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Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
One of Merce Cunningham’s final works of choreography, before his death on Sunday evening, was creating site-specific work for Rockefeller Park, in Lower Manhattan, where it will be performed this Saturday and Sunday as part of the River to River Festival.
According to the River to River organizers, Cunningham combined new material and dance movement from past and current repertory for the 60-minute Event (as Cunningham recombinations are known), which is free to the public and will be performed by Stephan Moore and David Behrman and members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company Music Committee.
In a statement prepared before his death, Cunningham said of the piece: “Presented without intermission, this Event consists of excerpts of dances from the repertory and new sequences arranged for the particular performance and place, with the possibility of several separate activities happening at the same time—to allow not so much for a program of dances as the experience of dance.”
Patrick Healy
New York Times
Seen from the streets: Tara Donovan’s plastic construction at Lever House (Photo: Librado Romero/The New York Times)
Outdoor art isn’t what it used to be. Once it honored heroic individuals and upheld values that whole populations could embrace. Today, excepting memorials like the Vietnam veterans wall, outdoor art serves rather to divert, amuse and comfort.
A striking illustration of that old-new dichotomy straddles East 60th Street and the southeastern corner of Central Park. On the north side, temporarily installed in Doris C. Freedman Plaza by the Public Art Fund, is “The Ego and the Id,” a big, brightly colored sculpture by the Austrian artist Franz West. Its two parts, made of roughly welded-together pieces of aluminum, form lumpy, spindly loops rising 20 feet in the air. One is painted glossy bubblegum pink, while the other sports a coat of yellow, green, blue and orange patches. In places near the ground, the loops morph into round stools on which people can sit. Judging by the reactions of passers-by and their clambering children, this infectiously cheerful work is a popular attraction.
Meanwhile, on the south side of the street, on an elevated, neo-Classical stone pedestal, is a bigger-than-life gilded-bronze sculpture of the Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman. Riding on horseback, he follows a female figure in billowing robes, an allegory of Victory. The monument has been here since 1903. On a recent sunny day there were lots of people on the plaza in front of the sculpture, but most were watching a group of athletic young men performing gymnastic dance feats to loud hip-hop music. It seemed a safe bet that no one there knew or cared who the man on the horse was or who made the sculpture that honors him.
The creator of the Sherman monument, Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907), was the pre-eminent American sculptor of the 19th and early 20th centuries. His career is the subject of an indoor show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Including miniature cameo portraits, exquisitely sensitive relief portraits of upper-class women and children in marble and bronze and a monumental marble figure of Hiawatha, the exhibition of almost four dozen works from the museum’s collection displays a kind of traditional skill and idealism that practically no one possesses anymore.
The big problem for outdoor art is the absence of any consensus of values in our pluralistic, multicultural society. It’s hard to imagine a public sculpture of a hero today that would not be regarded by one faction or another as partisan. As an unscientific sampling of art in the public realm this summer confirms, contemporary outdoor art tends to offer unobjectionable, mildly decorative or entertaining and relatively empty experiences.
A few blocks south of the Sherman monument, placed by the New York City Parks Public Art Program on the Park Avenue median strip between 57th and 51st Streets, are seven bronze and stainless-steel sculptures by James Surls of giant, semi-abstract, fantasy flowers. Mr. Surls, who is based in Carbondale, Colo., is known for funky wooden indoor sculptures resembling the works of an eccentric backwoods visionary.
With petals inscribed with eyes and other petals in the form of crystals, the Park Avenue works hint at psychedelic experience. But that aspect is neutralized by the colorless metal and a stylistic decorum that turns them into innocuous garden sculptures.
In the same neighborhood is a more eye-grabbing sculpture by Tara Donovan, the artist known for spectacular accumulations of ordinary objects like plastic straws and disposable cups. Presented in the window of the Lever House Lobby, where it may be viewed from indoors as well as out, Ms. Donovan’s untitled piece consists of 2,500 pounds of plastic sheeting loosely folded into a wide box that is glassed in on the front and back and built into a freestanding white wall.
At first you notice the serpentine pattern formed by the edges of the plastic material. Then a remarkable optical effect kicks in. Light pouring through from either side reflects on the shiny surfaces of the plastic folds, producing a shimmering, kaleidoscopic effect. The transformation is magical and more hallucinogenic than anything suggested by Mr. Surls’s works.
(By the way, some art lovers will be relieved to discover that Damien Hirst’s colossal bronze sculpture of a partly dissected pregnant woman has been removed from the outdoor Lever House plaza. It has been replaced by a giant, white Hello Kitty figure by Tom Sachs. A painted bronze that looks as if it were patched together from pieces of foam core, it is not a great improvement, but it is at least not nearly as hideous.)
Ken Johnson
New York Times
The Makakovskaya metro is considered the most beautiful station on the underground rail system
Moscow’s skyline and architectural heritage are on the verge of being destroyed forever because of low-quality renovations and thoughtless demolition, according to a report released yesterday by a group of Russian and international activists.
“There is no other capital city in peacetime Europe that is being subjected to such devastation for the sake of earning a fast megabuck,” the Moscow Architecture Preservation Society stated in its report. The authors said that hundreds of important buildings – from 19th-century palaces to masterpieces of Stalinist architecture – were being neglected or demolished.
The problems have been blamed on a lack of legal consequences for developers who ruin listed buildings. Critics of the system say that opaque development plans mean the public is left in the dark until works are under way. And while the financial crisis has slowed down some of the more rapacious developers, the dried-up cash flow also means that there is less money to spend on quality renovation work.
“An all-round lowering of standards, the triumph of vandalism and the obstruction of every last vacant space on the skyline is the legacy that the last decade has bequeathed to Moscow,” wrote Anna Bronovitskaya, an art historian. The report also blamed “a theme park approach to an historic city” and an overabundance of cars.
Even where attempts had been made to renovate historical buildings or build within the architectural context of the area, the results were often atrocious. The report spoke of “bloated sham replicas of historic buildings” dominating the skyline.
An earlier version of the report was published two years ago but the authors said that after a pause in the demolition of listed buildings and an increased willingness on the part of city authorities to listen to public concerns, former service was soon resumed.
“There has been no progress in the last two years, things have got worse and worse,” said David Sarkisyan, the director of the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture in Moscow.
“This is probably a battle that we are not going to win, but it’s one that is very important to fight.”
Shaun Walker
The Independent
The Spanish winery by Rogers Stirk Harbour, which has received two nominations for the prestigious prize. Photograph: Katsuhisa Kida
It is a 90-minute train journey from Copenhagen, and set in the flat, rather bleak fields of an island in the Baltic Sea. But the Fuglsang Kunstmuseum was today named a favourite for the UK’s most prestigious architecture prize.
The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), organisers of the Stirling prize, today revealed the shortlist for this year’s award, which also includes an NHS health centre, a Spanish winery and a city-centre mixed-use residential scheme.
For a prize that has been won by such high-profile schemes as the Gherkin, the Scottish parliament and the Lord’s media centre, this year’s list is strikingly un-starry. Even so, RIBA president, Sunand Prasad called it “a fascinating set of schemes”, that reflected the wide-ranging spirit of the prize.
Bookmakers have made the Fuglsang Kunstmuseum 3/1 favourite. Designed by Tony Fretton Architects, the whitewashed brick building, which contains mainly Danish art, is on a working country estate in Denmark and is part of that country’s policy of relocating cultural facilities in rural areas. The judges praised the £6.5m building as being “well-constructed and detailed, with nods to architectural history. It feels as if it could have been built in any decade since the 1920s.”
There are two nominations for Richard Rogers’ practice, Rogers Stirk Harbour. One is for the Maggie’s Centre – part of a network of cancer drop-in centres – at Charing Cross hopsital in Hammersmith, west London, which, judges believe expresses “compassion, sensitivity and a deep sense of our common humanity”.
The practice’s other nomination is for Bodegas Protos near Valladolid in north-west Spain. The winery, with its five imposing arches, is used for storing and bottling wine. The architects were praised for creating an environment similar to caves, which still exist in local hillsides.
The most costly scheme nominated is the £500m masterplan for Liverpool’s city centre, made up of fewer than 42 acres of retail, commercial and residential buildings. In total, 26 practices contributed over a nine-year construction period – a timescale that judges said was “a triumph of skill and commitment”.
An 18-storey office block at 5 Aldermanbury Square, near the Barbican in London, is also nominated. The £72m, building which replaced a 60s development, was designed by Eric Parry Architects and is commended for “creating, improving and connecting public spaces in an area of the city notoriously difficult to resolve.”
The final nomination is for Kentish Town health centre in north London, designed by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris. The building replaced a structurally unsound one from 1974 and was said by the judges to be “uplifting” for both staff and patients.
The Stirling prize, now in its 13th year, is for projects designed in Britain, but not necessarily built there. The jury, which includes the architect Benedetta Tagliabue, designer Thomas Heatherwick and Sir John Sorrell, the chairman of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), will visit all the schemes before naming the winner on 17 October.
Mark Brown
Guardian
(Photo from Edward Lifson’s “Hello Beautiful!” blog)
As my fellow archi-blogger Edward Lifson reported Monday, the tent fabric is finally going into place over the aluminum skeleton of Zaha Hadid’s much-delayed Burnham Plan Centennial pavilion in Millennium Park (below). But I’m hearing that the pavilion, which was supposed to be done five weeks ago, is likely to open a few days after its Aug. 1 target.
Emily Harris, the executive director of the Burnham Plan Centennial Committee, writes in an email: “While it still looks like the construction will wrap up on August 1, that is a Saturday, and we are concerned about weekend crowds as well as the cost of taking down the tent on the weekend. So I’m thinking early the next week – 4th or 5th to be safe.”
That’s not a final decision, she adds.
Blair Kaman
Edgar Tijhuis, a criminologist, lecturing students enrolled in a summer program in Amelia, Italy, in international art crime studies (Chris Warde-Jones for The New York Times)
“What’s the resemblance between the illegal art trade, the funding of terrorism by charities and smoking pot in a Dutch coffee bar?” Edgar Tijhuis, a criminologist who teaches at VU University in Amsterdam, paused and looked expectantly at a dozen students listening raptly. There was silence. “I hoped you wouldn’t say anything or else I wouldn’t have much to teach you,” he said.
Professor Tijhuis, who also practices international art law in Amsterdam, had come to this small walled town in Umbria, where church bells chime hymns to the Virgin Mary, and swallows squawk louder than cars, to lecture students enrolled in what is billed as the first master’s program in international art crime studies.
His class focused on international organized crime, and the lecture touched on money laundering and cigarette smuggling as well. (As for the resemblance he asked the students about, he explained that the activities showed how illegal transactions can be transformed into legal ones, and vice versa.) Other courses include art history, criminology, museum security and forgery. They’re all part of a three-month master’s program here trying to capitalize on interest in a field that’s been gaining attention through news media reports about the restitution of looted art and through popular literature. Not to mention that police forces around the world have in recent years created special squads to combat the problem.
Noah Charney, an American, is the director of the program and founding director of the group that sponsors it, the Association for Research Into Crimes Against Art (which also consults on what it calls art protection and recovery cases). He said the time was ripe “for academic study to help inform future police enforcement.”
According to the association’s Web site (artcrime.info) Italy has by far the most art crime, with “approximately 20,000 art thefts reported each year.”
Citing Interpol, Mr. Charney said art crime was the third-highest-grossing illegal worldwide business, after drugs and weapons. Interpol itself says on its Web site (interpol.int) that it knows of no figures to make such a claim.
Whatever the case, fighting art crime may certainly pay for Mr. Charney. He has managed to transform himself into a 360-degree specialist. He not only teaches at the school and other universities, he also writes fiction and nonfiction books on the subject and he’s developing two television programs, one of a documentary nature that he would present, the other a fictional drama based on himself.
Harasyn Sandell, 22, who graduated this year from Dominican University of California, said she had long wanted to work with the F.B.I. Art Crime Team. “I think I’d be a good undercover agent because no one would suspect me,” she said.
The program, she added, was “seriously the best thing ever,” partly because it puts students in contact with experts like Virginia Curry, a retired F.B.I. special agent who has dealt with art crimes. Ms. Curry was here at a midterm conference this month giving a lecture on unexpected thieves.
“This is what happens when good people go bad,” Ms. Curry began, before Power-Pointing through case studies of graduate students, museum directors and professors who succumbed to temptation. (She did note that “you can make more money working for McDonald’s than as a museum intern,” though she did not suggest that this justified criminal behavior.)
Elisabetta Povoledo
New York Times
In the spring of 1978, a few months before I left Dallas to move to New York City, my senior English teacher, Jim Lloyd, took me aside to warn me of the dangers that lurked up north.
Most of what he told me was the familiar claptrap about how the insidious racism of the North was far worse and more pervasive than the overt racism of the South. I was hearing this a lot and had learned to take the path of least resistance and nod agreeably rather than point out that both regions had no shortage of either. Then Mr. Lloyd finished with a remark that mystified me. “Watch out for that graffiti!”
Maybe Mr. Lloyd was hip to something that would become a worldwide movement in public art. (Without it, we wouldn’t have Shepard Fairey and his iconic image of President Obama.) The work of the early graffiti movement is now beautifully depicted in Subway Art, a 25th anniversary edition of the book that in 1984 introduced graffiti to a large audience.
Almost everyone who lived in New York City in the late ‘70s or early ‘80s had a graffiti moment. My moment came one evening during my first month as a New Yorker; I was heading back uptown to campus and transferring to a local train on an Upper West Side platform. The train barreled into the station with the usual deafening roar; it was a big, ugly, gun-metal gray tube, but suddenly one of the cars jumped out at me. It was spray-painted in bright fluorescent colors with blocky letters, and to the side were images of cartoon characters. I stood gaping in awe. To that point, I had only experienced graffiti solely as vandalism, the messy scribbles that made the interiors of subway cars that much more drab. This was totally different; it was public art as mass transit.
Before long, I began making any excuse possible to leave campus in the hopes of finding more graffiti. After about a month of looking at cars during my travels, a visual vernacular took shape. Most of the cars were self-advertisements—a public art iteration of the Operation PUSH mantra, “I am Somebody.” Bright colors were the norm, cartoon and comic-book references were common, and there were occasionally brief texts. It didn’t take a cultural critic to see that these artists, whoever they were, had advanced some concepts of Pop Art (Andy Warhol had his soup cans and Roy Lichtenstein his Donald Duck). And in retrospect, the texts certainly had a connection to Jenny Holzer, who was just starting to get her work into Soho galleries.
I wanted to pursue these odd bursts of public art, but backed off when some of New York native pals told me that the artists wandered into the subway tunnels to find idle cars. Dirty, rat-infested, electrified subway tracks? No thanks. I settled for getting my art from pristine museums and galleries and occasionally on subway platforms.
Fortunately, photographers Martha Cooper, a photojournalist for the New York Post, and Henry Chalfant, a sculptor with a sidelight in photography weren’t daunted. They, too, had been impressed with graffiti artists and began documenting what they saw. They fell in with a variety of crews, and Cooper shot them in action. Chalfant took magnificent photographs of their trains in motion. Individually, they shopped book proposals and found the American publishing industry unreceptive, so they pooled their resources and shopped the idea abroad. The result, Subway Art, was published in 1984.
Martin Johnson
Root
“Usefulness is inversely proportional to status,” Deyan Sudjic writes in his new book “The Language of Things: Understanding the World of Desirable Objects.” “The more useless an object is, the more highly valued it will be.”
The author is referring to the relative value of art versus industrial design – but the observation can be applied equally well to cities such as San Francisco.
Think about it: The physical need to occupy a specific patch of earth has never been less important to one’s success. Everything we might acquire can be tracked down online; most culture we seek can be procured through a handheld device.
Our 21st century equivalent of an office tower turns out to be a cafe with free Wi-Fi.
All this should signal a death knell to the traditional core. Instead – recession aside – marquee hubs such as San Francisco stand more desirable than ever. It’s not that we need to be here. But the center serves as a stage set, the spotlit focus for people who use urbanity to define themselves and their tribe.
Cities aren’t the focus of Sudjic’s book, a well-tailored provocation that both explores why the best design work is timeless and decries how it can be debased for status or show. Thomas Chippendale and his 18th century furniture are explored as a precursor to Ikea – “a pioneer in brand creation” – and the ever-shinier line of Apple products is contrasted with the demise of the fountain pen as status symbol (“the basic concept has lost its relevance”).
The underlying theme: the quest among designers and clients for “emotional resonance,” the design of a watch or a laptop computer that connotes something beyond what it does: “to provide us with a reminder of the world beyond utility.”
John King
SF Gate (San Francisco Chronicle)
ICA, Boston
At a time when cultural organizations struggle to hold onto their audiences, the ICA is Boston’s greatest success story. Since opening in December 2006, attendance has boomed, making it the second most visited museum in the region. And a string of recent high-profile shows has done more than create foot traffic. The shows have changed the way Bostonians, traditionally more attuned to Sargent and Monet, look at contemporary art.
“Maybe it just took that landmark building to make people wake up,’’ said Susan Stoops, curator of contemporary art at Worcester Art Museum.
No show has had more impact than the current 250-plus-piece exhibition of work by the controversial street artist Fairey. Just last month, attendance passed 105,000, making it the most popular show in the ICA’s 73-year history. That came on the heels of well-received exhibitions featuring Bombay-born sculptor Anish Kapoor and Tara Donovan, who crafts objects out of Scotch tape, plastic buttons, and pins.
“Don’t get me wrong, I love the Museum of Fine Arts, but if you go there, you won’t see any graffiti,’’ Sudbury’s Evan Berkowitz, 13, said after walking through the Fairey exhibition. “I like the ICA. It’s a nice break.’’
How has the ICA done it? By reaching out to the mainstream without alienating art world insiders. Chief Curator Nicholas Baume said the museum remains committed to giving attention to deserving artists who make important works. But he says he is also conscious of the need to build a new audience.
“Kapoor, Donovan, and Fairey are artists you don’t need to have a lot of experience going to museums and have an art history degree to really engage with and respond to,’’ he said.
Even some local gallery owners, critics, and curators who criticized the shows held just after the building’s opening in December 2006 have come around. They appreciated the work of Kapoor, known for his mirrored, bean-shaped installation, “Cloud Gate,’’ in Chicago’s Millennium Park. They also praised the solo exhibition featuring Donovan. In a fortuitous twist, two weeks before the show opened, Donovan was awarded a MacArthur genius grant.
“They’ve really hit their stride,’’ said Nick Capasso, senior curator at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park.
Geoff Edgers
The Boston Globe
(Photo: Guardian)
Elizabeth Peyton – painter of celebrities, celebrity painter. Is there much more to be said? Now in her mid-forties, this native New Yorker has acquired such a reputation for her wan little portraits of pop stars, art stars, dealers and collectors that her society status appears almost indivisible from theirs.
In a sense, Peyton is the painterly equivalent of photographers like Wolfgang Tillmans and Juergen Teller, so completely a part of the very world they record for magazines as well as art museums. And in fact she also takes, and exhibits, photos of her friends; Marc Jacobs, Chloë Sevigny, Matthew Barney, Olafur Eliasson, faces skimmed from social occasions. The curator of a recent show called these somewhat insouciant (and often poorly exposed) shots “acts of devotion”, which is striking precisely because this is the exact claim people always make for her paintings.
But the question raised by the paintings, as opposed to the photographs, is how can one possibly tell?
Peyton’s portraits sound like a fan’s visions, sure enough. Liam and Noel Gallagher imagined in their Sunday best on their mum’s sofa; Liam in violet-blue shadow; Liam in flowers; Jarvis delicately offering Liam a light. Kurt Cobain in white, silver, as a child, with his favourite cat, as a blanched and beautiful face – not too far from reality.
All these paintings are based on spreads from the NME, Rolling Stone and so forth. The translation into oil paint involves flattening, cropping and a kind of whimsical simplification, not so radical that the star is no longer recognisable, nor so streamlined you could really call it stylish. The main effect is simply of homogeneity. All these famous figures – no matter how individual, how young or old, solitary, tormented, cheerful or gregarious, no matter what profession or sex – share a family resemblance. They all look like Elizabeth Peytons.
Laura Cumming
Guardian
