July 14, 2008
Please stick to the rivers and lakes you're used to. So I've seen all four of Olafur Eliasson's Waterfalls via automobile, at a leisurely jogging pace, and from a couple of vistas while cycling. I haven't walked down there yet. Honestly, I don't know I have the interest in making a specific journey, having seen them more than once now via the means listed.
There's an inherent difficulty in trying to create monumental art in New York. This is a town that grinds down every attempt at out-sized presentation: of people, or art, of place. Larger than life here at times requires cosmic performance. To get it 'right' is not necessarily success anyone should venerate. You could argue our best known citizens of the past three decades, a short fingered vulgarian and a thrice married proponent of "traditional values" are the sort we would prefer dissipate into the either.
The at times breathless run up to this latest, self-conscious effort at grandeur is as much an indication of the move or die shark-like mentality of the blog news cycle, and perhaps maybe a little Gilded Age navel-gazing (apartment sales still up in Manhattan! -- even though they are down by an unsustainable level in Brooklyn and the backer of half the outstanding mortgages nationwide is about to enter receivership).
Just three years ago, art tussled with this very issue in a very determined way in the form of The Gates project by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in Central Park. And like Eliasson's project, it came off a bit thin. The promotion was certainly gargantuan, at time seemingly like a struggling second city claiming a bit of cultural relevance -- as if Portland tried to open a 'world-class' contemporary art museum (or, hell, I'll say it: SFMOMA). But you don't take on Central Park unless you think you can win. Granted, there were more than a few obstacles working on behalf of the park, but I remember thinking one thing a good artist did was to know when an idea would fail.
I worked on The Gates -- and one reason was that I knew that if I didn't make that kind of commitment, the likelihood of getting uptown in February was small (a failing that starts way back in 1995, when I couldn't find the time to see a Richter exhibit that was up for what seemed like years), and my fears proved to be true. Aside from an abbreviated circuit in the hours following the unfurling and an abortive visit to Tavern on the Green (my only), I never went back to see the exhibit. Likewise, the times I've seen the waterfalls have been incidental -- which is nice and in large part how public art should be seen, but I have little desire to make a specific pilgrimage
Honestly, I was disappointed (though I was more sanguine at the time). Particularly in the southern reaches it seemed like we are a couple thousand gates short. Seeing the materials in the warehouse in Queens, or lining the park roads, that was some impressive hardware. And I was lucky to be working the northern end, where some vistas were compelling. When I walked south for the first time on opening day, I was stuck at how sparse it seemed. If you want to make art based on repetition in New York, you need to go balls to the wall. And we were balls to half court if lucky in most spots.
Eliasson doesn't even seem to get that close, even though his four spindly towers cost almost two-thirds the total cost of The Gates project. I've assumed since the first time I heard that number that most of it went for the lawyers. Surely there is some fancy engineering going on in the fountain part -- and let's not kid ourselves, they are fountains -- but beyond that, it's four mid-sized scaffolds that need to weather six months of salt water. It can't be that much.
The brochure says the use of stock materials recalls the pervasive element that brings us joy everywhere, the interminable scaffolding surrounding so many buildings, and (though less clear) perhaps to make the towers as 'dumb' as possible, so that they wouldn't overwhelm or detract from the 'work' -- presumably the cascading water. But the water barely cascades. It responds too quickly to wind, and never seems to reach a critical mass that imposes they way you expect a 'waterfall' to. Like The Gates, it just leaves you wishing it commanded more.
At more acute angles, this both less and more successful. Without the latticework back to provide immediate ground, the spout of water can be more impressive, but it is also foreshortened and can look like no more than a particularly strong fire hose. Seen dead on, which seems to be the preferred vantage, in some light the water is barely visible, unless it is being pushed off center by the wind.
Given the loaded terminology of the name, competing with something like this, regardless of locating it in the East River, far from any impressive natural occurrence still means you have a tall order (pun intended). If they were only called 'Fountains' they might not leave one with a sense of lacking, but the branding would be weak.
Not knowing, and not trying to know (some art is worth reading the placard to, but this is the sort of thing that should work on its face[s]) what is trying to be achieved, I look on to them as discrete objects -- only a view points really present them as a set piece. Each time, I mostly see the flat grey, squat towers. Their actual size can be promoted (90 feet! More!), but we live in the town that invented tall. They are squat, either pointing up rather timidly against some really uninspired backdrops, or hunkered down in the shadow of one of our most impressive landmarks. And even that one is not so grand, unless viewed though a high pass filter, ultra long exposure photo.
Look, you could put a pile of hot dog vendor carts under the Brooklyn Bridge and they would look impressive. Everything looks good in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. Surely there is a modicum of admiration of what it takes the city of New York to approve even the temporary defacement of one of the most storied images in the history of organized civilization, but if the gesture is as much the writing a $15 million check as it is the result, then hell, we should have held out for an even more substantial sum and concomitantly gratuitous splurge. Why shouldn't it have cost at least what a 'good' penthouse goes for these days?
This is not Eliasson's first large scale 'environmental' intervention. His most popular work is likely The Weather Project, in which he constructed a simulacrum of the sun in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London. By most accounts, it was an impressive gesture. Others don't strike me as powerful, particularly Green River, since I used to live in Savannah, where the river was dyed green every St. Patrick's Day (a practice that was finally halted, ironically, out of environmental concerns, though by then every one noted cynically that the presence of multiple riverside factories made the additional color superfluous).
I'm not going to use the failure of this as a cudgel against large public installations, The Public Art Fund has in its portfolio some fascinating projects. I won't say the money was wasted (it was mostly private), but the opportunity? Well, maybe a little. You could try to embrace it as grand futility, but it just looks like a testing station for perhaps a more impressive work to come, be it art or utilitarian. But, alas, this is all we are going to get. Unlike The Gates (or Chris Burden's installation at Rockefeller Center, which comes down this week), it's with us for a while -- October -- so don't feel compelled to rush downtown. Perhaps they will work better at night and as the days grow shorter, I'll prove to be less critical.
Found always via this permanent link.
June 28, 2008
Nowhere is my home. The three plus year battle of the Economakis family (or parasitic, exploitative real estate clan, depending on where you side in the battle) to convert 47 E. Third Street, an unremarkable tenement, into a 'single' family unit (single in quotes because they have indicated it will also serve to provide guest space for their extended family) has reached the stage of real estate battle where stasis becomes the story itself (akin to the Windermere on 57th).
I'm not going to detail the various claims and counter-claims; conveniently, everyone involved has a website. And this isn't a post about rent control, though that is germane to the continuance of the dispute.
What struck me most about the story was how starkly it underscores one of the more pernicious effects of the real estate boom in Manhattan. Even though on a per square foot basis real estate grows more dear every day, and people seem to have no limit for irrational mismatches between absolute dollars and relative scale (million-dollar studios et al), there is still a noticeable creep upward in the size of premium property, and certainly in trophy properties.
There have been a few notable conversions of this nature recently, including one only a few blocks away, in which the Bouwerie Lane Theater was basically erased to make way for a mansion and 'respectable' retail. And the contingents that find fault with the Gilded Age aura that encompasses these stories seem less troubled by similarly outsized footprints under the control of artists -- even though that hasn't proved to make them any less susceptible to market development.
There isn't an immediate corollary to real estate prices beyond Manhattan, since the wealth driving this is detached from any rational or practical notion of economy, like other compressed, hyper-inflated districts (Ile Saint-Louis, et al). There is an ancillary effect, but only some of it is a permanent shift, slightly upwards, of baseline prices in some areas, likely already established (the near neighborhoods of Brooklyn), and a retreat is as likely as not for everywhere else, since the most egregious overbuilding is in areas that don't attract the strata of untouchable wealth that Manhattan does. What is more acute, across the board, is what cultural effects that may result from a loss of density.
Density is the lifeblood of most of the elements of New York that stand out as unique: class and ethic mixing, artistic foment, intellectual and economic innovation. From the salons of Greenwich Village to the light industrial inventors in Brooklyn (it seems like everything from Barbicide to Steinway Pianos were invented in a bathtub there), to say nothing of massive cultural and intellectual edifices ranging from Abstract Expressionism to Broadway and the New School started because like minded people could find each other and still commingle with a panoply of others.
The Economakis' are removing from housing stock inventory which could easily house up up to 30 distinct lives, based on habitation patterns of just the past two decades (go back four or six, and it would easily be double), housing the city has no good plan for replacing. The Bloomberg administration was reelected with a plan for new housing that did not better those of his opponents, and is likely falling well short of his goals.
The calculus that drew a large percentage of people who don't prioritize financial gain as the end all of human endeavor is that the trade off of lower standards of living and less certainty in the traditional trappings of security (health care, retirement, affordable housing -- affordable anything) was worth the struggle in hopes of having accomplishment within fields where laurels were not accompanied by sums that could even place you in the most modest of market rate apartments. Barring that, simply rubbing elbows and trying might be its own reward, and the city always needs good waiters and dog walkers.
But the math is breaking down. People at the absolute lowest rungs are not living a bohemian dream; rather, they are saddled with economic requirements that force long commutes and extended works schedules that chip away in quite literal terms from the time required in the struggle to create cultural works, gradually diluting the pool of the willing.
As someone who loves a good class war, let's also look outside the glory of art, where the idea that hard work and a willingness to forgo extravagance in return for a solid, if unspectacular existence is dashed as well. Teachers, nurses, cab drivers, civil service, no one living here a generation ago would encourage a child to take this path with the same confidence. Think about every time you've had an interaction with someone, a mundane transaction that all of a suddenly shifts when you understand everyone here is a crank and a know-it-all, or a preening self important fool willing to share an opinion at the drop of a hat; afterward you walk away, perversely proud of your town, because a cab driver would never lecture you on cheese in Topeka.
The argument that the hordes of American tourists and locals that invade the East and West Villages are here to see the latest show at the New Museum doesn't hold. Those people aren't understanding of or pursuing cultural consumption past finding where Magnolia Bakery is. But the cheap, sanitized version of New York that results in glossy expensive lounges and restaurants that can barely be filled now is a reasonably new phenomena (at least at its current scale) and I doubt it has any longevity. The winding path of downtown culture over the past century that set that stage for it is in hasty retreat. Or, at least, it grows more diffuse, and the difference between those two eventualities may not make a difference in twenty years.
No doubt that some of the people the Economakis' want to displace haven't done much of anything with their good fortune. In the end, most of use won't. Because it's a numbers game. When you reduce the numbers, you are slimming the odds. And in this case the house is as bland, corporate and unyielding its best known shill.
*As a matter of perverse disclosure, I just found out I may have been a tenant of Granite (the management company the Economakis family controls). One of the properties listed in Manhattan was a former apartment. But my checks always went to an individual. And he was a shitty landlord. Over the course of three years he refused to give us information on where or when we should dispose of our trash (among other failures).
Found always via this permanent link.
June 18, 2008
A very simple message: support Paul Newell. I'm going to try and make this short. I hear blog readers want bullet lists and such, so let me hit the high points quickly, and then the three of you that read for, you know, style, can continue south. One: Vote for Paul Newell, who is the first person to challenge Sheldon Silver for the 64th Assembly District of New York State since 1985, this September 9, in the Democratic Primary. Two: if you are inclined to do more, come to M1-5 (52 Walker Street, between Church & Broadway) next Tuesday, June 24, and toss some dollars in the pot. I'll be there, if that's any appeal.
I've been a constituent of Sheldon Silver for most of my time in New York. What Sheldon Silver has actually done, for me, as a constituent, I'd have a hard time enumerating. As much as I admired his (nonetheless) dirt dealing quashing of the Jets Stadium (a project I showered less than no love for), it affected mostly my abstract principles about urban development. On the ground, things like congestion pricing, rent stabilization, and the commuter tax, he's been an absent landlord at best, offering obfuscation about his reasoning that at best sounds like 'we know what's better for you'. And I gotta tell you Shelly, paying well over two grand for a tenement pad feels great. Thank you.
When you live in New York, you can be forgiven for not seeing the gradated differences in what we loosely call progressive politics. Give the Speaker some face time with just about any national politician, and he will play the way we expect: somewhere left of Emma Goldman, and we can all pat ourselves on the back for the symbolism of unrepentant liberal idealism.
But, you know, when the proverbial rubber hits the road, Silver comes up more than a little short. The oft used excuse for his lack of constituent service is the larger problem of holding down the fort against Joe Bruno. But you know, the Democratic majority in the Assembly is overwhelming, and we are creeping up on the Senate. So every craven accommodation and compromise, is suspect. Considering how drastic the impact of some of those issues has been (the commuter tax and luxury decontrol, to name two), trading that to protect upstate assemblymen who sell us down the river for a stoplight, even when our tax dollars subsidize the entire state, is a bit rich.
Paul Newell has a very simple point. For everything else Silver is, he still represents a discrete district. He has an obligation to those people, to act in their interests, with transparency and honestly, two qualities that he is distinctly lacking around the largest issues. Smaller issues, like funding security in public housing, developing the few remaining viable lots in lower Manhattan for affordable housing, things that can directly effect the people he ostensibly serves, get caught up in these supposed larger battles. But those battles often look like they all center on one struggle: sustaining Silver as one of the "three men in a room."
The Democrats are poised to retake the Senate. Their control of the Assembly is seemingly unyeilding. We have a Democratic governor. That we have to go hat in hand to try and get Silver off the dime of business as usual is an insult to the progressive ideals that people often point to as a defining feature of this city. And it is particularly galling to those he was elected to serve. People like me. I'm more than ready for Change. We are on the verge of the possibility of an historic change. At all levels.