nyc waterfalls

i was on the governor’s island ferry, going to the figment art show, and looking at the eliasson waterfalls. (taking either this ferry or the staten island ferry is an excellent way to see how the falls fit into the landscape/cityscape. i prefer the governor’s island ferry, which will end you up on governor’s island–you should see it–rather than on the staten island railroad facing a man who decides to fondle himself in front of you. i suppose you might prefer the staten island ferry if that works for you.)

anyway, eliasson. i thought back to the jean-claude and christo installation in central park (we are meant to, press has all pointed to the success of the gates as one reason for the elisson installation). it’s no secret i thought the gates was lousy public art–like giant croquet hoops, only in that awful construction-hazard orange–but i want to be impressed by nyc waterfalls. i was not, really. sure they are structurally impressive, if that works for you, but they are also piddly compared to the nyc skyline. as natural wonders? the falls are too thin to be impressive. good try, but not quite. i don’t dislike them; i am only unimpressed.

so i thought for a while about what is missing in these kinds of public art installations (excluding things like playing the building which works really well. there are lines every day to play it, and it exposes the lovely interior of an otherwise closed building.) i think the problem is this:  the artists are thinking that physical scale will make their projects beautiful or effective, but the physical scale of new york would diminidh the most massive installations. why not think, instead of scale, of pervasiveness. new york is widely varied in population and in architecture, why not find a way to use either the very game population to create art? something involving layers of performance (it might be too difficult to engineer one performance with full collaboration, so maybe several performances that aggregate over the course of a month or a summer?

but then, i like performance.

eliasson at moma

i finally went to see the second half (or first half) of the eliasson exhibition. i agree with peter schjeldahl that the ps1 exhibition is better, although the seemingly-dangerous swinging fan is pretty darn excellent. i am tepid about his assessment that eliasson’s work might only be fun; i do think (as i said in the ps1 response) that when he works best, eliasson reveals that nature is awesomely and beautifully complex while seeming effortless. is there more to it than that though? maybe not.

you have two more days to see it.

waterfalls, with some trepidation, next.

monsieur verdoux

at the film forum. it closed this week, but i had the great pleasure of going (with a friend who loves film like nobody else i know) to see it on the last day.

this is my second charlie chaplin film-city lights was the first-and i see how they are, intellectually very similar, little tramp or no little tramp. monsieur verdoux is overtly didactic where city lights certainly has a politics, but it is just below the surface. of course, this may be a result of the speeches at the end of monsieur. i understand that chaplin was reluctant to move away from silent film, and perhaps we can see here why. language has given him the ability to curse.

i wonder if welles’ involvement (hes credited with the original idea) added to these vocal politics? but welles’ tone is different from chaplin’s. chaplin takes a position, where welles tends only to insist on questioning, not settling on an answer.

does this sound like i am criticizing chaplin? i am not. i like that monsieur moves from what could be a lightly critical and humorous to directly critical–the audience is given the pleasure of the film, with its jokes, and that excellent gestural humor, and, oh my, could martha raye   be any better or funnier?, and then led to chaplin’s criticism of world politics at the beginning of the second world war.

did this influence godard? must’ve.

i got stuck on the scene where chaplin sits on the sofa and his elbow slips off the arm, upsetting his balance and eventually sending him off the sofa. his grandson, james thierree, does an excellent extended version of this same movement, unable to prop his chin in his hand, in the larger context of trying to sit in a chair, cross his legs and prop his chin, in au revoir parapluie. in the new yorker, he apparently expresses reluctance to be compared to chaplin, but then why take chaplin’s gesture and amplify it? (i think they’re both excellent, but i also think they are different, or they do different things.) chaplin is making social criticism and thierree, from what i have seen, is more interested in fairytales.

j. hoberman wrote this on monsieur.

very disjointed of me. more again later, perhaps?

bubble battle

i went to the bubble battle organized by newmindspace. as tend to do, i waited until i was on my way to try and find bubbles, so i had to participate via polaroid…

and

i would never have imagined bubbles would polaroid so beautifully.

take your time

olafur eliasson’s exhibition, take your time, is up at both moma and ps1. i went to the ps 1 exhibition today. (the g train was running regulary this weekend, so brooklyn flea first, then art.)

this is absolutely the worst exhibition photo–the ones on the moma site are excellent but not copyable.

i should say first that i first saw eliasson’s work at the ica boston (your only real thing is time). i dragged along my mother and one of my sisters (who were not so appreciative as i). it struck me that he had re-created something beautiful in nature as an unnatural thing–i mean that, rather than just trying to replicate nature, he made a piece that recalled and used elements of nature but which was definitely a thing made by human appreciation and curiosity. i loved the dark pool of water. and i generally love best the pieces that reveal for us how complicated nature is.

like the waterfall on the ground floor of ps 1. it is a contraption of metal boxes, various kinds of tubing, a pump and water, which bubbles up into each of the small metal boxes and overflows into the metal pool in which the whole things sits (i should be a better describer).  it does only what a spring would do–bubbles water up to a surface–but we see how much that takes. nature looks effortless; eliasson shows us that it is not, and makes it more beautiful.

i also liked the slowly rotating circular mirror that took up most of the ceiling on a room in the third floor, but it’s full worth depended on the audience. when i came into the room, the floor was full of people lying on their backs and looking up into the mirror. after a few minutes, some left and other took their places; the new people were more fun. one man walked himself around while lying on his side. another lay face down and pretended to climb upward on the floor. a little girl could not be coaxed into being silly, but the woman with her held her legs up in the air. i went through again, after looking at the roomsfull of models (impressively prolific, and i like seeing the mind at work) and there was almost no one on the floor. patience may be rewarded in this room.

olafur eliasson is the new york artist this summer–aside from these two exhibitions, the public art fund has organized and is producing four seemingly independently-standing waterfalls mostly in the lower Mahattan waterfront (with a pile of money from, among others, mayor bloomberg). it seems that the gates (that awful series of construction-orange giant croquet hoops conceived of by jeanne-claude and christo and placed in central park) made a bunch of tourism money for the city, and so eliasson has the chance to made something beautiful and profitable this year. i hope that the waterfalls are beautiful and thoughtful, rather than merely ornamental. there are already fountains in new york.

varieties of religious experience

i am reading william james, slowly. in part because some parts of his concepts are complex (!) and in part to savor what i have just read.

today:

writing about the “higher and wider universe of abstract ideas” he says “Such ideas, and others equally abstract (abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice), form the background for all facts, the fountain-head of all the possibilities we conceive of. They give its ‘nature,’ as we call it, to every special thing. Everything we know is “what’ it is by sharing in the nature of one of these abstractions. We can never look directly at them, for they are bodiless and featureless and footless, be we grasp all other things by their means, and in handling the real world we should be stricken with helplessness in just so far forth as we might lose these mental objects, these adjectives and adverbs and predicates and heads of classification and conception” (56)

A marvelous articulation of the sense, when experiencing (what shall we call it?) joy or pleasure that seems like it must be involved with something more than merely the thing that brings joy or pleasure, of the larger thing behind it. Look, I can’t even get close enough to look at it askance.

overheard at the broadway/houston subway station today

“it’s when you’re staring right into the abyss that you really know who you are.”