swimming in long island

Currently at PS1 Contemporary Art Center (A Museum of Modern Art Affiliate in Long Island City New York http://www.ps1.org ) one can find Argentine artist Leandro Erlich's "Swimming Pool" (this, after ten years of trying to bring the piece to NY; it was first conceived in Texas in 1999, where Erlich was an art student).  The two-story installation has visitors first come to the pool from above - step ladder at the side, ripples on the surface, haunting figures of others visitors floating (?) below - then, by wooden stairs off to the side, one crosses - clothed and dry - through the pool wall and into the deep.  The illusion for the upstairs crowd is enhanced when downstairs patrons splash their arms about and do the crawl "underwater".

While perhaps "simple" (compared to other concept/content heavy works at PS1 right now), the piece is direct, effective, and playful - and in the chilly New York  (where, unlike sunny Southern California, swimming pools are rare) winter, the sight harkens to a long-lost and much-regretted summer.  Erlich is from a family of architects, and one sees architectural issues of status and living space playing out with lingering emotional splashes (Marco Polo, bee stings, bleachy eyes, adolescent groping).

This being said, the piece is also a disturbing lie: it has a surreal pop ("a swimming pool! here?") at first glance, but so tames the nature of pools that, in the end, I wasn't sure if this lie was or wasn't also part of Erlich's intentions.  What is so off-putting?

First, while the surface of the water is cleverly counterfeited, it remains untraversable.  No shoves, toe dips, lost quarters, or cannon balls will break the water.  The pool is thus reduced to surface - to Looking Glass mirror-ness without a "through" - and hi-jinks, horseplay, trepidation (is it too cold?) and occasional annoyances ("stop splashing!") are liquidated.  Whether you use a ladder or steps to descend slowly into a pool, or take the plunge, whether you try to mitigate the sudden shock of cold or embrace it, a real swimming pool is perhaps the only time that humans feel their body gliding through a plane from one world to another.  But not here.

Once under the waves, a real estival swimmer faces other challenges, other risks: his or her weight, the problem of holding breath, trying to focus or grope about, the chill, the air caught in the puffing shorts... Erlich's simulacrum however  makes swimming unswimming: another walk about the room.  The play of light above and the shimmering ghosts of those looking down remind us of "being below", but no more than pre-made postcards of Paris capture the subtle touch of a lover's hands in the pre-dawn fog while crossing the Pont des Arts.

Which is to say that by these loses, by the deficiencies of Erlich's work, other pools and pooling moments may come (if we seek them) flooding upon us.  These things that this work fails to bring.  Preteen awkwardness while changing at the Y.  Aching fatigue after laps.  Amorous glances in the pool or during showers.  Tarps puled over above-ground pools, caked in rotting leaves and deep green algae.  Childhood peeing.  Vacation packages in cheap hotels, towels lain on lounge-chairs strung with vinyl.  Hot tubs and sexual adventures.  Slips at the edge and stern warnings about running or shoving.  Inflatable splashers.  Slides, boards, lanes, debris catchers.  Swimming holes in old quarries.  The feel of the hot bricks and the beaming sun as you pull yourself out shivering.  One wonders if even such common loci as kitchens, bathrooms and bedrooms can hit such a complex nexus of memories and emotions, both of space and status, but also the body -- the fundamental nature of breathing and muscle, the womb, the skin, sex -- of family, of risk, of play and of aging.

Which is to say that I would rather there had been a real pool here, and that someone had pushed me in.

p.s. I expect that much has been written by phenomenologists about the differences between beaches, swimming pools (of which there is an amazing diversity), reflecting pools (both the clean coin-peppered versions seen in our capitals and the algae-incrusted still dark tains found in jungle temples), boating pools, Renaissance and Baroque fountains with tritons rising or sculpted grottos lost in the byways of overgrown parks, gay baths... these and others each draw us, haunt us, scare us by turns, in ways that our language seems hopeless to fully illustrate. 

p.p.s. I wonder sometimes if the iconography of the swimming pool and of the bather in gay-related art, fiction and movies -- David Hockney, "Gods and Monsters", "Milk", "Death in Venice", "Dancer from the Dance", Herbert List, Bruce Weber, porn, and so forth -- doesn't also perform (frequently) a kind of simplification/reduction of the pool as "locus amoenus" ("pleasant, lovely place"), a rhetorical term used to describe the groves and shadowy valleys from which poets speak of nature, love and simple pleasures...  The individuals splashing about in most of these works are rarely screaming tots or sluggish over-tanned and slightly over-weight old lions, but rather stunning youths and young men at the epitome of their classical beauty.  Which is fine as a short-cut for talking about desire, but hopelessly insufficient for plumbing the soul.  "The Swimming Pool Library" is perhaps an exception.

misty light, hot white, ghost sheen

It's the last Sunday of the Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967) show "Take Your Time" (Aprl 20 - June 30) split between The Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York.  The scorching humidity outside barely let up today even when the skies ripped open and deluged the Gay Pride marchers.  The weather inside was just as affecting.

The MOMA show is made up of thirteen large scale and effective pieces, including a wildly swinging fan cum pendulum, kaleidoscope rooms, long corridors in a monofrequency yellow, strobe-caught water drips, and a moss covered wall.  Frequently, Eliasson's tools are utterly simple (small motors that rotate wires, strobes, mirrors), but the effects -- because of the complicated unspeakability of one's associations to light, mood, memory, damp, dark and breeze -- defy simple analysis.  References abound, of course, to a generation of Southern Californian light artists (James Turrell, Robert Irwin); to Larry Bell's boxes; and even, by antithesis, to Judd and Serra (Eliasson's "1 cubic meter of light" - a misty box made of light beams), but the pieces work well without knowing any names.  One finds joy (kids love chasing the swirling fan), mystery, meditation; one feels the weight of light (the yellow corridor reduces and transforms fabrics and skin into variations of tweed and plastic); one lingers and breathes.

While aspects of the P.S.1 show on the other side of the river seemed more like marginalia (and here I am thinking of Eliasson's numerous musings on geodesic domes, kaleidoscopes and filtered glass in the side galleries), the curators' use of the old public school building was brilliant: on the top floor (in the stifling heat) were placed Eliasson's luminescent pieces; on the basement floor (in the cool musty half-light) the water works.  Spending time alternating from top to bottom was akin to spending time in the Russian baths: heating, exhaustion, relaxation, healing.

The P.S.1 crowd favorite was likely the gigantic foil mirror suspended and rotating above the reclining visitors, but for me  the most hard hitting of the entire two-site show were (upstairs) the "Neutral Light Set-up" (a room bathed in ever changing hues of off-white light) and (downstairs) "Beauty" (a billowy iridescent curtain of mist in a dark vault).

Despite the heat, I found myself camped on the floor of the neutral light room (see video) in utter amazement of the ephemeral, the powerful emotional connotations (cloud sky sheen) of the hues and they way they painted the walls.  All of a sudden, some five minutes into my meditation, perhaps under the bright white, all the floaters in the back of my eyes came into view and lingered.

If a person could marry a piece of art, I would propose to Eliasson's Beauty.  The mist falls not as streams or a flattened sheet, but in a undulating pillowy-ness that catches the light on one side and shimmers in rainbow threads, while from the back the white glow lights it like a waterfall seen from cave mouth.  People irresistibly need to touch the spray, some blow on it, some walk through it (from the back, the effect is highly cinematic), and from the right spot one knows what it means to love with a fire light heart.

(NB: while MOMA has a camera (no flash) ok policy, P.S.1, strangely, has a no-camera rule.  Get it together guys!) 

sllafretawaterfalls

Olafur Eliasson's four "Waterfalls" in New York's East River (from the Manhattan Bridge to Governor's Island) started cascading yesterday and will continue till October 13.

Roberta Smith, in the New York Times, waxed all Whitmanian over them in her review (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/arts/design/27wate.html) and perhaps there's no reason not to. 

I have liked Eliasson's previous large-scale meditations on weather and light, the meteorological and the artificial, and his use of water in all its states; and the mechanical and ephemeral Waterfalls are a perfect confounding of all of those preoccupations.  My only disappointment is in finding them positioned so far away from the public that their force, roar and spray are intuited rather than experienced.  (People are encouraged to take boat rides to see them from the river; the idea being that their power will echo through the rocking hull... More than a passing ferry?  Doubtful.) And in a humid New York summer, I'd be willing to abandon a degree of safety to have recycled river water douse my clothes.

Having people focus on the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn (straddling the Naval Yards, Downtown and the Lower East Side) is also to remember the historic heart of the shipping, unloading, merchandising,transporting city... a city and a riverfront that are disappearing before our eyes.  The Domino Sugar plant is closed and preservationists are fighting to save its sign.  The Fulton Fish Market is closed and being converted to swanky lofts.  Red Hook is undergoing a loft and Ikea boom.  When the water is turned off, what will be left?

sachs craft

Tom Sachs' show of recent work (May 8 - June 21) at Sperone Westwater (http://www.speronewestwater.com) in the meatpacking district of Manhattan reveals the 41 year old New Yorker DIY re-appropriator with still a lot to say.  Sachs is probably best known for his (infamous) concentration camp fabricated from a Prada hatbox, his candy jar of 9-mm bullets (which led to his [then] gallery owner Mary Boone being arrested for a night), and his various misuses of Hello Kitty.  And while shock value still has its place in his work today, the strongest pieces go way beyond catty conversations among culturati in martini bars.

The best pieces in the show are "handmade" (more on this in a second) constructions -- boxes, cabinets, odd lamps, Duchampian ready-made-aided works -- which show both an eye to artisanal detail (like inset slots and toggles for keys and hooks) and awkward do-it-yourself bricolage (e.g. hand-burnt letters, exposed wiring).

Particularly stunning is Sachs' "Negro Music": a ghetto blaster and tons of tapes (and a bottle of Jack) safely locked away in a laboratory glove box (through rubber gloves you can switch tapes, hit play, rewind... the Jack Daniels however remains unassailable).  The strange protection offered is of course an illusion, for the sound comes through... as too the disturbing image of white culture testing, genetically modifying, appropriating and taming black cultural production.

The political reappears in other whimsical ways.  Sachs' "Waffle Bike" -- a tricked out bike (riffing off Puerto Rican bikes in New York) with attached refrigerator, waffle maker, a cage for chickens, a flag pole (Norway) and loud speakers (broadcasting Arabic) proclaims a untenable melding of northern European cuisine and Southern itinerant street sellers.  The only thing lacking is seeing it in action.  And syrup.  

In the same way, the kooky "LaGuardia", a observation tower for cats (built on several levels with stairs: liter box, goldfish pond, observation deck...) is both whimsical and disturbingly prison like (what are these cats surveilling?!).

I loved the mandela meets Renaissance dueling cabinet gun chest "Hardcore" in which handmade guns and the tools that were used to make them (pliers, hammers, etc.) -- all lovingly inscribed or etched with punk band names and the track listings from their albums -- are elegantly ensconced and sealed in a beautiful mirrored plywood case.  Once again, a "dangerous" cultural production (hardcore punk, a Brechtian hammer) has been aestheticized and sealed off, but the keys are close to hand and the case can travel.  (I would gladly have opened up the case and started to play... but the gallery do-not-touch-ethos is hard to fight).

I am not enraptured by everything that Sachs puts out.  His foamcore whales, Hello Kittys, pyrographic reproductions of animal fable engravings (do grandparents still give wood burning kits to their grand kids? do you remember the smell of the wood burning under the smoldering stylus?) leave me cold.  

Even more so, I do not know what to make of artistic productions that involve -- Renaissance atelier style -- the mobilization of a crew of (14) assistants (like Peter Halley, Jeff Koons, Sol Lewitt...).  It seems to me that "DIY" has a hard time surviving a capitalist production method no matter how artisan-based its ethics.  It would be more honest if each and every one of the assistants added their name to the masthead... but that dilemma is also a part of Sachs' attack.

[addendum 6/27:  Sachs "handmade" boxes have  brought me back (by antithesis) to thinking about Toland Grinnell (a Brooklyner, born in 1969) whose work has prominently featured creepy sets of elaborate and luxurious traveling cases and collapsable furniture in Vuitton-style precision.  The design-centered detail of Grinnell's work has always been a stumbling block for me. 

(Here's an interesting interview with Grinnell from 2003: http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag03/nov03/grinnell/grinnell.shtml.

Grinnell's "Pied-à-Terre" was on longterm display at the Brooklyn Museum through last May: http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/toland_grinnell/ )]

touching me touching you

Everyone remembers the great joy (although maybe it's more a boy thing?) of going to a science museum (or even better: more recent museological funrides like the Exploratorium in San Francisco) and being able to hit buttons, making sparks fly, setting whirring planetary models into motion, proving... oh but what were those presentations demonstrating in fact?

Carl André's invitation to walk on his floor pieces of aluminum or wood squares notwithstanding (ha, a pun! - and sadly, the last time I was in MOMA, they seemed to be discouraging touching or walking on the André piece), contemporary art remains generally disdainful of the public's touch.

Not so, two gallery shows currently on view in New York.

* Yoko Ono at Galerie LeLong (http://www.galerie-lelong.com/newyork/fr_newyork.htm).  Love her, hate her, it doesn't matter.  The LeLong show (April 18 - May 31) invites the public to "Touch Me" via molded soft rubber parts of the artist's body (lips, knees, breasts, belly, feet).  The effect is a little creepy: I could swear that someone had got her nipples wet, and her foot was already missing a toe (the panel next to the feet referenced the loss as typical of the violence that a woman's body is always subject to).

Touching Yoko's knee.

I am a little confused about the work's ideology, however, for Ono asks the public to cut themselves up and objectify their own bodies by shoving their limbs or faces out through holes cut in a large canvas and having the gallery assistant take Polaroids which are then pinned to a wall (with the pictured people's comments written on them).  I wish this part of the show had more force, but everyone seemed so excited about having their stocking-covered leg or well-posed hand mounted on the wall, that it was just goofy.

(I think this was why I so loved Kate Gilmore's video piece Star Bight, Star Might (2007) from the 2007 Arsenal Show - pushing her head through that plywood is a painful and laborious act.  Splinters and scratches remain on her face when she finally manages to break through.)

Kate Gilmore, Star Bright, Star Might

I guess Yoko could have forced her public to endure something more humiliating or honest than Polaroids.  Although I saw a couple of nipples on the wall, I didn't see much that dared.  How 'bout us being forced to endure groping and touching?  Would the public oblige?  Would the public touch?  (Even sex clubs keep the lights down in their back rooms).

(Ancillary thought: Michel Leiris talks a lot about the essential element of the kind of art he is engaged in (confessional, intimate) being "risk", exposure to the horns of the minotaur... It's a good mantra.)

* Upstairs at Tanya Bonakdar (http://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com), and in concert with a major show of his works at MOMA and PS1, there is a nice participatory sound piece by Olafur Eliasson called Spatial Vibration: String-Based Instrument, Study II (see http://spatialvibration.blogspot.com).  Using something resembling (tonically) a traditional asian instrument attached to a turntable-like drawing machine, the public can create a large round paper image of the vibrations they play.  SPROINGGGG!  CHHHHRRRRING!

Eliasson's Spatial Vibration (the assistant is changing the ink pen)

Groovier still, you can take the huge round sheet of paper home, Felix Gonzales-Torres like.  Stamped with the artist and the piece's name no less.  It's got noise.  It's got free.  It's got participatory.  It's got take-home.  What more could you want?  From a gallery, at least.