Eden II

On Friday morning, November 20, I stood hard-hatted and slack-jawed beneath Tea Mäkipää’s ship, Eden II, as it hung from a crane far above 100 Acres, and couldn’t help but marvel at the process that turns conversations, emails, and artist’s renderings into an actual, physical, 47-foot, 8-ton object.

This rare pleasure is experienced by those involved with object– and place-making everywhere, but it was felt most distinctly by the crowd gathered for the ship launch in 100 Acres, a park first envisioned in an IMA strategic plan in 1996. While Eden II began its journey via two cranes, one barge, and one motorboat from the park’s central meadow to its resting place in the southwest corner of the lake, one could also see crews at work building the walls of Alfredo Jaar’s Park of the Laments, hear the nearby construction of Marlon Blackwell’s visitor’s center, and observe the assembly of Andrea Zittel’s fiberglass floating island by LA-based fabricators The Barnacle Brothers. At long last, 100 Acres is really happening. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Art, Art and Nature Park, Current Events

Tentacles of the Beast, 2008

I just returned from a trip to New York in the height of the August heat with all of the lovely smells and suffocating humidity that comes with it. The goal of this trip? To spend as much time with artists and their work as possible, to slip into the city’s unique rhythms and magic anonymously and deeply. To see again.

My first experience with art on this trip happened unexpectedly and almost immediately. When I got to my Midtown hotel to drop off my bags before rushing down to a Chelsea studio on 26th Street, I pulled back my curtains and opened the windows, letting in the outside air to equalize the freezing air in my room. Set before me was a Hitchcockian scene, a 21st century Rear Window. I looked outside of my room on the eighth floor and saw various people engaged in quiet, disparate activities: in one window a woman busy at her desk, in another two people kissing, and an old man walking out onto the fire escape to grab a secret smoke. There were silent intimate recognitions, an awareness that we were all seeing each other, despite our resistance to acknowledging it, a fierce refusal to allow our eyes to meet directly. Extreme privacy and exposure both at once. I was reminded of the Impressionist era opera paintings where the subject of the work is spectatorship, the reciprocal experience of looking and being looked at. What happens in the space between.
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Filed under: Art, Art and Nature Park, Travel