Entries tagged with “art” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York

Via WFMU's Beware of the Blog: One of my favorite freeform DJs, Maria, has a show of architectural photos opening tonight in Manhattan:

Deborah Berke & Partners Architects LLP

Maria Levitsky
Building Photographs

Opening Thursday May 21, 6:30-8:30pm
220 5th Avenue, 7th floor
New York, NY
212 229 9211

Open all summer 2009 by appointment

In her artist's statement she relates her craft, in a way, to the work of historic preservation:

It is this evidence of disappearance that I desire to record in my photographs. I look to create images that incite the imagination to ask the question what could have happened here? and who left these traces? The photograph itself becomes a trace as the scene continues to change in time, as many of the locations are demolished or redesigned.

I'd like to think that she conceptualizes recorded sound in similar ways. Among other audio treasures, Maria introduced me to the bass player Henri Texier: I remember very clearly the first time I heard him on her show. (It was one of those moments you drop what you're doing and call the station to see what's playing.) I'll forever be grateful -- and can't wait to see what visual treasures she's captured in her exhibit. If you want to listen to her radio shows online, click here.

The 2001 photo shown above, left, is of the now-demolished Thunderbolt roller coaster at Coney Island. At the website linked you'll find historical nuggets like this: "In the "American Experience" documentary Coney Island: A Documentary Film, Mae Timpano described her years living under and working at the Thunderbolt, 'We used to find teeth in the yard. We used to find wigs, glasses, guns. Everything we found in the yard ... nobody came back for them, though.'"

On public art in Queens: An excerpt from Public Art New York, by architect Jean Parker Phifer and photographer Francis Dzikowski [Newyorkology]

Coke with that slice? DEA busts drug-dealing pizza parlor in the Bronx. [Animal]

A guide to Boerum Hill [Lost City]

Images of America publishes new volume on St. George, Staten Island. Plus: "town" or "neighborhood"? [Walking Is Transportation]

The making of Manhattanville: What will be lost when Columbia expands? [Manhattanville.net, via an older post on JVNY]

Bonus: From my own back yard -- if you haven't seen Jon Kessler's amazing installation "Kessler's Circus" at Deitch Projects (76 Grand Street) you've only got through tomorrow. Here's an older VBS.TV documentary series on Kessler, set in his long-time Williamsburg studio, that should give you a feel for the work.

Image from Newyorkology:

Flight
James Brooks, Artist, 1938-40
Collection of the City of New York
Marine Air Terminal
Delano & Aldrich, Architects, 1937-40; Restoration by Beyer Blinder Belle, Architects, 1995-6
West end of LaGuardia Airport, Flushing

We'd be remiss as NYC lit bloggers if we didn't note the recent two-part Q&A series on the Times's City Room blog, in which William C. Sharpe, an English professor at Barnard, takes questions on the city at night. In November, Princeton UP published his book New York Nocturne: The City after Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography.

Sample exchange:

Your books sounds like a fascinating study, Dr. Sharpe. A few years ago, I took a course comparing the literature of Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the professor noted that both writers used their experiences of the built environments of London and St. Petersburg in their works of fiction. Dickens in particular was known for walking the streets of London at night by himself. I wonder if there are writers in your study that also walked the streets of New York City at night (in good and not-so-good neighborhoods, like Five Points?) and incorporated those experiences into their works of art or literature?

-- Posted by Roseann F.

The activity of walking the night streets to stimulate creativity and shake off depression seems to be as old as the city itself. The New York contribution begins with George Foster, who published a guide called "New York by Gas-Light" in 1850, and Walt Whitman, who even as he praised the darkened city in his early poem "The Sleepers" (1855) was warning people in his journalistic articles, "Don't go wandering about the streets or parks unnecessarily in the evening" because "New York is one of the most crime haunted and dangerous cities in Christendom." While there are plenty of writers who walked at night -- such as Stephen and Hart Crane, Federico Garcia Lorca and F. Scott Fitzgerald (though he might have been too drunk to notice much) -- I more readily think of the painters, such as Edward Hopper, who was able to paint "Nighthawks" because he was one, or Willem de Kooning, who strolled through Chelsea with the poet Edwin Denby during the Depression and showed him how to look at the "dispersed compositions" on the sidewalk: "spots and cracks and bits of wrappers and reflections of neon light."

Rest of the series here and here.

 

... or studying for finals, or raising kids, or whatever it is you do, gentle reader, you may have missed a couple Deitch Projects installations that are slated to close within a couple weeks.

First, the breathtaking Kehinde Wiley show, "Down," at Deitch's 18 Wooster St. location (around the corner to the south of the old main space on Grand). I was walking back to SoHo from a doctor's appointment in TriBeCa* with one of my kids when we stopped in for a gander. I have a hard time thinking of something I've seen this arresting (or cool) all year. [The piece above, "Sleep," measures 25 feet in length!] Through December 20.



Second, and also sponsored by Deitch, the recreation of Keith Haring's day-glo mural at Bowery and Houston -- installed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the artist's birth -- is slated to "close" on the 21st. Not sure exactly how that will happen, although there was some indication when it "opened" last spring that the piece would eventually be replaced by another Haring recreation.

Catch them while you can. I, for one, have enjoyed the mural's place in the neighborhood for most of the last year.

*Do we have a style guide for this blog? I find typing the internal capitals in "SoHo" and "TriBeCa" to be a little annoying. But aren't those standard usage?

A painter friend pointed me in the direction of last night's 60 Minutes profile on Julian Schnabel (described, by said friend, as a fifth-rate painter, a second-rate conceptual artist, and a first-rate film director, which I think is apt).

It's an interesting overview of his career, which skyrocketed in the early 80s, and it culminates in a bit of spleen-venting over how badly Robert Hughes trashed him back in the day (now almost three decades ago).



Watch CBS Videos Online

When his third film, the exquisite The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, came out in 2007, the New York Review of Books ran what I thought was a terrific overview of his career by Sanford Schwartz. His first film, the biopic Basquiat, offers a shrewd glance backward the downtown painting scene in the 80s (and certainly is more watchable than the terrible, terrible 1980 Merchant Ivory film Jane Austen in Manhattan, whose only redeeming feature is that it captures the grit of a few street scenes and unfinished loft spaces that now are valued in the millions). Schnabel's second film, Before Night Falls, also has New York content -- though mostly at the end, when the Cuban exile novelist Reinaldo Arena, played by Javier Bardem, kills himself in the city in 1990. It's the only one of Schnabel's films I've only seen once, which means I probably need to give it another viewing.

If Schnabel's films are virtually flawless, his painting might be described as merely interesting. But as the critic Sianne Ngai has argued, even conceptual art that is merely interesting is probably going to be more interesting than aesthetic judgments (like Hughes's) that claim a sort of finality on the subject. "[A]esthetic judgments are not in
themselves interesting," she concludes, though "their time-consuming and ongoing justifications are." As my painter friend pointed out, Schnabel has clearly won the old Schnabel-Hughes feud of the 1980s. Probably because his work -- and his ongoing ego-driven autobiography -- turned out to be more interesting than anyone else's claims to the contrary.

Seems like all NY media are fixated on Banksy, NMTE. Suddenly every piece of street art downtown's being fixated on with attribution speculations abounding. The comments sections of blogs (regrettably not ours -- we need to have a lurker amnesty post soon!) bristle with debates about the more identifiable points of his style.

Gawker, Gothamist, and the Times report on the above mural, which went up earlier in the week in SoHo (Wooster and Grand). One of the painter's girlfriend (as reported on another blog) told a passerby that Jeffrey Deitch had something to do with it.

The super cool SuperTouch blog smells another rat a few blocks away, on Broadway just above Canal; they report that Banksy's gone legit, rented the wall space, and hired a painting crew to put these up:

 

Of course this has raised the eyebrows of the worldwide legion of the Banksy faithful that follow the Bristol Bad Boy's every clandestine move with baited breath. Has Sir Banks given up his usual M.O. in favor of going legit? Has he made so much money that it's safer to rent space and hire commercial painters than bomb? Is he qualified to run for Vice President of the USA?

Probably not. But if he were, we hope he'd be wise enough not to follow Cheney's Imperial Vice Presidency lead, unlike another candidate we could name ...

And speaking of street art and politics: The Times also has a piece this week about Shepard Fairey, of Obey Giant fame. (I've always thought it looked more like Nixon than like Andre the Giant, myself.) Mr. Fairey, of course, is responsible for the best political art of this presidential season, beating out even MBW's SuperObama:

Walking to the neighborhood theater last week (to watch Man on Wire a second time, which was even better than the first) we noticed a glut of superselfconscious Williamsburgy hipsters crowded at the corner of Bowery and Houston for what turned out to be an opening. The gallery space is only temporary; it's eventually going to be a pizza joint. But for now it's dedicated to the kind of wheat-paste pop-ups you typically see on plywood-covered construction sites and abandoned buildings. The Modesto Kid (our lonesome commentor) had tipped me off to the work on the building's exterior a couple weeks ago:



The piece, by the French street artist known as "Jr," announces that much of the show inside -- dubbed "The Outsiders" -- deals in forms more at home on the street, plastered in the middle of the night when no one's looking, than in a high-art gallery space, though we shouldn't miss the fact that we're talking about a group of street artists here who, as the glitz last week would suggest, have serious gallery representation. (You'll find another Jr piece currently on 12th St. between 1st and A.)

The show is organized by London's Lazarides gallery, and it's a shame they're not staying longer. (This feels more exciting than anything that's turned up yet at the New Museum down the street.) For the time being, though, the buzz seems to have generated an outburst of pop ups in the surrounding neighborhoods. The Sun speculated that they may be the work of Lazarides artist Banksy, who's not in the show but who has done up NY corners before; bloggers have discounted the claim and attribute the work to Mr. BrainWash (MBW) instead, which makes sense, given that his website currently sports the Warhol spray-soupcans that also dot the neighborhood at the moment. My favorite, SuperObama, makes me want to go buy a cordless jigsaw and take one of these babies home:



(Top photo from Lazarides site; bottom one from animalnewyork.com)

"The Outsiders" shows at 282 Bowery through 12 Oct.; the MBW pieces around the neighborhood are already starting to wear after last week's rain, so see them while you can.

Today's Times has a tour through NYC's Rauschenberg holdings by Roberta Smith, the paper's chief critic. It opens with the point that the artist not only epitomized (some would say dominated) the post-War NYC art world, but that he insistently drew on -- and gave back to -- the city as well. The piece begins: "Robert Rauschenberg, who died Monday at age 82, is part of the cultural mythos of postwar New York. He regularly exhibited new work here for more than 56 years, which must be some kind of record. It extended from his first solo show at the Betty Parsons gallery in 1951 to the debut of his 2007 "Runts" series at PaceWildenstein in Chelsea in January.  ... Many of the materials for Mr. Rauschenberg's found-object wizardry came directly from the sidewalks, gutters and trash bins of New York. Most of the images he used were lifted from its magazines and newspapers and mirrored the look and pulse of urban life." She goes on to tell you where you can find work on display -- and which institutions own the most stuff of his. The rest of the article is here.

Her invocation of his relationship to print media serves as a reminder that few contemporary artists can be said to have worked so fervently in so many media -- or to have made the concept of distinct media problematic. And not just in his refusal to differentiate between painting and sculpture, as in the "combines." Yesterday's paper had a piece on his contributions, largely in collaboration with Merce Cunningham, to the city's dance world. David Byrne writes in, reminding us that he even designed album sleeves for popular NYC bands like Talking Heads. He pushed video projection ahead of its time. NPR's obit closes with music he recently composed.

I love the story about his first trip to a museum in the midst of a rural Texas childhood, when, looking at Blue Boy, he first realized that artists existed -- that it was possible to be an artist. He spent the rest of his life grappling with that realization and in doing so serves as a model for anyone else who wants to wake up and make things -- or to make up things -- and look at them with new eyes or ears.

The artist Robert Rauschenberg, subject of one of my favorite New York biographies, is dead at 82. The Times appreciation here. The Combines show, which I saw here and in LA, was without a doubt one of the best shows I'd ever seen -- and as good as it was it benefited from being seen in different venues.