This past weekend the renovations of Washington Park and the J.J. Byrne Playground outside the Old Stone House in Park Slope were unveiled to a cacophonous crowd of thrilled children and their parents. Fittingly, I was there to see Brooklyn Utopias: Park Space, Play Space, an exhibit on the second level of the Old Stone House coinciding with the park’s reopening that invited artists to respond to the ideas of bringing play to public spaces while being conscious of community and urban development.
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Relocating its New York edition from Armory Week to join Frieze Weekend, the 2012 Pulse Art Fair offered itself as an accessible companion to the bigger fair action on Randall’s Island, both in terms of location and the art presented.
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The curious history of a former retirement home for wealthy elderly people fallen on hard times and the contemporary Bronx community now surrounding that home provide rich material for the 32 artists in No Longer Empty’s current exhibit, This Side of Paradise. Sharing its name with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, which follows the trials of a man seeking and losing love, wealth and status, This Side of Paradise inhabits the Andrew Freedman Home on the Grand Concourse, a stately structure sitting behind a fence and broad lawn.
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In his first solo show, Bernard Klevickas has staged the space of Orchard Windows Gallery on the Lower East Side for contemplating industrial process and the aesthetics of machinery and its methods. Turbulence is a small, but detailed, show of sculptures created between 2002 and 2012 from metal and plastic, all with consciousness of surface and form.
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In 2010, Columbia University received a donation of an extensive collection of Edward Gorey items from Andrew Alpern, an architectural historian and attorney who spent four decades acquiring the illustrator’s work. The 700 objects in the collection include almost every edition of every book Gorey published, as well as drawings, etchings and pieces of his design and illustration work. Gorey Preserved, now exhibited at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, is a glimpse into the collection, and into Gorey’s mischievously dark world, where death could be as playful a character as a cat on a unicycle.
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Don’t go to Jon Kessler’s The Blue Period at Salon 94 Bowery if you don’t like to be watched. Actually, if surveillance makes you nervous, you should probably move to the remote landscape of Antarctica, because at least in Kessler’s installation the cameras are visible. The thousands of CCTV units that constantly film us in the streets and buildings of New York are not. Yet beyond just reminding us that privacy is dwindling, there’s the trade-off in The Blue Period for enjoyable voyeurism.
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At the beginning of the 2012 Queens International, the fifth biennial of Queens artists to be staged by the Queens Museum of Art, you are asked to take a journey. The exhibit’s subtitle, Three Points Make a Triangle, was inspired by the French surrealist René Daumal’s unfinished 1944 work Le Mont Analogue, a “roman d’aventures alpines, non euclidiennes et symboliquement authentiques” (“a book of alpine adventures, non-euclidean and authentically symbolic”) in which eight explorers employing science and metaphysics discover an invisible mountain. Daumal died of tuberculosis at the age of 36, the book and its journey cut short, halfway through a sentence in the fifth chapter.
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The art in Swept Away: Dust, Ashes, and Dirt in Contemporary Art and Design at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) has some of the best material lists I’ve ever seen: city dust and pencil on silk; soot on organic cotton canvas; dryer lint and cotton; blown glass and ash from burned books. It’s label text that borders on poetry.
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Struck with financial troubles, the South Street Seaport Museum closed its doors in March of 2011. Although its future was then uncertain, it has now reopened under the direction of the Museum of the City of New York, fueled by a $2 million grant from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.
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The heart of a society is most open when dealing with death. Its spoken and unspoken fears and hopes, both for life and the afterlife, are embedded in rituals of remembrance and memorial. In China, this has taken the form of detailed objects made of Joss paper that are burned for the deceased.
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