a battle, not a rejection.

Anything claiming to be art requires the in-person experience to be fully appreciated.  If you see a documentary picture or video of an artwork and think the artwork will be the same in person, then in my book you have a problem.  (Of course the LCD monitor or paper magazine can be the intended home of the art.)  The amateur photographs of The Weather Project make me want to be there.  Through the photos, I have a sense, true or not, that the experience would be romantic and enveloping.  Gromley's work makes me want to compete in the undeclared photo taking contest, not necessarily to be in the space.  Eliasson's photos make me dream of the visit.

Two of the works at MOMA are brilliant and the "Take Your Time" room at PS1 exceeds any carnival fun-house of mirror rooms and tricks.  Completely ignored by nearly all visitors, beige moss - of a type used for architectural models - densely covers each inch of the large gallery wall.  Moss Wall is a visual trip over the Amazon Rain forest.  Only by viewing the work from 6-10 inches can it unfold.  As that visual range, the human eye and brain together imagine "depth of field" and a complete 3D visual experience that become physical.  The human brain feels the tiny changes in elevation as you move your head and eyes like an airplane plane. But at 200 or 300 feet above a real forest, the eyes and brain do not feel any 3D effect.  Eliasson discovered that multidimensional physical reactions can be sparked in the body.

360 Degree Room of All Colours turns color into music.  The circular space changes its pastel colors in slow repetition.  The light level is PERFECT for the human eye in that pupil is fully open without the need to squint.  If you stare into the fabric walls from 10 inches, your entire field of vision fills with one color.  Only on a sail-less boat in the sea with a low sun, can you stare at the dome of the sky with a similar full view of blue. I loved it, but this is not the surprising part.  If you sit of floor and a stare, the color change from washed out to very intensive pastel.  My body started to feel the motion of the colors in ways that can only be compared to music. The chemical levels in my body shot up with the swelling of the color intensity.  

Since architecture school, I had been told of psychological power of color, but never the physiological.  Still part science, but like other chemicals in the body, I am hooked and looking for my next dose.  

Finally, Take Your Time at PS1.  A huge disc cover red in reflective mylar rotates very slow on the ceiling.  Immediately, everyone dives to floor and looks up.   Your brain tells you that all the people - including yourself - are not lying on the floor, but suspended magically on a vertical wall with less effort that Spiderman.  That is the fun house trick.  The questions is - why do you want to lay there for minutes and minutes?  People don't want to leave. 

The mirror is tilted about 3%.  Patience and 3% is the genius of the work.  The angle causes the reflection of the visitors and the walls of the room to change very, very slightly in a loop.  Again, somehow and for some reason, the brain knows that the view is changing and therefore remains alerts and interested.  Unless you move the very edge of the disk, you can get yourself to consciously recognise the change.   Like the colors in the 360 Degree Room, you body responds - in this case the brain - without consciousness. 

Perhaps Eliasson has invented the first of science of art since gestalt. 

I don't know how other creative people can utilize Eliasson's operational observations, but the work drives home the memory of special sunsets and hours napping adjacent to a waterfall in the forest.  He proves that humans can make the spaces that facilitate these calm and happy moments.  Thank you Mr. Eliasson.  

Thank you for the Images

Matt Verzola

AndrewPaulCarr

Giant Flickr Eliasson pool  

 The Waterfalls produced by the Public Art Fund.  Opening soon.

Instead of the cows, etc, the Royal Parks Foundation has commissioned paintings or prints on the drooping canvas of a classic deck chair.  The Foundations states:  Deckchairs have become a very British icon since the design was patented by Macclesfield businessman, John Moore in 1886.  The Titanic boasted 600 deckchairs - only six of them survived the sinking and one of these, believed to have been used as a makeshift life-raft, was sold at auction in 2001 for £35,000.

The "Celebrity Artists" did a fine job.  One of the artists, Jonathan Yeo, was withdrawn from public display for a clever pun of falling leaves (oak, but think fig) with images of formerly covered genitalia.  The Foundation is displaying and selling the Yeo chair at its website.  See the Guardian.  Bid now on online or attend the auction on June 3 in London

But the most interesting part for me is the very, very high quality of the winning children's designs.  Are all children artistic gifted under the age of nine years old?  How does human culture suck this instinct out of our being?

Returning to New York City after a 20-year journey in Seattle and South Florida.  New York taught me how to think art.  

Psychologically, NYC has changed dramatically.   Signs in the subway remind parents to keep baby carriages off the escalator.  Street territory has been reapportioned for small plazas to hangout or walk more comfortably.  Only a few of the former down-and-out residents of the street remain.  The permanent abandonment of former brick tenements has ceased.  Dark windows signal the wrecking ball and renewal, not the hopelessness. 

Of course, the dark hopeless territories still exist, but many, many people can live and work in Manhattan rarely encounter the misery.  In the 1980s when I organized artistic critiques of the civic abandonment, all peoples in Manhattan had to divert their hearts away from the people of the streets or the five stories of broken glass.  We artists were saddened and angry at the diversion- but that anger sparked thought, energy and action through art or body or both. 

On Wednesday, I revisited one of the most dangerous Manhattan zones in the 1980s - the meatpacking district.  Today, the pristine storefronts are so numerous and trendy that both Samantha and Carrie from "Sex in the City" shopped there. I thought I was walking in some kind of strange dream where the fairy godmother swooped her wand and sparkled the filth into beautiful clothes for everyone. 

One art gallery, Leo Keating Gallery, had sponsored an art event to raise money for the new Highline park that will open in a few months.  The use of the old elevated rail tracks was a favorite student architecture project in the 80s and 90s.  One of architect Steven Holl's very early theoretical projects proposed housing on the tracks.  Now after ten years of advocacy and fund raising, the Highline will become a public park - an important part of the literal greening of Manhattan. 

To raise cash, the gallery was selling fluorescent green chalk shoes by Julia Mandle. Earlier in the month, she put shoes on various students from nearby schools and they drew a path on the sidewalk to the Highline.  A simple idea to tell the children, their friends and their parents that the Highline was coming to the neighborhood.  On the night of the gallery opening, she and a friend where making an apparently arbitrary path through the new glamour of the meat packing district.  Following the path that evening would lead you to the gallery or to her on the shoes. 

The gallery did not have significant posters about the Highline and the artist was not carrying any information with her.  This absence of information is a very New York thing that does not happen in other parts of the USA.  As I remember from days past, the New York art world believes that explanation apparently degrades the artwork.  Converting the thing from art to advertising. 

My new paying job is to create a consistent public art program for the Times Square Alliance.  Advertising, not art, dominates Times Square.  So my new work takes me straight to conflict between the instinct for ambiguous poetic connotations of art and the directive for the clear targets of advertising. 

Yet the visitors to Times Square desire the unexpected.  The protective judgments about art back home are abandoned in Times Square and the energy of strangeness is embraced.  Instead of secrecy of naughty personal acts in the Vegas slogan "What happens here, stays here", a visit to Times Square might generate a celebratory slogan like "Look what happened to me here".  The visitors snap pictures of every new billboard and ask a friend to record their strange encounters with Naked Cowboy or the two Statues of Liberty that graced Times Square today with a background of Peruvian flutes.  What better place could exist for public art to receive the full acceptance of all types of folks?

 

 

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