NEWSgrist: *Bethany Bristow: ‘Easter’ + other urban
interventions* Vol.4, no.16
============================
============================
NEWSgrist
where spin is art
{bi-weekly news digest}
free e-subscriptions:
http://www.newsgrist.net/subscribe.html
subscribe // unsubscribe
============================
Vol.4, no.16 (Oct 20, 2003)
============================
============================
*Underbelly*
Bulletin board: post your own news, press releases, urls:
http://pub11.bravenet.com/forum/show.php?usernum=870870569
============================
============================
CONTENTS:
- *Splash* Bethany Bristow: ‘Easter’ +
other urban interventions
- *Quote/s* Art pas
mort (FIAC); Dave Hickey
- *Url/s* more Urban Interventions
- *Dia Doomed?* 22nd Street closings (Artnet news)
- *Nike Plotz* performance prank
invites lawsuit (Rhizome)
- *Red Balloon*
Explosive intervention at FIAC (ArtForum News)
- *Paris
Power Failure* gloomy art fair (AFP)
- *Whitney
Futures* Saltz sez it (Village Voice)
- *Air Kiss* Dave Hickey on the state of the arts (Denver Post)
- *Glassy-eyed* Gehry’s glass curtain (NYTimes)
- *Darkness at Noon*
Multiphrenic Art Spiegelman (NYTimes)
============================
============================
Bethany Bristow: ‘Easter’ + other urban interventions...
Easter, part of an ongoing series of site-specific
tactical installations in
New York City. Sculptures made
from melted glass bottles, feathers, and
corn syrup are installed on the
sidewalk or building facades then left to
the elements. This work explores
the random and chaotic nature of the
urban environment in contrast to
the controlled and static nature of
traditional art venues. The unknowable
fate of the installations suggests
a time-based methodology,
however this is mediated by the final art
product that takes the form of
large format c-prints. The work is a test
to the permanence/impermanence
of the self, art, and the world around
us.
splash archived at: http://www.newsgrist.net/Splash_Bristow.html
============================
============================
1)
"Art pas mort: juste un
cancer. Le cancer discursif. Ablation et chimie"
(Art not dead: just a cancer. The discursive cancer.
Ablation [surgical
removal] and chemistry).
-- Flux intermittent anonyme et concret (FIAC) [see *Red Balloon* below]
2)
"Criticism has sort of divided itself into this
opaque, academic narrative,
which is totally over, and this new sort of Art
Brit-tabloid sleaze, which
is about who was at the club. There is no real place much
anymore for
what I do."
-- Dave Hickey [see *Air Kiss* below]
============================
============================
NikeGround
> more info:
> http://0100101110101101.org/nikeground/index.html
[see *Nike Plotz* below]
RIP: Yahoo Sign (Houston + B’way NYC)
Frank Gehry Unofficial site
from Gothamist: Oct 14, 2003: Gehry Goes to the West Side
http://www.gothamist.com/archives/2003/10/14/gehry_goes_to_the_west_side.php
[see *Glassy-eyed* below]
============================
============================
> From Weekend Update
Walter Robinson
Artnet Mag, 10/16/03
http://www.artnet.com/magazine/reviews/robinson/robinson10-16-03.asp
Everyone's whispering about looming plans to close Dia:
Chelsea
(formerly known as the Dia Center for the Arts),
ostensibly for
renovations but more likely as a money-saving move.
According to this
scenario, the bookstore would stay open (taking a page
from the
Guggenheim SoHo's playbook) and the space upstairs could
be rented
out. Dia's formerly energetic website needs updating, but
it looks like the
current round of shows there are se to expire in January
2004. The West
22nd Street museum has already found temporary tenant for
the huge
exhibition space across the street where Bruce Nauman's
Mapping the
Studio video installation unspooled in 2002 -- the Italian
Trade
Commission has installed a ginormous collection of Italian
design called
"Theater of Italian Creativity" -- with free
espresso, when we were there.
[...] and...
Esthetic atmosphere changing at huge Starret Lehigh
building over at 501
West 26th Street with new tenants -- the
"investigations unit" of the
Homeland Security Bureau on floors seven and eight.
============================
============================
Nike buys streets and squares.
Guerrilla marketing or collective hallucination?
http://0100101110101101.org/nikeground/index.html
In September the news went out nationwide:
"Karlsplatz", one of the
city's main squares, is soon to be renamed
"Nikeplatz". Apart from the
new name, it appears that a huge monument in the shape of
Nike's
famous "Swoosh" logo will be built in
"Nikeplatz". Needless to say, it is
all fake. The one-month campaign provoked the reactions of
Vienna's
citizens, city officials and, of course, the Nike group,
which has denied
any involvement and tries to put an end to this bizarre
performance.
This almost unbelievable prank is the work of the
organization known as
0100101110101101.ORG, who this time have tricked an entire
city:
Vienna.
media coverage:
http://0100101110101101.org/nikeground/media.html
and:
Rhizome, October 17, 2003
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Why doesn't Nike want to play with me?
Nike starts legal action against the European art group
0100101110101101.ORG and cultural Internet platform Public Netbase.
http://www.rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=10718&text=20778
In mid September this group started a surreal art project called Nike
Ground (http://www.nikeground.com),
a performance built around a fake
guerrilla marketing campaign: Nike was supposedly buying streets and
squares in major world capitals, in order to rename them and insert
giant monuments of their famous logo. A hi-tech container was installed
in Vienna, supposedly the first city to host a "Nike Square", as part
of
the action.
On October 10th, 0100101110101101.ORG publicly claimed to
be behind
this "hyper-real theatrical performance". The project
questions the issues
of private appropriation of
public space, the side effects of bombarding
marketing strategies and the artistic freedom to manipulate symbols of
everyday life.
On October 14th, Nike released a 30 pages injunction
requesting the
immediate removal of any reference to copyrighted material, and that any
activity related to Nike cease immediately. Failure to comply with this
request would mean that Nike will claim 78,000 Euro for damages.
"Where is the Nike spirit?
-- responds Franco, spokesman of
0100101110101101.ORG -- I expected to deal with sporting people, not a
bunch of boring lawyers!".
"Many artists have dealt with commercial products in
the past, before
Nike even existed -- comments Eva, also from 0100101110101101.ORG --
think of Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup, for example. Contemporary art
does not have a well defined
role within this society. On the contrary, it is
a field where one can make statements that are not possible in any other
context. Art has always used powerful images from the society of its
time as its subject. Nike invades our lives with products and ads but
then forbid us to use them creatively".
According to independent curator and writer Timothy
Druckery, "the work
of 0100101110101101.ORG provokes questions about how corporate
identity cannot endorse itself as a proxy public sphere or
as an entity
immune from the implications of its actions".
Curiously enough, the building of the "Viennese
Secession", built by
Joseph Olbrich in 1898, faces the fake Nike Infobox in Karslplatz. In
huge gold letters over the entrance are the words: "To every time its
art. To every art its freedom".
CONTACTS:
0100101110101101.ORG:
HTTP://0100101110101101.ORG
Nikeground@0100101110101101.ORG
NIKEGROUND:
http://www.nikeground.com
info@nikeground.com
============================
============================
EXPLOSION CAUSES TEMPORARY SHUTDOWN AT FIAC
ArtForum News 10/13/03
http://www.artforum.com/news/week=200342?sid=b713d667665086f6de4df0bf0aa39725#news5611
Paris's Foire Internationale d'Art Contemporain (FIAC) was
evacuated and
temporarily closed on Friday, October 10 after a Perrier
bottle containing
chemicals exploded at the fair. As Le Monde's Harry Bellet
reports,
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3246,36-337711,0.html
one man was taken to the hospital with an eye injury, and
a gallerist was
hurt during the evacuation. The bottle exploded at about 4
PM in Paris-
Expo's hall number 4--where 175 galleries are showing
their wares--near
the stands of the Seville gallerist Pepe Cobo and the
Vienna gallerist
Ursula Krinzinger. For some, the incident recalled an
intervention at the
fair in 1975, when Hermann Nitsch threw animal blood and
intestines at
visitors. This year's intervention appears more nefarious;
the bottle
contained two strips of aluminum and hydrochloric acid. A
second bottle
was discovered near the stands of the galleries Continua,
Vallois,
Perrotin, and Nelson; it was filled with gas, and a balloon
was attached
carrying the following message: "Art pas mort: juste un cancer. Le
cancer discursif. Ablation
et chimie" (Art not dead: just a cancer. The
discursive cancer. Ablation [surgical removal] and
chemistry). Shortly
thereafter, the French national police received an e-mail
in which a group
or individual signing itself "Flux intermittent
anonyme et concret" (FIAC)
took responsibility for the incident. FIAC organizers have
denounced the
act as "malicious and scandalous," and the
French police are investigating.
more:
Flux Intermittent Anonyme et Concret statement
("FIAC")
posted at Indymedia Paris:
http://paris.indymedia.org/article_theme.php3?id_article=8045&id_mot=12
la FIAC pue [The FIAC stinks]
-- action a la Foire
Internationale d'Art Contemporain le 8/10/03
La Foire Internationale d'Art
Contemporain pue !
Ce soir, 8 octobre 2003 lors
du vernissage de la 30eme edition de la
FIAC, a Paris, aux alentours
de 20 heures, des milliers de
consommateurs, dont le
ministre de la culture se sont pince le nez en
soutien aux intermittents et
precaires. Notre action n'est qu'un avant-
gout de celles qui
suiveront tant que nos revendications
n'auront pas
ete satisfaites. Nous refusons
la substitution de nos droits sociaux
collectifs par des subventions
discretionnaires. Nous exigeons
l'abrogation du protocole du
26 juin reformant l'assurance chomage
des intermittents et
l'ouverture de negociations avec tous les concernes.
Nos actions ne connaitront pas
de pause. Nous appelons la semaine de
mobilisation sans fin du 13 au
19 octobre. Ce que nous defendons nous
le defendons pour tous.
-- Flux Intermittent Anonyme et Concret (FIAC)
============================
============================
Paris art fair opens to gloomy picture
Expatica.com (Agence France-Presse)
http://www.expatica.com/france.asp?pad=278,313,&item_id=34800
PARIS, Oct 8 (AFP) - Once a global art market power-house,
Paris this
week opens the 30th edition of the FIAC contemporary art
fair facing
both a sullen market and soaring rivalry from competitor
fairs in the
United States and Europe.
"It has always been fashionable to say that things
are terrible in
France," said Anne de Villepoix, a gallery owner who
is also
vice-president of COFIAC, the selection committee for FIAC,
acronym for
the International Fair of Contemporary Art being held from
October 9 to
13.
"Why not say instead that there is a market in France
and that within the
FIAC we have fought to keep things moving," she
added.
But the problem, said Jean-Louis Prat, who heads the
prestigious
Fondation Maeght in the Riviera town of Saint-Paul de
Vence and is a
keen observer of the art market "is that the latter
is not all it should be
in France."
"The big modern art collectors tend to be based in
Belgium, in The
Netherlands, in Germany, in Britain or in the United
States. And one
cannot say that the economic context favours collectors
here."
Meanwhile galleries and individual buyers have been
flocking to rival
trade fairs in Basel, Switzerland, and to its year-old
Florida clone, Art
Basel Miami, despite claims by de Villepoix that "it
is more expensive to
exhibit there than in Paris".
In Madrid, the last edition of the ARCO fair drew 200,000
people and
London this month will join the list of FIAC rivals when
it opens the
Frieze Art Fair. "Wait and see," said Prat.
"The British have never been
conformists".
FIAC opened in 1974 as the "Salon International d'Art
Contemporain" in
an old Paris railway station and was an immediate success,
drawing 9,000
visitors the first year, 15,000 the next.
After a performance by Hermann Nitsch in 1975, and
including the
ritualistic quartering of animals at the Grand Palais in
1976, there were
more and more "happenings", with even the likes
of stars such as Andy
Warhol turning up for the show. The number of visitors
mounted from
100,000 in 1984 to 150,000 in 1992.
A problem with the glass roof over the Grand Palais in
late 1993 marked
a turning-point however. The FIAC was forced to set up
shop under a
makeshift marquee on a construction site, and the number
of visitors
began to decline.
First the selection committee hit a crisis, with some
Paris gallery owners
criticising the drop in the quality of the work chosen for
exhibition.
Others were unhappy with the latest venue at Paris's big
exhibition
centre.
Though the art market, contrary
to expectations, has not collapsed
following the September 11 attacks, the fair in the last
couple of years
has failed to attract more than 70,000 visitors.
For its 30th edition, there will be 175 galleries present,
85 of them
French and 90 of them foreign, which is a two percent drop
in
participation from abroad despite the presence of five
newcomer nations-
Canada, Cuba, Japan, Luxembourg and Portugal.
============================
============================
Under a new director, will the Whitney's future be
brighter than its
recent past?
At the Crossroads
by Jerry Saltz
The Village Voice 10/02/03
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0341/saltz.php
With exhibitions of John Currin, Arshile Gorky, and Lucas
Samaras on its
fall schedule, the Whitney Museum of American Art should
perk up. It
better, because this institution is in trouble brought on
by good
intentions, bad curators, meddling trustees, and an inept
director. Now
the Whitney is trying to right things by turning back the
clock: Adam
Weinberg, its former curator of collections, recently
director of
Andover's Addison Gallery, returned as its director on
October 1.
Weinberg is an encouraging choice; he's smart, convivial,
knows the
board, and loves art. In order to save this ailing
institution, however, he
must do several thorny things while standing up to its
pesky trustees.
Hopefully, this museum's future will be brighter than its
recent past.
Before we look forward, however, we need to look back.
Last May, after five desultory years on the job, hapless
Maxwell Anderson
announced he was resigning his directorship. Now he's
gone, having done
a lot of damage. Unlike at the Guggenheim, where all roads
lead to and
from its domineering director, the Whitney's problems are
systemic, and
start with its 39 trustees, many of whom are passionate
and
knowledgeable, but a few of whom are bullies. In any case,
the institution
has a history of fickleness and compromise. Anderson was
the result of
these shortcomings.
In 1998, after ushering the museum into and through the
culture wars, its
energetic director David Ross moved on. Skittish and
perhaps envious of
MOMA's erudite director, Glenn Lowry, the Whitney's board
cast about for
a Lowry clone. Enter Anderson, then director of the Art
Gallery of Ontario.
Anderson apparently enticed the trustees with managerial
speak and
corporate airs. He looked the part and was a smoothie; he
was one of
them and was hired.
Within weeks of taking on the job, Anderson blundered.
Before
communicating his intentions to his curators, he spoke to The
New York
Times about "restructuring curatorial
portfolios" and some managerial
hooey called "Power Up." Whether they were
pushed or left of their own
accord, soon three of the Whitney's top curators, Thelma
Golden, Lisa
Phillips, and Elisabeth Sussman, were gone. This created a
vacuum that
Anderson parlayed into a crisis. Attempting perhaps to
appease the art
world and the social circuit, he made three flawed hires:
Marla Prather as
curator of post-war art, Sylvia Wolf as curator of
photography, and
Lawrence Rinder as curator of contemporary art. Prather
mounted
perhaps the worst museum show ever of a great artist,
"Robert
Rauschenberg: Synapsis Shuffle," Wolf, the horrendous
Michal Rovner
show and the benign but pointless Kenneth Josephson
survey. (More on
Rinder later.) Meanwhile, Anderson ignored the question of
what to do
about the once proficient Barbara Haskell, a Whitney
curator for more
than 25 years.
Shows outside the jurisdiction of these curators, while
not gems, were
commendable. I'm not enamored of either Joan Mitchell or
Wayne
Thiebaud, but both their retrospectives were credible.
Better were the
Barbara Kruger, Sol LeWitt, and Alice Neel shows. The
exhibition of early
video art, "Into the Light," and the Jacob Lawrence
survey were both
superb, and "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," while
patronizing, was a huge hit.
But Anderson couldn't leave well enough alone. Citing
financial problems
and making vague allusions to 9-11, he canceled the much
anticipated
Eva Hesse retrospective that Sussman had originally
developed for the
Whitney. Things might not have soured so had Anderson
found a way to
keep this show (as Lowry, Philippe de Montebello, Lowery
Sims, or even
Thomas Krens might), replaced Haskell, and retained Golden,
who was
then working on the 2000 biennial as well as the lively
"Freestyle"
exhibition (eventually mounted at the Studio Museum).
Instead, we got Haskell's flawed Elie Nadelman
retrospective, the Diller +
Scofidio, Rovner, and Rauschenberg fiascoes, the dreadful
2000 biennial
(overseen by Rinder and five other Anderson-appointed
curators),
Rinder's weak biennial two years later, and his iffy
"BitStreams" and arid
"The American Effect." None of Rinder's shows
needed to be as bad as
they were; all contained outstanding artists. He's also
adept at spotting
and highlighting trends. Rinder's intentions are
exemplary. Unfortunately,
his eye isn't. He's better suited to the issue-driven
atmosphere of a
university art museum, someplace more about ideas than
objects.
Now the Whitney is at a crossroads. Weinberg needs to deal
with Rinder
and anyone responsible for Diller + Scofidio. After
reassuring the rest
of the Whitney's talented, underpaid staff, Weinberg
should then hire
art-oriented curators, people with good eyes, not good
politics or social
connections, and annul Anderson's ridiculous
"portfolios." Next, because
39 are too many trustees, 10 should graciously step down.
Three or four
highly regarded, mid-career artistsindividuals who would
attend meetings
and not be afraid to speak their mindsshould join Chuck
Close on the
board (I nominate Elizabeth Murray). The Haskell question
has to be
dealt with; historical shows must get juicier and more
relevant; and
many more exhibitions of living artists must be mounted.
All this could
lead to good things. I'm hoping that even if the upcoming
biennial is a
failure, it'll be an art-driven one rather than an
academic one, which is
what we've been getting. If Weinberg does nothing, the
Whitney may
feel more user-friendly but it will keep drifting into
darkness.
============================
============================
Art no longer in, leading critic claims
By Kyle MacMillan
Denver Post Critic-at-Large
Denver Post, Wednesday, October 08, 2003
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~78~1680878,00.html
Dave Hickey's place among the leading art critics and
intellectuals of our
time was confirmed two years ago by his selection for a
$500,000 "genius
grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation.
Hickey, 64, who has taught at the University of Nevada at
Las Vegas for
more than a decade, has written four books. They include
"Air Guitar,
Essays on Art and Democracy" (1998), a must-read in
cultural circles.
The former art dealer and magazine editor has written
catalogue
monographs on numerous artists, including Terry Allen, Ann
Hamilton
and Bridget Riley, and contributed articles to
publications as diverse as
Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and Artforum.
With Hickey's salty language, irreverent humor and
ever-present
cigarette, the crusty critic is also one of the the art
world's most
celebrated and controversial characters.
In advance of a lecture today at the Rocky Mountain
College of Art &
Design, he spoke to The Post:
Q: Are you surprised that you have become something of a
cultural icon
in your own right?
A: Well, yeah, of course. I'm a marginal character. To be
honest, nobody
much over 30 takes me very seriously. Now, I stand in a
grandfatherly
relationship to young artists, and, as you know, your
parents are (jerks)
but granddad gives you a quarter.
Also, in American art, influence tends to skip
generations. That's just
inevitable. Everybody's trying to overthrow the people
before them and in
the process, they fall back on the people before them. Of
course, I'm
surprised. It's totally ludicrous.
Q: Are you working on a book now?
A: I'm doing a couple things. I'm working on a (British
sculptor) Anthony
Caro essay for the Tate retrospective. And we're puttering
around at the
University of Chicago Press to do a big collection of my
monographs, an
anthology.
The bulk of my writing, which is virtually inaccessible,
is all these
catalog essays I've done about individual artists, which
is a pretty good
survey of my time, from one generation older to two
generations younger.
Q: What do you think of the art criticism in magazines and
newspapers
today?
A: Most people of my generation, being (Robert) Bob Hughes
and Peter
Schjeldahl and people like that, we all trained in writing
for magazines
and for newspapers, and therefore we do have the sense
that you've got
to write a lead and you've got to engage the reader on
some level.
That doesn't happen anymore. Criticism has sort of divided
itself into
this opaque, academic narrative, which is totally over,
and this new sort
of Art Brit-tabloid sleaze, which is about who was at the
club. There is
no real place much anymore for what I do.
Q: What gets left out of both of those scenarios is the
art itself,
particularly the art object.
A: Well, of course. Art objects are basically what
interest me. My
principle is always that people are (jerks) and ideas are
smoke. Just give
me an object any time.
It (object-making) will become a discourse of enthusiasts.
It will
maintain in culture the kind of status that jazz has. I
really think the
world of object-making is receding into that kind of
marginal status,
which, in a sense, is OK for me. That's the status it had
when I was a
kid.
Q: What are some of the ways that you see the art world
has changed in
the last 20 years?
A: Art's just not that important or that fashionable
anymore. It's not
cool. Not only that, it's not intellectually serious. But
art gets sold.
I just talked to a friend of mine who came back from New
York, and he
said, 'I didn't see anything but C-prints (a type of color
photograph).'
They're all going to turn green, which makes them terrible
collector
objects. And they're all really boring.
What do you do with an art world in which the normative
work of art is a
giant C-print of three Germans standing beside a mailbox.
What's that?
Stop it, please.
There's a tendency in the art world to mistake the end of
something for
the beginning of something. I think this is certainly the
case with
photography. Cindy Sherman stands for a resolution of a
whole group of
ideas about identity that come out of Warhol.
I certainly think nothing could be more the end of
everything than
Matthew Barney - that personal, post-minimalist dialogue.
They (his
works) don't lead anywhere. Looking at "The Cremaster
Cycle" and
trying to do something that derives from it is like
reading "Finnegan's
Wake" and trying to do a novel.
Q: I'm wondering if you could name an underrated artist
from the 1970s
or earlier?
A: In the New Yorker this week, there's a review of Ken
Price, who was in
my Santa Fe show and is only now getting the recognition
he deserves.
Price is a willful and enigmatic objectmaker.
If you live on the West Coast, you're now beginning to see
a burgeoning
re-recognition of all those abstract classicists - John
McLaughlin, Fred
Hammersley and Karl Benjamin - who stand in relationship
to California
painting the way the abstract expressionists do to New
York painting.
============================
============================
Ship of Glass for Chelsea Waterfront
By HERBERT MUSCHAMP
NYTimes, October 14, 2003: CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/14/arts/design/14MUSC.html
The proud city sails on. Frank Gehry has designed a New
York
headquarters for Barry Diller, the media and e-commerce
mogul. The
new building will be opposite the Chelsea Piers sports
complex, on the
West Side Highway between 18th and 19th Streets. It will
also be on
the East Side of Bicoastal City, the dual metropolis that
has emerged
from the symbiotic cultural competition between Los
Angeles and New
York. Buda, meet Pest.
Looking something like a tall ship in full sail, the
nine-story glass
building will house offices for Mr. Diller's
InterActiveCorp, a group of
Internet businesses with a focus on travel. They include
Expedia,
Hotels.com, Hotwire.com, Citysearch and Ticketmaster.
With typical Gehryesque frankness, the design appears to
reflect New
York's present preoccupation with ornamental building
tops. If the top is
what counts, why bother with the base and shaft? Just go
for the crown!
Seen in this way, the low-rise Diller building evokes the
grand tradition
of skyscraper design epitomized by the Empire State
Building, the
Chrysler Building and 70 Pine Street. It has all the
romance of those
towers, but at a more human scale, as befits the
horizontal sweep of the
riverfront location.
The articulation of the glass facades also breaks down the
bulk. From the
West Side Highway, the building appears to be composed of
individual
modules, stacked in two tiers. Each of the modules is
formed by giving a
five-story rectangular solid a one-quarter twist. The
edges of the
rectangles become curves.
Mr. Gehry has used a single example of this module once
before, for an
office building in Hanover, Germany. Here, he groups them
together to fill
the zoning envelope of allowable bulk. On the side facing
the river, the
elevation will resemble a row of five glass town houses,
crowned with
three stretch penthouses. The upper tier is set back from
the lower, to
allow open, rooftop terraces.
The facades are nearly plumb with conventional building
lines, especially
along the side streets, where the walls are again broken
down into smaller
envelopes. Undertaken by InterActiveCorp in partnership
with the
Georgetown Company development firm, the building,
scheduled for
completion by early 2006 and with 165,000 square feet,
will eventually
provide quarters for about 500 employees. There will be
underground
parking for 70 cars. Though Mr. Diller will retain offices
in Los Angeles
(in a building to be remodeled by Mr. Gehry), the new
building, signifies
a shift in his business interests from entertainment to
tourism, which has
itself emerged as a leading form of entertainment in the
era of
globalization.
Glass is the key feature in this design. Indeed, even more
than Christian
de Portzamparc's LVMH Tower on East 57th Street, the Gehry
design could
radically transform the use of glass in New York
buildings. The design
employs super-clear "white" glass, etched with a
white pattern that helps
reduce energy costs. Visually, the effect is somewhat
ectoplasmic, as if
to denote that more and more of us have two addresses now:
one on the
street, the other in cyberspace.
I have my own version of the "broken windows"
theory of urban decline.
It's called the "cheap glass" hypothesis. Both
concepts deal with the
power of small causes to produce big effects. The broken-windows
theory,
which got great play in the Giuliani administration,
states that when
smashed panes aren't quickly repaired, it signals neglect
and decline.
Neighborhoods become targets for burglars, who beget drug
dealers,
prostitutes, muggers, murderers.
The cheap-glass theory states that when so-called
"value engineers" are
hired to reduce building costs, mirror glass quickly
follows. Mirror glass
induces low self-esteem, depression, poor citizen morale,
reduced
productivity, strained personal relationships and
ultimately broken
windows of the soul. This is not the way to go.
New York has missed out on glass. People came to associate
it exclusively
with International Style office towers of the postwar
decades. In response
to a glut of that architecture on the market, architects
and clients began
to look nostalgically toward pre-war masonry buildings.
The glut now is of
brick and cast-stone buildings that appear entirely
constructed of
processed cheese.
Perhaps it was good to get away from glass for a while. A
design like Mr.
Gehry's gives the material some of the novelty it
possessed early in the
last century. Because of technological advances, glass
should be seen as
a luxury material, not as a cheap way to enclose space.
Its use should
be encouraged by government agencies with the power to
grant financial
incentives to developers.
After Richard Meier's two new residential towers on Perry
Street, the
Diller building will be the third great piece of glass
architecture to
arise on the West Side Highway. The project arouses
visions of a strip of
first-rate contemporary design stretching alongside the
new promenades
of Hudson River Park. Perhaps nothing can fully compensate
for the loss
of the great trans-Atlantic liners that sailed off in the
early 1970's. But
it helps immensely to see the architectural imagination at
work in a
design that captures the lure of faraway places.
============================
============================
Dark Nights, Sharp Pens
by MEL GUSSOW
NYTimes, 10/15/03
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/15/arts/design/15SPIE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Art Spiegelman will be known forever as the creator of
"Maus," the
Pulitzer Prize-winning comic-strip book about his parents
as Holocaust
survivors. But that is only one aspect of an artist whose
talent is so
diverse that he regards himself as "multiphrenic."
"That's sort of like schizophrenic, but more than
two," he said during a
recent interview in his SoHo studio.
Never mind that schizophrenia is not characterized by a
split personality:
Mr. Spiegelman combines multitudes as cartoonist and
author. In each
role there are subcategories, as he freely mimics other
sources from
Charles M. Schulz to Harvey Kurtzman and Mad Magazine
while
remaining faithful to his own subversive nature.
"I've accepted the fact that there are various personages
in there," he
said about himself. "There is not enough to make a
planet, but there's
enough to make a person named Art Spiegelman." At 55
he is, as he
described Maurice Sendak, "a one-man armada."
Mr. Spiegelman's range is typified by two current
projects. He and his
wife, Francoise Mouly (art editor of The New Yorker), are
the editors of
"It Was a Dark and Silly Night," the third in a
series of Little Lit
cartoon books for children (published by HarperCollins).
For the past year
Mr. Spiegelman has also been drawing a dark and sobering comic strip
about 9/11. Called "In the Shadow of No Towers,"
it has been appearing
in The Forward, the Jewish newspaper, and in periodicals
throughout
Europe.
For the Little Lit series the editors invite cartoonists
and authors to
improvise on a theme. The prescription for the new book
was simply to
begin with the words "It was a dark and silly
night."