The Season of Lights (and the art that comes with)

Recently, my friend Linda, from New Zealand, came to New York City for a visit. (She actually came because she's writing her master's thesis on the Peter Greenaway work/show that's currently taking place at the Amory, which I'm dying to see!) Anyway, having not met many Jews before arriving at my house on the Upper West Side, she was interested in how Christmas in NYC makes Jews feel given its unavoidable presence.

I could not and cannot answer this question for all Jews, (though I hope at least most would agree,) but for me, simply put, I love it. In fact, I'm delighted to be able to take part (if even just passively) in a religious tradition that adds meaning to people's lives. (Unless of course it involves extraordinarily loud music at sunrise, as is the case with the Christmas parade here in St. Maarten, which woke me up this morning. With that said, above you can see pictures from the balcony of our villa - despite the lack of snow, the atmosphere does make for a pretty spectacular Christmas feeling, eh?)

Anyway, back in NYC I appreciate the tree vendors who line the streets with spruces that give

the city the smell of a magical winter forest. I am awed by the creativity that goes into the production of the Christmas windows and I enjoy interacting with the many people from a plethora of backgroudns who are drawn out from their homes and onto 5th Avenue to see the elaborate displays no matter the temperature. I am proud to be American during the holiday season because people are so generous (albeit a bit consumer oriented) and grateful to have time to spend with family and friends. And I can't get enough of the lights that decorate all of the city's trees creating a spiritual, perhaps even mystical feeling that inspires strangers to offer each other holidays greetings as they pass on the street. All and all the city and its dwellers and visitors are happy and there is nothing better than that...

Linda understood just what I meant when she and I walked all the way from our dinner Caracas (favorite restaurant!) home. On our way we passed the usual, which I described above, as well as an awesome light installation in Madison Square Park that Seth had taken me to a few weeks earlier.

Prior to holiday time, and in day light as apposed to darkness, I had not thought of the installation as speaking to the season, and my guess is that it isn't intended to. However, seeing the installation in the context of my Christmas walk with Linda, made me realize just how poignant the exhibition is at this time of year, which is so laden with lights both literally and figuratively.

The installation, which is by Jim Campbell, has three components: Scattered Light, which is made up of hundreds of hanging light bulbs that are programmed to light up and dim down in a way that creates an illusion that people (or at least their shadows) are passing through the space that the lights occupy. The Madison Square Park website, which you can access through the link above, explains that the work is supposed to reflect the pedestrian experience in an urban environment. It's a shame that the MSP website doesn't shed more light on the work because that one sentence that describes the conceptual objective of the work seems to indicate that the city is much more lively, or vibrant than the people, though I like to think it's the people who make the city the exciting place that it is!

Regardless, to me the most interesting quality of the work is that depending on the angle from which it's viewed, the shadows, or silhouettes are either completely sharp, or rather abstract. (You can see this quality in the first minute of the video above.) I'm sure I've taken my analysis of this work too far, but to me, that feature serves as a reminder that during the "season of lights" is a time that we make an extra effort to reach out to our family and friends, so as not to allow them to turn into vague, distant characters.

The second part of the work is called Broken Window, but unfortunately both times I visited the installation, this work seemed to stick true to it's name, leaving me little to say about it. (Or is that the point?)

The third piece, Voices in the Subway Station, is made up of a number of glass panels that are situated in the grass and light up sequentially. After a bit of research, I've come to find that there are two interpretations of this work, so by all means take your pick: 1) The order in which the panels light up mimics the effect of a passing subway, as a person above ground would see it through the grated sidewalk out of the corner of his eye. 2) The lights are intended to represent people speaking to one another on a station platform as they wait for the subway to arrive, thus creating a "visual symphony," (how awesome is that term?).

As much as I enjoyed the installation, I can't help but wonder how much more meaning it would have if it was interactive, or tied to the actions of people in the park or on the subway below the park in real time. (Come on Jim Campbell, you engineer major at MIT, put that degree to good use! No, just kidding, in fact NYMag reveals just how complex the making was sans an interactive feature.) But in truth, the best part of the season of lights is that it's the time when people are most connected to each other - after all, the bells and whistles, or lights if you will, are simply tools to help us maintain a positive spirit so that we can achieve that goal...

On that note, the installation is only on view until February 28 (my birthday Part I!), so go check it out before it ends!

1. A photo from my dinky computer taken on the balcony of our St. Maarten villa somtime around Christmas eve.

2. Video footage of Scattered Lights along with an interview with the artist, courtesy of www.switched.com .

3. Photo of Voices in the Subway Station from www.watersideplaza.com .

When Religion and Art Are One...

Check this out! Architects from around the world are currently competing for most appealing sukkah design. Twelve winners have been selected to have their sukkas fabricated and placed in Union Square for all to see until October 2. Through this process, people have the opportunity to learn about different types of architecture and to think about the meaning of this ancient holiday, which in the contemporary idiom serves to remind us how lucky we are to have such bountiful harvests / so much to eat, and remind us of our obligation to help those less fortunate than us, though who might permanently live in temporary shelters... Talk about how art can be a vehicle that adds meaning to life...

P.S. In my book the 900 sukkah will always be the winner!

PICASSO

This week at the Christie's sale, his 1932 painting Nu au Plateau de Sculpteur (Nude, Green Leaves and Bust) (1932) became the most expensive work ever sold at an auction, selling for a whopping $106.5 million; his Metropolitan Museum retrospective, which includes nearly all of the hundreds of his works owned by the Met, has gotten mixed reviews, though most critics have labeled it nothing more glamorous than a big-name hodgepodge; a California art dealer in her 70's admitted to selling a fake of his work for $2 million and is now likely headed to jail; his current MoMA prints exhibition, which I saw and loved last week with my dear family friend Shifra, is yet another testament to his prolificness; a goon stumbled into one of his works at the Metropolitan, resulting in the

creation of a hole in the canvas and an expensive repair job; oh and Gagosian Gallery in Anthens just closed an exhibition of his linocuts, which is especially cool to me because I intern for Gagosian!

However, in my mind the most wonderful Picasso news of 2010, at least so far as New York City is concerned, is brought to you by sidewalk artist Hani Shihada. In four words: Shihada makes art accessible. Chalk as his medium and NYC pavement as his canvas, Shihada both replicates famous works of art and creates his own masterpieces.

Most recently he recreated Picasso's Le Reve (The Dream) (1932) outside of the Carlyle Hotel, just blocks from the Met, to draw (haha) attention to the opening of their Picasso show. Pardon the momentary tangent, but in light of the fact that The Dream is from the same period as Nude, Green Leaves and Bust (the work from the Christie's auction,) and Woman with Yellow Hair (1931), which I saw on display at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum just a few days ago, it strikes me as important to share with you that all three of these works are portraits of Marie-Therese, a teenager with whom a married, middle-aged Picasso had an affair. Picasso was known to have been intoxicated by his love for the young woman and thus his works in which she is the subject are highly erotic; in fact, they are often considered the most sexually charged of Picasso's works. (For example, you might notice that in The Dream the upper half of Marie-Therese's head looks like a phallus.)

So, back to Shihada for a moment: In a recent Daily News article they quoted him saying "This [the sidewalk] is my gallery, the way I like to reach people... It goes straight to the people."

I love that quote because it articulates one of Shihada's goals, which is to reclaim the word "gallery." He shows that galleries don't have to be daunting, exclusive, expensive places, rather galleries can be places that open art to the public, or in Shihada's words, places where art is brought straight to the people.

But Shihada does more than open art to the public in the visual sense, he also makes his viewers think seriously about art's place in society. He invites us to reflect on the artist's process by allowing masses of people to gather around him as he works in a public space, an unusual opportunity given that most artists create in a studio, behind closed doors. In making his process public, Shihada gives us a moment to appreciate the intensity of an artist's labor and the devotion that it takes to be an artist, to produce art. Similarly, as people pass by his work, they naturally ask themselves 'should I walk on the creation, the art, or is that sacrilegious? Why is it that it feels wrong to walk upon it?' Etc.

And even if people aren't intellectualizing Shihada's work as I just have, at least they are exposed to art, they are given the opportunity, free of charge, to visually place a painting with some big name artist they might have only previously heard of, something art historians pay thousands of dollars of tuition to do...

1. Pablo Picasso, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, 1932. Oil on Canvas. Private Collection.

2. Pablo Picasso, The Dream, 1932. Oil on Canvas. Private Collection.

3. Pablo Picasso, Woman with Yellow Hair, 1931. Oil on Canvas. Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, New York.

A Step in the Right Direction

Nowadays, with the availability of cheap and frequent flights, all types of people have the opportunity to travel. And of course, with the all too common, excessively long delays and unavoidable layovers, travelers spend more time in airports than ever. The San Francisco art community has capitalized on these fortunes and misfortunes, by bringing art to the airport - art to the masses. The San Francisco International Airport is the first airport to be accredited by the American Association of Museums, housing exhibitions loaned from other institutions as well as exhibits planned specifically for the airport. Statistics show that some 10% of people passing through the airport actually stop to take a look at the works on display, which are changed and rotated on a regular basis so as not to bore frequent flyers. In a given year well over 350,000 people take note of the eclectic art displayed in the airport! That means that each year there are 300,000 more art viewers at the airport than at the average museum!*

For those of you who don't know, my life goal is to make art available and accessible, physically, psychologically, and intellectually, to people from all backgrounds. Thus, in my mind there is nothing greater than public art that engages people, capturing their attention by provoking thought and raising questions, in the way the art at the San Francisco airport does.

The existence of programs like the S.F. airport-museum program is particularly important at this period given that traditional museums, much like churches, synagogues, and temples, no longer work for most people. More explicitly, the main goal of such institutions has always been to add meaning to people's lives, however I speculate that for most they no longer do so for two main reasons: 1) People have found other outlets to stimulate them and produce meaning in their lives, even if those outlets are sometimes bunk, i.e.: television. 2) People want instant gratification; in a fast paced society, people don't have time to visit an institution that only has one function, nor do they have the attention span necessary to do the research that makes the tool, be it prayer or art, function.

Given these pending problems, here are a few key questions we must address in order to fulfill people's needs as we enter this new stage in human development: how do we produce bite-size (not in the physical sense) art that isn't dumbed down? In other words, how do we make art accessible to people, including people with no art historical knowledge, without sugar coating it or diminishing its multitude of dimensions? How do we provide people with the opportunity, and perhaps even encourage people, to engage with art on a regular basis and how do we make such art understandable? What is the best forum through which to do this?

Off the top of my head I can think of several important artists who have used public art to engaged large numbers of people, making them conscious, aware of their daily routines / existences and asking them important question about society at large.

Take Richard Serra and his Tilted Arc (1981), which was commissioned by the U.S.'s General Services Administration Arts-in-Architecture program. Titled Arc was designed by Sera in 1981 and placed outside of Federal Plaza that year. The work called attention to the space in which it laid, a place that thousands of people passed through daily, without ever thinking about or noticing - in other words, regular passersby took the space fore granted.

However, once the piece was put in place, people finally began to notice the space it occupied! In fact, it caused such a ruckus that after a long and heated public debate Titled Arc was taken down because it was so disruptive! Some people feared that it was a terrorist threat because bombs directed at the federal building could be thrown over it; it prohibited others from taking public transport at night because they worried about the invisibility of people on the other side who could potentially mug, or harm them. It caused people to question their notions of security, of familiarity, and it forced people to live with a greater sense of awareness, to live more conscientiously, more alertly. Additionally, it became a target for urination, which brought up questions about homelessness, about poverty, and how on both governmental and grassroots level poverty related issues must be dealt with. And of course, the fact that this mammoth, shield-like work that was ultimately disruptive and upsetting, was installed in Federal Plaza, undoubtedly calls attention to the role of the government as both protective and at times oppressive.

In one concise sentence, Tilted Arc, changed the entire environment of Federal Plaza, forcing people, both consciously and unconsciously, to question and make meaning of societal issues they had once overlooking and parts of their lives that had simply become routine.

I don't know if you'd consider this attempt at capturing people's minds, guiding people to think about meaningful and important aspects of life and society, successful given that Tilted Arc's presence in the public sphere elicited frustration, annoyance, and even anger, but at least it made big a enough stink to bring art into the public sphere!

1. Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, 1981. Steel. Federal Plaza, NYC. Dismantled in 1989.

* To read more about SFO museum project, check out an article called "Flying Through San Francisco? Stop to Enjoy the Art," on the NPR website.