DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt

2012/05/03

Navigational Perception

Filed under: Studying Perception — Tags: , , , , , , — fred @ 14:17

Marshall Islands stick chart, a map of islands, ocean swells, and currents, original source of photo unknown

Synchronicity is a concept describing how seemingly unrelated things take on meaning by being experienced concurrently.  Years ago a friend gave me the Fall 1991 issue of the magazine “Whole Earth Review”.  It is 144 pages densely filled with a wide variety of articles on technology, ecology, and human potential – the promo on the inside front cover starts, “Mayans, Hawaiians, and Tibetans.  Virtual reality, psychedelic alchemy, neuro-tarot.  Youth culture and elder care.  Teaching lumber companies not to trespass.  Radio as anarchic medium.  A grandmother’s advice on childrearing.  Zines.  Independent music producers.  Lucid dreams.”  Lots of interesting thoughts and speculations there.

There were two articles within that issue that stuck with me and that have informed my thought and my creative process ever since.  The magazine draws no particular connection between the two articles – it puts them in separate sections – but both have to do with developing special perceptual skills for purposes of moving through the world.  If I hadn’t encountered these articles in the same place, they might not have made such an impression on me, but their alignment opened a door for me about how we can train and expand our perception of the world, not through drugs or mystical experiences, but through simple practice.

For me, artistic development is about learning to perceive more deeply, to notice beauty that most miss.  Mass commercial culture is all about bombarding people with sensations, pushing their buttons and pulling their strings.  By appreciating subtle things and enjoying all the fantastic phenomena the world gives us for free, we can liberate ourselves from commercial mind control.  But even if you don’t care about all that and just read this blog for the drawing tips, there’s no technique more powerful than learning to see more when you look.

So, back to “Whole Earth Review” – both of the articles I’ll be talking about are available in full online, and you’ll find a list of links at the bottom of this post.

Cover of “Whole Earth Review”, Fall 1991 issue

“Nightwalking: Exploring the Dark with Peripheral Vision” tells of its authors Zink and Parks’ experiments in enhancing peripheral vision.  The human eye contains two types of light sensitive receptor cells.  Cones, densely packed in the center of the visual field, see color and fine detail.  Rods predominate in the outer circle of the visual field.  They see neither color nor fine detail, but are far more sensitive than the cone cells in dark conditions.  The visual cortex uses this peripheral rod vision for orientation and to notice movement happening away from our point of focus.  (See my earlier post, “Exercising Perception”, or my guest post on Daniel Maidman’s blog for more detail on all this.)

Peripheral vision is usually a subconscious process.  Zink and Parks found that they could expand their conscious attention into the peripheral visual field by locking their central vision on the end of a stick attached to a hat and extending about a foot in front of their eyes.  When the focal point is immobilized, awareness is free to move elsewhere.  They practiced hiking in the desert, over very uneven terrain, this way, and found that they were able to move smoothly and sure-footedly, avoiding obstacles and pitfalls without looking at them.

Even before I read this article I had been doing perceptual experiments on my own.  I had often tried walking around the city with my eyes crossed, which is essentially the same thing Zink and Parks were doing, and had discovered the fascinating ability to watch things happening far away from my line of sight, even simultaneous things on opposite sides of me.

New Mexico Desert at Night, photographer unknown

Since the peripheral visual field is dominated by rod cells, noted for their high sensitivity to extremely low levels of light, Zink and Parks decided to try the technique walking in the wilderness in the moonless night.  If you’ve tried walking on a moonless (or new moon or crescent moon) night far from artificial light sources, you know how hard it can be to see where you’re stepping or what’s around you.  Zink and Parks again used the hat with a stick in front, adding a dot of phosphorescent paint to the end of the stick, and again went hiking in the New Mexico wilds.  They found they were able to see all sorts of things one would never see by normal looking in the dark – rabbits and bats moving around them, the faint bioluminescence of decaying wood.  They were able to move swiftly and safely over rocks and ravines.  (I wonder if anyone has tried this in a dense forest at night – that would be much darker than the open desert landscape, even on a moonless night.)

Nightwalking participant, from Australian site NLP Cafe Brisbane. This nightwalker’s hat has a glow-in-the-dark plastic heart instead of a dot of phosphorescent paint as described in Zink’s original article.  Photographer unknown.

In my own practice as an artist, I’ve found the ability to move my awareness into the peripheral visual field is a vital skill.  I can look at a detail with my sharp central field and still maintain a sense of the whole of what I’m looking at because the peripheral vision is taking it all in.  Many observational artists intuitively squint at their subject – this disables the sharp vision, helping you to see the whole pattern.  A deliberate practice of developing peripheral sight can be even more powerful.

Centered on the Feet, 2012, watercolor on paper, by Fred Hatt

The second article that struck me in the Fall 1991 issue of “Whole Earth Review” was “The Soft, Warm, Wet Technology of Native Oceania,” Harriet Witt-Miller’s piece on the traditional navigation techniques of the peoples of the Pacific islands.  Eighteenth-century European explorers were astonished to find that the far-flung islands of the Pacific, widely scattered across thousands of miles of open ocean, had nearly all been settled long ago by people with outrigger canoes who had no sextants or compasses or chronometers.  How did they cross such distances, and find tiny dots of land in the vast expanse of ocean?

Micronesian Proa, still from “The Navigators”, a film by Sam Low

These cultures, now tragically threatened by rising sea levels, had highly sophisticated methods of accurate maritime navigation, all based on direct observation rather than on abstract patterns such as latitude and longitude or the geometrical satellite array of the Global Positioning System.

GPS satellites, original source of illustration unknown

Traditional Pacific navigators or wayfinders learn to observe very subtle things.  They can look at the light reflecting off the bottom of a distant cloud and tell whether it is over green land or over a coral atoll’s crystalline lagoon, thus detecting islands beyond the horizon.  They know the stars and the way their arcs of movement change with the hour and the season.  They observe the behavior of sea birds and the properties of water and floating debris to determine in what direction lies land.  They have a deep understanding of the movement of wind and water currents.  They learn to distinguish the constant patterns of ocean swells from the shifting surface waves by sensing the deeper movements with their scrotums resting on the bottom of their boats.

Currents of the Pacific, warm currents in orange, cold currents in green, original source of map unknown

Currents of the Pacific, warm currents in orange, cold currents in green, original source of map unknown

The Micronesians map their world with “stick charts”, made of palm sticks.  According to the caption of the below illustration from Witt-Miller’s article, credited to “Exploratorium Quarterly”, “Curved sticks showed prevailing wave fronts, shells represented the locations of islands, and threads indicated where islands came into view.”

Micronesian stick map, illustration from “Whole Earth Review”, Fall 1991 issue, page 67

Western ways of knowledge and technology have often been about superimposing an abstract pattern over the real world, and operating according to the abstraction.  For the visual artist, that traditionally means systems of linear perspective, canons of human proportion, color theories, etc.  For the contemporary artist it may also include the abstracting analyses of critical theory and semiotics.

Proportions of Man, 1557, by Albrecht Dürer

I understand and use such abstractions – well, critical theory, not so much – but in my own practice of observational figure drawing I stay much closer to the Pacific wayfinder’s method, looking at subtleties of reflected light, following the swells and hollows of the model’s body as though I am moving across a territory.  I look at the points of inflection, such as nipples or kneecaps, in terms of angular relationships and the flowing patterns that join them, as the sticks connect the shells on a Micronesian sailing chart.  My process is tactile.  I feel my way along.

Hands Reversed, 2012, black watercolor on paper, by Fred Hatt

All of these different kinds of observation are happening simultaneously, or in quick succession.  Part of my mind is aware of the peripheral view.  Part of it is looking at the colors in the shadows or the direction of hairs on the body.  Part of it is mapping the points and following the flows.  Part of it is focused on my paper, my brush, my colors.  It is impossible to coordinate all these factors into a systematic method I could describe or define.  The magic that makes it work is intuition, the power of the mind to integrate a torrent of incoming sensations, conscious and not, into a coherent experience.  Intuition is trained by practice, not by theory.  It must be rigorously exercised, and then it must be trusted.

As I have pursued my artistic discipline, I have been deeply informed by these ideas of navigational perception.  To draw or paint or sculpt from observation is to explore, to discover, to wonder.

Both the short articles cited here are full of details I haven’t mentioned, and well worth reading for themselves:

 “Nightwalking: Exploring the Dark with Peripheral Vision”, by Nelson Zink and Stephen Parks

“The Soft, Warm, Wet Technology of Native Oceania”, by Harriet Witt-Miller

Both articles were originally published in “Whole Earth Review” No. 72, Fall, 1991.

Other relevant links:

Nelson Zink’s website NavaChing

Harriet Witt’s website Passenger Planet

Exploratorium’s website “Never Lost” on Polynesian navigation

Sam Low’s article “A World of Natural Signs”

Illustrations here besides my own drawings were found on the web.  Clicking on a picture will take you to the place where I found it.

2011/10/11

Sowing Seeds

Filed under: Abstract Art,Art and Philosophy — Tags: , , , — fred @ 22:41

Twixt, 2011, by Fred Hatt

How do you make change in the world?  Even I, who love finding beauty amid the world’s insanity and squalor, yearn for a kinder and juster culture.  Does art have any part in that, or is it just entertainment, an idle pastime of the privileged?  You surely see a lot of contemporary art that addresses injustice, stigma, corruption, exploitation, and violence.  But doesn’t much of that kind of art seem exploitive itself?  During a recent museum visit I saw mural-sized photos of homeless people in humiliating positions, and installations that made real footage of war and prison killings look like video games.  Do you suppose these works will change the minds of the powerful or offer any solace to the souls with whose real suffering they toy?  Do the artists who do this work or the curators who put it on display imagine that they are displaying a social conscience?  Ah, the abject of the world, the war-scarred, the enslaved – let them eat critical theory!

Perhaps it is pretentious for an artist even to pretend to care.  Social change is a complex phenomenon involving myriad conflicting and interacting forces.  The power that an artist has to influence the process of change in society would seem like the power of a mosquito to change the course of an ocean liner.  Even the mass-produced forms of entertainment such as movies and pop music no longer reach the vast audiences they once did.  The kind of art that shows in galleries or alternative performance venues, reaching a minuscule audience, must surely have no impact at all.

Ovum, 2011, by Fred Hatt

People think that the kind of power that produces change must be a direct push.  Huge advertising campaigns, political activism, legal crusades, large-scale economic offenses such as boycotts and buyouts, military or revolutionary attacks are all attempts to leverage monetary, demographic, or violent power to change things in a direct way.  History shows us that such efforts tend to produce unintended consequences such as political backlash movements or power vacuums that allow ruthless people to seize control.  There is a physical law that states that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction, and this often seems to apply to clashing cultural forces as well.

There is a different way of producing change, which may be described by the metaphor of planting seeds.  A seed is a tiny thing which contains the potential for the development of a tree or plant.  In nature, plants have various ways of scattering their seeds widely.  Most seeds will not find the conditions necessary to become a mature plant, but enough may grow to perpetuate and even increase the range of the plant that produced them.  Each seed begins to develop in darkness and obscurity and there is no way to see that it is growing until it is emerging into the world as a fresh new manifestation of life.  The very obscurity and indirectness of this process may make change that overcomes the reactionary recoil effect.

Radia, 2011, by Fred Hatt

The metaphor of the seed appears in a famous parable of Jesus, quoted here from the Gospel of Thomas, translated by Patterson and Robinson:

Look, a sower went out. He filled his hands (with seeds), (and) he scattered (them).
Some fell on the path, and the birds came and pecked them up.
Others fell on the rock, and did not take root in the soil, and they did not put forth ears.
And others fell among the thorns, they choked the seeds, and worms ate them.
And others fell on good soil, and it produced good fruit.
It yielded sixty per measure and one hundred twenty per measure.

In the canonical gospels, the seed is interpreted as representing the word of Christ, which may or may not take root in the hearts of those who hear it, but I think it works well as a wider metaphor of how the world works.  It even describes the evolution of species, in which mutations are scattered haphazardly like seeds, most fail, but a few find the conditions to flourish.  A process that might seem random and wasteful is the process that produces our world with all its wondrous variety.

Umbilicus, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Culture, too, is a seeding process.  In the internet era, an idea or style that sprouts and spreads in the culture is called a meme, and its explosive growth is called “going viral” (reminding us that a virus is also a kind of seed, and that the effects of a seed are not necessarily positive).  But viral memes are not all lolcats – Steve Jobs’ vision of friendly technology and Gandhi’s vision of nonviolent resistance are also powerful viral memes.

In a human life, anything that one does or says, demonstrates or communicates to others, may become a seed.  An artist plays with perception, expression, ideas, experience, and desires, and shares the products of this play with others.  An image, an idea, or a feeling thus communicated may connect with the receiver on a deep level.  Whether it stays in the memory or in the unconscious, it may later affect the receiver’s actions or thinking in some way.  At this point the seed is sprouting.

Elaborating on the metaphor, we could say that we are always scattering seeds.  Anything we say or do could be a seed.  Most of our deeds will amount to nothing, but occasionally something will take root.  We can’t know which of our actions or words will sprout, but we should be aware that some will.  We can’t check to see what is growing – the process of development begins in obscurity, and digging up a seed to check on its development may halt that development.  We should act as though everything we do is a seed of goodness, and we should let go of everything we do, trusting that the unpredictable process of the world will nourish and grow some of them.

Vortex, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Real change takes root over long periods of time, cumulatively growing from innumerable such seemingly insignificant experiences and actions of vast numbers of people.  This way of producing change through seeds requires faith.  One doesn’t seem to be changing or moving anything, and often doesn’t even perceive the invisible reactions that may show that the seeds are sprouting.  The power of this way of producing change lies in its invisibility, because since it seems to be nothing it provokes no reactionary counterpunch.

While artists may often engage in direct efforts to change people’s minds, even art which has no outwardly apparent political or intellectual content may be planting seeds.  Some art which does not seem to be making any statement may be an exploration of pure perception.  Since the way people perceive the world alters the way they experience and interact with it, something which expands or alters someone’s way of perceiving something even in a subtle way may be a powerful seed for change.

The illustrations for this post are watercolor on paper,  11″ x 14″ or 28 x 35.6 cm.

2011/07/26

Freudian Analysis

Filed under: Homage: Visual Artists,Top Ten — Tags: , , , , , , , — fred @ 19:55

Double Portrait, 1986, by Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud, who just died on July 20, 2011, devoted his long career to painting figures and portraits from life, perfectly ignoring all the art-world trends of his era.

Bella, 1987, by Lucian Freud

Many of his images are of people and/or animals sleeping.  He always painted directly from live models, often friends or family members rather than professionals, and he worked very slowly, so the sleeping poses may be an accommodation to the models.  I am struck, though, by the sense of struggle and intensity in these works.  Freud’s paint has the writhing quality of Goya’s horrors or El Greco’s spiritual transports, but in pictures of people simply relaxing on beds and sofas.  I think the sense of agitation arises from Freud’s own restless struggle to see more deeply and to capture in paint the intensity of his own visual experience.  For Freud, every canvas was a wrestling match against a powerful foe.

Pregnant Girl, 1961, by Lucian Freud

The fleshiness of his painting can be a distraction.  I got a better understanding of  the energy of Freud’s searching eye by looking at his etchings, where the quality of movement stands out.  Most portraitists view their sitters across a distance.  Freud’s perceptual focus hikes over his subjects like a surveyor mapping a territory.  He treats the figure as a landscape, to be explored by touch and movement.

Head and Shoulders, 1982, etching by Lucian Freud

Freud loved animals, and he often shows his own dogs posing with his models.  He told William Feaver, who wrote a book about Freud’s work, “I’m really interested in people as animals.  Part of my liking to work from them naked is for that reason.  Because I can see more, and it’s also very exciting to see the forms repeating through the body and often the head as well.  I like people to look as natural and as physically at ease as animals, as Pluto my whippet.”

Sunny Morning - Eight Legs, 1997, by Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud was the grandson of Sigmund Freud, the progenitor of psychoanalysis.  Sigmund Freud spent hundreds of hours with his subjects lying on a couch, trying to penetrate the hidden recesses of the mind through dreams and free association.  Lucian Freud also spent hundreds of hours with his subjects lying on a couch, but he kept an intense focus on the surface.  I think he felt that the physical body, truly seen, could reveal hidden depths.  Surely Lucian Freud’s work reveals depths, although, as with Sigmund’s work, it could be argued that those depths belong to Freud more than they do to his subjects.

David Hockney; Lucian Freud, 2003, photo by David Dawson

Freud said, “My work is purely autobiographical… It is about myself and my surroundings. I work from people that interest me and that I care about, in rooms that I know.”  Given the necessity of spending a great deal of time with his sitters, he wouldn’t work with anyone unless he genuinely liked that person.  Still, he absolutely avoided any sentimentality or idealization.  Freud’s subjects had to accept that he would portray their every flaw, that he would reveal their mortality.

David Hockney, 2003, by Lucian Freud

While Freud, as far as I know, never worked from photographs, some of his models were photographed while posing for his paintings, which gives us an excellent way of seeing where he exaggerates and what he emphasizes.

Sue Tilley posing for Lucian Freud, 1995, photo by Bruce Bernard

Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, 1995, by Lucian Freud

The painting above is one of Freud’s best-known works, having set a record for the highest price paid for a painting by a living artist when it was sold at Christie’s in 2008 for 33.6 million dollars.  Notice how much older the model appears in the painting than in the photograph.  He seems to have made her more obese and more splotchy.

Many figurative painters do the opposite, omitting bruises and calluses and visible veins, subtly idealizing the body.  And many people are repelled by Freud’s figures, with their sexuality and mortality so blatantly on display.  Speaking for myself, this is the very aspect of Freud’s work that gives it spiritual power.  It is the essence of the human condition that we are spiritual beings manifested in animal bodies that experience fear and desire, suffering and decay.  I see this as the quality of art that Federico Garcia Lorca calls duende, the life force intensified by the closeness of death.

Naked Man with Rat, 1977, by Lucian Freud

Freud’s earlier work, such as the portrait below of Lady Caroline Blackwood, lacks the blotchy impasto of his later work, but there is already a kind of magical realism, with enlarged eyes and expressive distortions.

Girl in Bed, 1952, by Lucian Freud

Freud said, “The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.”  You can see this principle not only in the individual works, but across the artist’s entire oeuvre.  The later work is unquestionably more abstract, the strokes wilder and freer, but they also have a living presence that is much stronger than in the earlier work.

Four Figures, 1991, etching by Lucian Freud

 

The Painter's Mother III, 1972, painting by Lucian Freud, and The Painter's Mother, 1982, etching by Lucian Freud

The face below is surely distorted, yet you can see the intensity of the artist’s perception in every thick stroke.  There is a kind of aura, a powerful presence that cannot be achieved by working from photographs and fretting over accuracy.

Esther, 1982, by Lucian Freud

 

Lucian Freud and model, 2004, photo by David Dawson

Freud said, “Perhaps when you have the sort of temperament that is always looking for flaws and trouble it might stop you from having what you always want, which is to be as audacious as possible. One has to find the courage to keep on trying not to paint in a stale or predictable way.”

Night Portrait, 1978, by Lucian Freud

I’ll conclude this post with two of my favorite Freud nudes.  Night Portrait, above, finds beauty in a pose that seems to be both resting and running, and in the textural contrast between the body and the quilt.  Naked Man, Back View, one of Freud’s many paintings of the model Leigh Bowery, also well known as a performance artist and costume designer, suggests an interior life through the turned-away display of a mountainous back.

Naked Man, Back View, 1992, by Lucian Freud

All the images in this post were found on the web.  Clicking on the pictures links to the pages where I found them.  The Lucian Freud quotes were also found on the web.  All the quote sites seem to have a similar collection of Freud quotes, unfortunately not sourced.

2011/04/21

Public Sculpture

Filed under: Public Art,Sculpture — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — fred @ 19:10

The Rocket Thrower, 1963, sculpture by Donald De Lue, Flushing Meadows Park, Queens, NY, photo 2004 by Fred Hatt

The wide variety of reactions I heard following my recent post on Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates got me thinking about public art, which can be highly controversial, but which also becomes such a part of the everyday environment that people stop noticing it, like that bum that’s always on that certain corner every time you pass by.  The Gates was only up for a few weeks, but most public sculpture stands for decades or even centuries.  It is much more widely seen than any other kind of traditional visual artwork, but most of the artists are not well known. In preparing this post I researched the pictured sculptures so I could provide names and dates for them.  In many cases it was easy to find pictures of these sculptures, but surprisingly difficult to find information about the artists, dates, etc.  If you live in or have spent much time in New York, you’ll surely recognize many of these pieces, but I’ll bet you didn’t know the names of the artists, and if you look at the captions here you will see that most of them are not exactly famous names in art history.  Public sculpture is ubiquitous but anonymous.

In this post we’ll take a look at a wide variety of public sculptures in New York City.  I took most of these photos, but not all of them.  The ones I didn’t take link back to where I found them on the web.

The lead picture above, with its incredible leaping energy, is in the Flushing Meadows Park location of the 1939 and 1964 Worlds Fairs.  This sculpture has the Art Deco style of the 1930’s, but it was actually made for the ’64 fair, and its title, “The Rocket Thrower”, makes it a monument of the space age.

Here’s another allegorical naked man in Queens:

Triumph of Civic Virtue, 1922, sculpture by Frederick MacMonnies and the Piccirilli brothers, Queens Borough Hall, Queens, NY, photographer unknown

Queens congressman Anthony Weiner has recently created a lot of publicity for the old statue “Triumph of Civic Virtue“, calling it sexist and offensive, and suggesting it should be sold on Craigslist.  This piece was originally installed in City Hall Park in Manhattan, but it was always controversial, as it presents an allegorical male figure of virtue standing victorious over two female siren or mermaid figures representing vice and corruption.  New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia finally “exiled” the statue to Queens in 1941, and there it has continued to be ignored or objected to to this day.

I wonder why we haven’t heard such controversy about another old-fashioned monument, the equestrian portrait of Teddy Roosevelt that stands in front of the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.  This statue shows Roosevelt on a horse, leading an Indian and a Negro who flank him on foot.  I’m not sure what this sculpture is trying to say, but it seems to embody a kind of paternalist colonialism that we’re no longer comfortable with, and this piece is in a much more prominent location than “Civic Virtue”.

Theodore Roosevelt, 1940, sculpture by James Earle Fraser, American Museum of Natural History, NYC, photographer unknown

“Tilted Arc“, one of Richard Serra’s curved and leaning steel walls, was installed in Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan for eight years.  People who worked in the area hated having to navigate around this 12-foot high, 120-foot long barrier, and it was eventually cut into pieces and removed, against Serra’s objections.  I’ll side with the workers on this one.  Serra’s space-bending works are quite popular when people can experience them in an appropriate location, but there is something oppressive about imposing such a wall on people who have no choice in the matter.

Tilted Arc, 1981, sculpture by Richard Serra, Federal Plaza, NYC, photographer unknown

Of course, most public sculpture doesn’t arouse such animosity that it has to be chopped up and junked or put up for sale on Craigslist.  Most commissioned memorial sculpture looks dated and stodgy as soon as it goes up, but it does add an element of human liveliness to the built environment.  Plus, it’s very popular with the pigeons.

Figures from the Maine Memorial, 1913, sculpture by Attilio Piccirilli, Central Park, NYC, "Pigeon God", 2002 photo by Fred Hatt

There must be hundreds of traditional bronze figurative monuments in the city, 19th century depictions of the Great Men of the era.  The craftsmanship is classical but the style is stiff and generic.  Sometimes an unusual point of view can make one of these into a fascinating abstraction.

Abraham Lincoln, 1870, sculpture by Henry Kirke Brown, Union Square, NYC, "Bronze Cloak", 2003 photo by Fred Hatt

There are stores that sell cast sculptures for private gardens, reflecting the common taste rather than the institutional preferences of public monuments.  In the display below, I’m struck by the similarity between the busts of Elvis and David on the right, as well as the middle finger and “kiss my ass” sculptures in the front row.

Statuary Store Street Display, 2003, photo by Fred Hatt

Many public sculptures are war memorials.  Such monuments exhibit an interesting range of styles.  There’s the “realistic” depiction of the band of brothers-in-arms:

107th Infantry Memorial, 1927, sculpture by Karl Illava, Central Park, NYC, 2010 photo by Fred Hatt

The gothic romance of the young soldier embraced by the angel of death:

Prospect Park War Memorial, 1921, sculpture by Augustus Lukeman, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY, 2003 photo by Fred Hatt

And this depiction of the soldier as void.  This reminds me of the traditional symbol of the “released spirit” in Jainism.

The Universal Soldier, Battery Park Korean War Veterans Memorial, 1987, sculpture by Mac Adams, Battery Park, NYC, 2006 photo by Fred Hatt

Gandhi is a different kind of warrior, a figure that is both a spiritual and a political icon.

Mohandas K. Gandhi, 1986, sculpture by Kantilal B. Patel, Union Square, NYC, 2006 photo by Fred Hatt

Some sculptures salute the power of love, like these kissing cherubs, not a public monument but a type of decorative sculpture that adorns many homes in my neighborhood in Brooklyn.

Eroded Cherubs, 2009, photo by Fred Hatt

A youthful and willowy Romeo and Juliet gaze into each other’s eyes outside the Central Park theater that hosts free Shakespeare in the Park every summer.

Romeo and Juliet, 1977, sculpture by Milton Hebald, Delacorte Theater, Central Park, NYC, 2005 photo by Fred Hatt

And these full body casts by George Segal commemorate the gay civil rights movement just outside the Stonewall Inn, where a 1969 riot sparked a rebellion of the oppressed.

Gay Liberation, 1980, sculpture by George Segal, Christopher Square Park, NYC, photographer unknown

Many sculptures use figures to depict the spirits of Nature, and the human connection with Nature, like this boy dancing with goats.

Lehman Gates, 1961, sculpture by Paul Manship, Central Park Zoo, NYC, 2010 photo by Fred Hatt

Or the irrepressible nature spirit Pan.

The Great God Pan, 1899, sculpture by George Grey Barnard, Columbia University Campus, NYC, 2007 photo by Fred Hatt

Or the trickster imp Robin Goodfellow, or Puck, best known as a character in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.  This Puck shows us ourselves in a mirror.

Puck, 1885, sculpture by Henry Baerer, on the Puck Building, NYC, 2005 photo by Fred Hatt

Of course the supreme god in Manhattan is The Almighty Dollar.  One of Manhattan’s Subway stations features many little bronze figures and scenes by Tom Otterness commenting upon both rich and poor in the money-driven society.  These figures embody a cartoon aesthetic in the traditional monumental medium of cast bronze.  Many people rub this moneybag head for luck as they pass by on their way to transfer trains.

Figure from "Life Underground", 2000, sculpture by Tom Otterness, 14th Street and Eighth Avenue Subway Station, NYC, 2004 photo by Fred Hatt

Mr. Moneybags isn’t the only sculpture people touch like a sacred relic.  The atrium of the very upscale shopping mall at the new Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle is dominated by two gigantic rotund bronze nudes, “Adam” and “Eve”, by Botero.  So many tourists are compelled to touch Adam’s penis that it shines in a golden color, while the rest of the figure is dark bronze.

Eve, c. 2003, sculpture by Fernando Botero, Time Warner Center, NYC, 2010 photo by Fred Hatt

This magnificent pagan goddess, Cybele, was a powerful presence in Manhattan’s Soho district for over a decade, but she’s gone now.  This depiction is a modern variation on the many-breasted Artemis of Ephesus.

Cybele, 1993, sculpture by Mihail Chemiakin, Prince Street, NYC, 2006 photo by Fred Hatt

These natural spirits can be embodied in a more abstract mode.  Alexander Calder applied his unique sense of organic form to the modern medium of riveted steel sculpture.  Look how beautifully the angles of the Calder “Saurien” are reflected in the angles of the buildings across the street from it, particularly the faceted glass LVMH building, second from the right in the top photo below. ( The LVMH building was constructed a quarter century after the sculpture was installed.)

Saurien, 1975, sculpture by Alexander Calder, Madison Avenue and 57th Street, NYC, 2004 photo by Fred Hatt

Saurien, 1975, sculpture by Alexander Calder, Madison Avenue and 57th Street, NYC, 2005 photo by Fred Hatt

About a block away from the Calder, another abstract modernist work portraying an embodiment of life force is Joan Miró’s “Moonbird”.  (If you look closely on the left of this picture, it appears that Pam Grier is heading for a meeting with Walt Whitman.)

Moonbird, 1966, sculpture by Joan Miró, 58th Street, NYC, 2009 photo by Fred Hatt

“Alamo”, better known as the Astor Place Cube, has long been popular despite its dry formalism because it rotates on its base if you give it a good firm push.

Alamo, 1967, sculpture by Tony Rosenthal, Astor Place, NYC, 2009 photo by Fred Hatt

I’ll conclude with what I consider one of the ugliest public sculptures in New York, though this picture flatters it a bit.  This one has a chunk of boulder, a replica of the hand from the equestrian George Washington statue across the street from it, bricks with gold leaf ringing an aperture that puffs out steam, and, unseen in this picture, a deliberately unreadable enormous digital clock display that is supposed to express “the impossibility of knowing time”.  This piece is the ultimate example of the hazards of art that is concept-driven and committee-chosen.  The artists’ website on this piece describes the significance of the elements of the piece, but understanding it doesn’t really improve it.

Metronome, 1999, sculpture by Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel, Union Square, NYC, 2010 photo by Fred Hatt

I’ve barely scratched the surface of the subject of public art here, even restricting myself to a single city and to work that can be considered sculpture.  In case of a future follow-up post, I’d include Greg Wyatt’s “Peace Fountain” near the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Eric Fischl’s Arthur Ashe memorial, Alice in Wonderland in Central Park, Gertrude Stein in Bryant Park, the Statue of Liberty, the Wall Street Bull, and . . . well, please send me your suggestions!

2011/03/04

Looking Back at the Gates: Central Park, 2005

Filed under: Public Art,Sculpture — Tags: , , , , , , , , — fred @ 13:18

Conversation, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8388 by Fred Hatt

For two weeks in February, 2005, the muted winter landscape of New York’s Central Park was altered by over seven thousand orange curtained gates straddling every meandering footpath of the great park.  Detractors consistently described the nylon fabric as “shower curtains”, but the environmental installation by Christo and Jeanne-Claude was inspired by the traditional Shinto torii, gates signifying the entrance to sacred space.

Viewing the Gates in Central Park, 2005, map from the New York Times

Christo and Jeanne-Claude have been altering the landscape and the cityscape, usually with fabrics, since the 1960’s.  I first became aware of their work in the 1970’s, when I saw the Maysles brothers documentary about the creation of their Running Fence, shimmering white fabric along 25 miles of rolling hills and into the sea on the California coast.  As the film showed, the great majority of the actual work they do is administrative and organizational, negotiating with bureaucracies and property owners, a task that took twenty-five years in the case of The Gates.  The engineering is minimalist and efficient, the materials industrial.  Their work is ephemeral, installed for a limited time, and unsellable.  It appears that they fund these huge projects mainly by selling photos, prints and preparatory sketches like this one:

The Gates, Project for Central Park, New York City, 2003, collage by Christo

Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s combination of aesthetic simplicity, huge scale, and very limited duration gives the work an interesting effect.  It exists for many years as a plan, a project, only very briefly as a reality, and then in a long, lingering afterlife of memories and images.  Its design seems aimed at altering a sense of space, but it succeeds also in altering the sense of time.

Vessels, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8398, by Fred Hatt

I took The Gates as an opportunity to practice my photography.  The saffron fabric seemed to capture the warmth of the sun in the gray wintry air.

Composition, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8400, by Fred Hatt

The colorful rectangles contrasted with the monochrome wriggliness of bare branches and 19th Century cast iron froufrou.

Cherubs, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8432, by Fred Hatt

Here the ephemeral curtains are glimpsed over the top of a boulder that has occupied its space for hundreds of millions of years.

Manhattan Schist, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8449, by Fred Hatt

The Gates created another skyline for the city of skylines.

Skyline, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8452, by Fred Hatt

South End, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8481, by Fred Hatt

Central Park is woven with extensive curlicues of footpaths, but usually they are invisible from a distance.

Breeze, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8492, by Fred Hatt

At dusk, the yellow-orange fabric took on a darker tone.

Dusk, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8512, by Fred Hatt

Construction Sign, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8530, by Fred Hatt

The orange color reminded many people of the orange construction equipment and safety markers seen everywhere in the city.  To some it seemed the entire park had become a construction zone.  The Gates had lots of detractors, grousing about all the hype, about how it didn’t fulfill traditional artistic values, about how it desecrated the classic landscape design of Olmsted and Vaux, about how they couldn’t enjoy the park with all the damn shower curtains and extra tourists.  I think some of these were the same folks that fire off an angry letter every time NPR mentions the existence of popular culture.  If you want to complain about the alteration of the landscape, how about the Second Avenue Subway project, which promises to keep a major commercial artery ripped up for the better part of a decade?

Bridge, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8617, by Fred Hatt

Overlook, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8624, by Fred Hatt

For me, The Gates provided interesting aesthetic effects, but only became truly beautiful when the snow fell.

Winter, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8746, by Fred Hatt

Snow Field, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8752, by Fred Hatt

Reflecttion, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8764, by Fred Hatt

The Gates were emblems of warmth standing amid the ice and snow.

Frozen Lake, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8899, by Fred Hatt

My friend Kayoko Nakajima, a dancer, was inspired to move among the billowing panels of color.

Kayoko's Dance, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo #8984, by Fred Hatt

The Gates inspired many other artists and parodists, including the charming Somerville Gates.

I walked just about every part of that wonderful park during those two weeks, whenever I had some free time.

Night and Snow, The Gates, Central Park, by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005, photo panorama #6,by Fred Hatt

And then it was gone, the materials recycled, the tourists gone, the pervasive orange accenting (or blight, if you prefer) vanished completely.  It was only an experience.

For my view of another giant temporary art installation in another great NYC park, click here.

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