For meditations on time, there are few places more frenetic with marking the seconds than Grand Central Terminal. The hundreds of thousands of people that pass through the station each day create a constant motion around the gold clock that sits calmly ticking away the moments in the center of the Grand Concourse. It’s around this idea that On Time / Grand Central at 100 was organized by MTA Arts for Transit and Urban Design.
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HONG KONG — The staging of Lygia Pape’s 1968 performance “Divisor” on the streets of Hong Kong was a fantasy I never knew I had, but witnessing it was a dream nonetheless. Presented as part of the current exhibition A Journal of the Plague Year. Fear, Ghosts, Rebels. Sars, Leslie and the Hong Kong Story (May 17–July 20 2013) at the nonprofit space Para Site, this current staging of “Divisor” channels the potency of the seminal work into another context, one defined by the effects of colonialism, plagues, politics, contagion, sterilization, and segregation.
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New York bristles with energy, and what makes it continually captivating for me is that this spirit comes so much from the people and acts of creation that can be just stumbled upon in the street. Last week in the East Village, at the corner of First Avenue and 7th Street, I saw an enthusiastic crowd chanting along to what seemed to be a lesson in Italian but was actually a component of a book party for Annie Rachele Lanzillotto.
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The after-sundown events for this past weekend’s Ideas City from the New Museum may have had the least to do with biennial festival’s focus on the future of our urban metropolises, but the NightFest definitely had the greatest visual impact.
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OAK PARK, Illinois — You’re driving to a suburb that you don’t know well, and you whip out your iPhone to quickly punch an address into Google Maps. In this case, that address is 704 Highland Avenue, home of Sabina Ott and John Paulett, who run Terrain Exhibitions, a once-a-month-ish, home-turned-cozy gallery experience. Every artist who shows work here must wrap it around the concept of the artist-writer couple’s home.
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South African artist Jane Alexander has long worked with blurring the evolutionary line between humanity and animals, using anthropomorphic sculptures to respond to the dehumanizing nature of Apartheid. Yet with her work’s installation in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, one of New York’s most hallowed spaces, this space between what is human and what is beast becomes even more interesting.
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Continuing the long human tradition of rock stacking, Ugo Rondinone’s contemporary art cairns are now looming around Rockefeller Plaza, casting their colossal shadows beneath Art Deco towers in an attempt to bring some ancient mystery to the busy summer streets.
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Upstairs at the International Studio & Curatorial Program, on the third floor, there’s a map tacked to a wall with a series of flags planted in it. The flags document the different countries from which the ISCP has drawn its artist and curator residents, and while it’s easy to notice gaps — large swaths of Africa and South America, for instance — it’s also refreshing to note how many flags there are, and how widespread. With 58 countries and counting, it’s clear that the ISCP is committed to finding art in the far-flung corners of the world; the process just takes time.
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In an attempt to show the faces of the New Yorkers and tourists who swiftly move through Times Square at an unrelenting 24-hour pace, French street artist JR has set up a photo booth right in its center. Inside Out New York City, which started last night as part of the Times Square Arts public arts program, is a continuation of JR’s Inside Out Project, where the faces of the people who live in a place are made visible on its structure.
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Newsstands as these highly individual, cluttered points of information in a personal dialogue with the street have almost totally disappeared from New York City. A huge reason was the raising of annual vendor fees from the hundreds to the thousands in the 1990s, and the replacing of the old booths that reflected the characters who maintained them with new, uniform glass and metal boxes. One of these old newsstands was Petrella’s Point run by Adam Petrella for 30 years at Bowery and Canal Street, and although it was removed in 2004, this past weekend an artist-run newsstand popped-up to bring back its spirit.
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