DISPATCHES
FILM, SHOPPING, NEWS AND THINGS TO MAKE AND DO… ART, MUSIC, ARCHITECTURE, FILM, SHOPPING
TALES FROM THE CITY: New York
words JONATHAN T.D. NEIL In mid-March I walked the southwestern Koons’s gargantuan and at the same time
tip of Manhattan to see public work by diminutive Puppy from 2000. Creative
Ugo Rondinone: two cast aluminium olive Time’s incomparable Tribute in Light
trees dressed in coats of white enamel, (2002) really deserves permanence
with skirts of snow gathered about them through repeat performances as New
from late-season storms. These were the York’s 9/11 memorial, since nothing yet
latest instalment in the public art built or promised could hope to evoke,
group Creative Time’s Art on the Plaza and at the same time counter, the
programme, which gives a select group gravity of that event; but Doug
of artists the opportunity to display Aitken’s recent and rather snoozy video
work in the modest public space installation Sleepwalkers (2007) felt
adjacent to the Ritz-Carlton at Battery more like a MoMA PR blitz meant to
Park. According to Rondinone, his knock the Whitney off the top of NYC’s
gnarled trees, cast reproductions institution-as-socialite ladder.
of a pair of actual olive trees from Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority
his parents’ Italian hometown, serve of public works, those which could
as condensed histories frozen for the stand as permanent fixtures in the
benefit of passersby. The only thing city, stick around for only a short
that came to my mind, however, was, period of time, sometimes only a few
‘Why trees?’ weeks, as did Anish Kapoor’s Sky Mirror
(2006) in Rockefeller Center.
Mostly this was because Rondinone’s
trees will be coming down just in time One rationale for the constant turnover
for another pair, Roxy Paine’s, to go is that the city has only a limited
up, a bit further north, in Madison number of venues for public art, and
Square Park. Beginning this month, relative permanence of any sort would
Paine will show three of his signature drastically reduce the exhibition
stainless-steel sculptures: one options for public work of any kind.
traditional tree, Defunct (2004), and But this is patently absurd. Given the
one less traditional, Conjoined (2007), pace of new construction in Manhattan
which is actually two trees that, in a alone, New York should be in the middle
kind of structural reversal, share of a public art renaissance. Why don’t
a branch rather than a root system; the city’s zoning laws dictate that all
and a three-metre high stainless-steel such developments set aside space for
boulder titled Erratic (2007). public art of one sort or another?
It is the commercial development that
should and very well could change The vogue for transitory
the face of public art in the city.
Take the reborn 7 World Trade Center, public art projects
which carries not one but two permanent
public art pieces: a Koons oversize placates the public with
burgundy balloon flower and a Jenny
Holzer LED display. Even if these ‘experiences’, not attachments
are not your favourite works or
artists, at least they are contemporary
with the city’s changing fabric;
Now, Paine’s and Rondinone’s art part of its permanent living culture.
practices are in no way similar.
But the repetition of subject matter The vogue for transitory public art
remains noteworthy insofar as both projects placates the public with
artists are equally invested in art’s ‘experiences’, not attachments.
(and our own) relationship to Permanence of any sort, on the other
temporality, which is a prickly issue hand, requires care (not simply
for public art in New York at the ‘maintenance’). To begin to answer my
moment, particularly given that so earlier question, then: as New York’s
little of it is offered to the public climate for cultural permanence grows
as ‘permanent’. increasingly hostile (c.f. the
exclusion of the Drawing Center from
It seems that nearly all such work is the redevelopment plan for the World
now transitory. Understandably, some Trade Center site), is it any wonder
must be necessarily so, for example that some of our better contemporary
Janet Cardiff’s wondrous audio walks artists plant trees made out of
through Central Park from 2004–5, or aluminium and steel?
ARTREVIEW four.linsix.lin
p 44-46 Dispatches AR May07.indd46 46 3/4/07 04:27:22
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