This is a quote from Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being that has always stuck with me, even as the specific context of his point wilted in memory. One reason the quote stuck is I wore it on a tee shirt for a couple years back in college. The shirt was made for a bicycle race that used to be held each year at my hippie liberal arts college during the Indy 500. It was the alternative transportation antidote to car races, five hundred impossibly small laps in front of a disused dorm building. Being a hippie liberal arts school didn’t necessarily mean it was all peace and love: the corners (it wasn’t even an oval) were sprayed with Teflon, and people retrieved compost and dung from the campus pet that quarter, a pig, which they proceeded to dump on you (the only rule of the race was “If you throw tomatoes, they can’t be in a can”). It was rumored one year people sought a passing circus for elephant dung.
So our team shirt bore the Kundera quote on the back (and, to give you an idea how just how smarmy a student I was, there was a Baudrillard quote on the front), and, later that summer, while interning here, I was waiting to go to a show at CBGB’s (the friends of friends duty, but I incidentally witnessed the subsequent Suckdog/Costes show, one of those things the seeming decline of makes your middle-aged laments of “New York has changed for the worse” seem defensible instead of trite), and thumbing through magazines at St. Mark’s Books (still on St. Mark’s), only to be interrupted by a strident feminist, who proceeded lecture me on the shortcomings of Kundera’s characterization of women in his novels. I didn’t necessarily disagree and was even perversely pleased that someone would interrupt a stranger to engage in a fairly sophisticated bit of literary criticism, which was terminated when I replied laconically that “I made this shirt for a race where people dumped pig shit on me.” Again, where has that town gone?
This quote popped up when I came across the Freedom of Expression National Monument in Foley Square a few weeks back. Partially it was the obvious symbolism: the instillation is a shockingly red megaphone attached to a platform reached by a short ramp. There is little doubt the intent of the piece, though for the doubters, there is a plaque helpfully affixed to the base of the ramp: “You are cordially invited to step up and speak up”. The megaphone is pointed at the Manhattan County Civil Supreme Court (best known recently as the site of the Martha Stewart trial), though it could have been rotated is most any direction and been effective. Created by architect Laurie Hawkinson, performer John Malpede, and visual artist Erika Rothenberg, and sponsored by a Creative Time, it is a reprisal of its original presentation in 1984 for Art on the Beach (1978-1985), when it was sited on a beach located in Battery Park City.
My first thought seeing it across the Square was fleetingly that was this was a piece of work by John Hejduk that I did not know. Perhaps only for formal reasons, it called to mind the House of the Suicide, one of his ‘masques’ that was constructed at the Georgia Institute of Technology during roughly the same period. The similarities are not, strictly speaking, derivative, but appropriately respectful of an idea: a rigorous geometry of structure that is not inherently the most rational (as a matter of engineering precision) solution, executed in mostly rough framing, which imparts an obsessive though not explicable logic, and an overall form that is both familiar and unsettling. It bespeaks of the strongest qualities of Hejduk’s work, and a perusal of Hawkinson’s CV indicates she received her BArch at Cooper Union the year before the Freedom of Expression National Monument was first mounted.
Even as the form is a deft execution of a process that I can find little fault, the overtly social commentary would seem to be a clear departure from the spirit of Hedjuk’s work, which is frequently appended with a number of obliquely positive adjectives personal, poetic and the like, mostly meaning strange to many a viewer. Except Hedjuk was not apolitical. The House of the Suicide was inspired by a poem about Jan Palach, a Czech student who found the condemnation of playacting to be a sentence he could not bear, and he immolated himself in 1969, as the Soviets were crushing the Prague Spring. It was his ability to imbue form with meaning that was not hopelessly subjective or grandly didactic that he clearly imparted on Hawinkson (and was shared by her collaborators).
And so we have an example of what the intervention of ‘art’ can be at its most effective: forms that are striking of their own accord, and still beguiling enough to seek to unearth what informed their creation. Of course, a big megaphone doesn’t require much excavation. But it does strike a nice balance between the whimsy necessary to draw people while still echoing some of the strident symbolism of social protest art, much of which can be attributed to the relentlessness of the red paint.
Where it is disappoints as social action is the ineffectiveness of the tool: yelling does not make you heard. Speaking up is not rewarded with the visceral effect of an echo reverberating off the walls of unyielding institution, but instead leaks tepidly out, resulting in an exercise Kundera would understand. The symbolism of this runs counter to the vibrant spirit of the artists’ statement, and so I conclude that the disjunction is a result of the vicissitudes of making public art.
Visiting over several weekends produced little in the way of incidents of speaking out. Given the light foot traffic of Foley Square off-hours, visitors, if any, were lost or particularly thorough tourists. It looks lonely most of the time, like a toy wanting to be played with. But such trifling terms should not be taken as an attitude of diminution; it is not a piece devoid of understanding the tenuous grip of democracy, and as much as it works to be engaging, its stoic presence when no one approaches is a compelling antidote to the weighty if overcooked symbols of ‘justice’ (or not — the INS is right there as well) that surround it. It’s a shame it was not closer to 100 Center Street during the convention, where the certain febrile emanations from those camped out to support detainees would have been the most poignant realization of Kundera’s comment.
That it feels both contemporary and emblematic of a very particular prior period makes the experience more acute. Being too young to know it first hand, but knowing enough of the genesis of the imagery, given the relative permanence of most of the buildings in the area, you can squint and imagine it is 1984 again, and the distance from the era of Reagan, the palpable anger at his willful silence regarding AIDS, and contemporaeneous development of the template for unfettered accumulation and consumption we are still in the thrall of, seems like nothing at all, carefully tracked by our big, red contrivance forcing us to recall Uncle Karl’s wisdom.
So what’s it like? Well, to that end, I must report cowardice, or worse, got the best of me. Not knowing for certain to what extent my words would or would not carpet Foley Square provided sufficient trepidation. But more damning, I could find nothing I wished to say. You, and I, have a chance to prove otherwise until November 13.
There are times when people are condemned to playact.
This is a quote from Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being that has always stuck with me, even as the specific context of his point wilted in memory. One reason the quote stuck is I wore it on a tee shirt for a couple years back in college. The shirt was made for a bicycle race that used to be held each year at my hippie liberal arts college during the Indy 500. It was the alternative transportation antidote to car races, five hundred impossibly small laps in front of a disused dorm building. Being a hippie liberal arts school didn’t necessarily mean it was all peace and love: the corners (it wasn’t even an oval) were sprayed with Teflon, and people retrieved compost and dung from the campus pet that quarter, a pig, which they proceeded to dump on you (the only rule of the race was “If you throw tomatoes, they can’t be in a can”). It was rumored one year people sought a passing circus for elephant dung.
So our team shirt bore the Kundera quote on the back (and, to give you an idea how just how smarmy a student I was, there was a Baudrillard quote on the front), and, later that summer, while interning here, I was waiting to go to a show at CBGB’s (the friends of friends duty, but I incidentally witnessed the subsequent Suckdog/Costes show, one of those things the seeming decline of makes your middle-aged laments of “New York has changed for the worse” seem defensible instead of trite), and thumbing through magazines at St. Mark’s Books (still on St. Mark’s), only to be interrupted by a strident feminist, who proceeded lecture me on the shortcomings of Kundera’s characterization of women in his novels. I didn’t necessarily disagree and was even perversely pleased that someone would interrupt a stranger to engage in a fairly sophisticated bit of literary criticism, which was terminated when I replied laconically that “I made this shirt for a race where people dumped pig shit on me.” Again, where has that town gone?
This quote popped up when I came across the Freedom of Expression National Monument in Foley Square a few weeks back. Partially it was the obvious symbolism: the instillation is a shockingly red megaphone attached to a platform reached by a short ramp. There is little doubt the intent of the piece, though for the doubters, there is a plaque helpfully affixed to the base of the ramp: “You are cordially invited to step up and speak up”. The megaphone is pointed at the Manhattan County Civil Supreme Court (best known recently as the site of the Martha Stewart trial), though it could have been rotated is most any direction and been effective. Created by architect Laurie Hawkinson, performer John Malpede, and visual artist Erika Rothenberg, and sponsored by a Creative Time, it is a reprisal of its original presentation in 1984 for Art on the Beach (1978-1985), when it was sited on a beach located in Battery Park City.
My first thought seeing it across the Square was fleetingly that was this was a piece of work by John Hejduk that I did not know. Perhaps only for formal reasons, it called to mind the House of the Suicide, one of his ‘masques’ that was constructed at the Georgia Institute of Technology during roughly the same period. The similarities are not, strictly speaking, derivative, but appropriately respectful of an idea: a rigorous geometry of structure that is not inherently the most rational (as a matter of engineering precision) solution, executed in mostly rough framing, which imparts an obsessive though not explicable logic, and an overall form that is both familiar and unsettling. It bespeaks of the strongest qualities of Hejduk’s work, and a perusal of Hawkinson’s CV indicates she received her BArch at Cooper Union the year before the Freedom of Expression National Monument was first mounted.
Even as the form is a deft execution of a process that I can find little fault, the overtly social commentary would seem to be a clear departure from the spirit of Hedjuk’s work, which is frequently appended with a number of obliquely positive adjectives personal, poetic and the like, mostly meaning strange to many a viewer. Except Hedjuk was not apolitical. The House of the Suicide was inspired by a poem about Jan Palach, a Czech student who found the condemnation of playacting to be a sentence he could not bear, and he immolated himself in 1969, as the Soviets were crushing the Prague Spring. It was his ability to imbue form with meaning that was not hopelessly subjective or grandly didactic that he clearly imparted on Hawinkson (and was shared by her collaborators).
And so we have an example of what the intervention of ‘art’ can be at its most effective: forms that are striking of their own accord, and still beguiling enough to seek to unearth what informed their creation. Of course, a big megaphone doesn’t require much excavation. But it does strike a nice balance between the whimsy necessary to draw people while still echoing some of the strident symbolism of social protest art, much of which can be attributed to the relentlessness of the red paint.
Where it is disappoints as social action is the ineffectiveness of the tool: yelling does not make you heard. Speaking up is not rewarded with the visceral effect of an echo reverberating off the walls of unyielding institution, but instead leaks tepidly out, resulting in an exercise Kundera would understand. The symbolism of this runs counter to the vibrant spirit of the artists’ statement, and so I conclude that the disjunction is a result of the vicissitudes of making public art.
Visiting over several weekends produced little in the way of incidents of speaking out. Given the light foot traffic of Foley Square off-hours, visitors, if any, were lost or particularly thorough tourists. It looks lonely most of the time, like a toy wanting to be played with. But such trifling terms should not be taken as an attitude of diminution; it is not a piece devoid of understanding the tenuous grip of democracy, and as much as it works to be engaging, its stoic presence when no one approaches is a compelling antidote to the weighty if overcooked symbols of ‘justice’ (or not — the INS is right there as well) that surround it. It’s a shame it was not closer to 100 Center Street during the convention, where the certain febrile emanations from those camped out to support detainees would have been the most poignant realization of Kundera’s comment.
That it feels both contemporary and emblematic of a very particular prior period makes the experience more acute. Being too young to know it first hand, but knowing enough of the genesis of the imagery, given the relative permanence of most of the buildings in the area, you can squint and imagine it is 1984 again, and the distance from the era of Reagan, the palpable anger at his willful silence regarding AIDS, and contemporaeneous development of the template for unfettered accumulation and consumption we are still in the thrall of, seems like nothing at all, carefully tracked by our big, red contrivance forcing us to recall Uncle Karl’s wisdom.
So what’s it like? Well, to that end, I must report cowardice, or worse, got the best of me. Not knowing for certain to what extent my words would or would not carpet Foley Square provided sufficient trepidation. But more damning, I could find nothing I wished to say. You, and I, have a chance to prove otherwise until November 13.
Click here to view photos of the installation.
(note: link is off site — photos presented via the excellent folks at flickr)