Erik Lasalle, Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New YorkEl Anatsui’s “Broken Bridge,” shown installed in Paris, will be on display at the High Line later this year.
By CAROL VOGEL
Published: July 26, 2012
Every museum has a few paintings or sculptures so popular that art lovers think of them as old friends. When one disappears, its absence is noticed.
“Our viewers let us know what they miss,” said Ann Temkin, the Museum of Modern Art’s chief curator of painting and sculpture. “If a certain Warhol or Picasso is not on view, people are very vocal.”
Last week “One: Number 31, 1950,” one of Jackson Pollock’s mystical drip paintings, was removed from the walls of the fourth-floor painting and sculptures galleries and taken to the Modern’s conservation lab for a few months for study and cleaning as part of a larger research project. So Ms. Temkin had a considerable hole to fill. “I did feel we had to put up another major Pollock in its place,” she said.
MoMA has a few drip Pollocks from which to choose. The issue, though, was size. “One: Number 31, 1950” is almost 18 feet long, a length Pollock worked with knowing the dimensions of the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, where it was first shown. None of MoMA’s other drip Pollocks are anywhere near as big.
“We do have an equally great, though not as gigantic, Pollock,” Ms. Temkin said, referring to “Number 1 A, 1948,” which has just been hung in place of “One.” “It’s the painting where Pollock’s hand prints are visible in the upper right-hand corner,” she said, “and it was made a year and a half earlier at that very moment when all of the Abstract Expressionist painters were at that breakthrough moment.”
A canvas of delicate layered webs, globs and pools of paint, “Number 1 A, 1948” is just shy of nine feet long. But when she hung it on the wall, Ms. Temkin was surprised. “It has the amazing capacity for its presence to expand far behind the boundaries of the canvas itself,” she said.
TIN DRAPERY FOR HIGH LINE
The High Line attracts nearly four million visitors a year, and it had 500,000 last month alone. It has become a phenomenon, not simply as a place to walk above the dense city streets and enjoy views of the Hudson River, but also as a serious art destination. Year by year its arts programming grows. Now it includes films and performances as well as projects by fine artists.
A star in the fall lineup will be a site-specific installation by El Anatsui. This artist, who was born in Ghana and lives in Nigeria, is known for his shimmering, almost painterly tapestries fashioned from discarded bottle caps that are woven together with copper wire. On an outdoor wall adjacent to the park, between 21st and 22nd Streets, he will be creating “Broken Bridge,” a monumental drapery made from pressed tin and mirrors.
“He hasn’t shown here much except in galleries,” said Cecilia Alemani, the curator and director of High Line Art. “We’re particularly excited because this piece is slightly different than others he has made in the past, since it includes mirrors that will reflect the surrounding landscape.”
“Broken Bridge,” his first outdoor installation in the United States, is to be installed in early October and be on view through the spring of 2013.
NEW MUSEUM EXPANSION
In 2009 the New Museum bought 231 Bowery, the building next door to its current home on the Lower East Side. While it has yet to undergo extensive renovations, the building is being used for artist residencies and additional ground-floor exhibition space, which the museum calls “Studio 231.” At the same time it has been working on an expansion that does not have the construction headaches of bricks and mortar.
The museum has recently raised about $1 million to expand virtually, redesigning its five-year-old Web site. The new site, four years in the making, is to go live on Friday. “We hope it will be a destination location,” Lisa Phillips, the director of the New Museum, said in a telephone interview. “We have a fast-growing online audience that is already three times the size of our on-site audience, which is about 350,000 visitors a year.”
These are among the Web site’s new features:
¶The Art Spaces Directory, an international guide with an interactive map to more than 400 independent art spaces in 96 nations.
¶A digital archive of the museum’s 35 years, including images, videos and publications.
¶“First Look,” a series organized by the curator Lauren Cornell, featuring a new digital artwork every month. “It will be a combination of either works that are not familiar to a wide audience or commissions,” Ms. Phillips said. She explained that the museum plans to tap artists who already work in the digital realm. It also intends to ask artists who have not created digital works before to contribute. For the Web site’s start Taryn Simon, an artist, and Aaron Swartz, a Web programmer and political activist, have teamed up to create “Image Atlas,” which invites viewers to enter a key word: what pops up will be top results from search engines around the world.
¶A blog called Six Degrees will have weekly interviews, photographic essays, short videos, reviews and curators’ recommendations. Running alongside it will be social-media platforms inviting public participation.
THE STAMPS OF DANCERS
While the financially troubled United States Postal Service may be streamlining operations, it continues to commission artists for new stamps. On Saturday it introduces “Innovative Choreographers,” four first-class stamps depicting the dance giants Isadora Duncan, José Limón, Katherine Dunham and Bob Fosse.
James McMullan, best known for the posters he has created for the Lincoln Center Theater, illustrated the stamps. Working primarily from archival photographs, Mr. McMullan said he wanted his stamps to be different from the rest. “I love dance, and I love gesture,” he said in a telephone interview from his home and studio in Sag Harbor, on Long Island. “This was the opportunity to make something unusual, something with movement rather than a static portrait.” Each choreographer is depicted in a move identifiable with his or her work.
In addition to the stamp project Mr. McMullan has also been looking through his archives in preparation for a retrospective of his work that opens on Nov. 21 at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where he teaches. “There will be materials besides the theater posters,” he said, explaining that the show will include life drawings — both pencil and gouache — that he has been making for more than 30 years.
A version of this article appeared in print on July 27, 2012, on page C22 of the New York edition with the headline: At MoMA a Substitute for Pollock’s ‘One’.
Courtesy the artists and Friends of the High Line
A rendering of the High Line billboard by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari.
By CAROL VOGEL
Published: May 31, 2012
After his blockbuster retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York last fall, Maurizio Cattelan, who is just 51, said he was officially retiring from making art. What did that mean, exactly, coming from a jokester like Mr. Cattelan?
One answer comes in the form of a billboard, 75 by 25 feet, at 10th Avenue and West 18th Street in Chelsea, next to the High Line. It is a giant image of a woman’s 10 perfectly manicured and jeweled fingers, detached from their hands, emerging from a vibrant blue velvet background. It was unveiled on Thursday and can be seen from both the elevated pathway and the street.
The billboard is part of a High Line series that began last December with “The First $100,000 I Ever Made,” a blown-up photograph of a real $100,000 bill, the largest denomination the United States government ever printed, by the Los Angeles artist John Baldessari. This new billboard — the fourth — will be on view through June 30.
Mr. Cattelan created the image with the photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari as part of Toilet Paper, a two-year-old art magazine founded by the two men.
But what about Mr. Cattelan’s supposed retirement? “It’s not like it’s my own,” he said, laughing, about the billboard. “We worked together.” He explained that he is “in between moments,” adding, “I’m missing it, but it’s good to have distance.”
The billboard’s photograph was taken in Milan, and while Mr. Cattelan and Mr. Pierpaolo held casting sessions to find just the pair of hands to shoot, Mr. Cattelan said they happened on an old woman in a bar near the sessions and asked her to pose.
“It’s like a magic trick,” said Cecilia Alemani, director of the public art program at Friends of the High Line. “It’s almost cinematic in its format.”
Mr. Cattelan called the image “Surreal but verging on Pop,” adding that “it’s a bit gory but without the blood.”
But why show just those fingers and not the rest of the hand? “Fingers are something sexual, like penises,” he explained. “It doesn’t always have to be a cigar.”
On Friday, High Line Art, the public art program of the New York park built on a historic elevated rail line, announced its plans for its spring 2012 season. Work on view will include, in April, a new contribution by the Scottish artist David Shrigley to the High Line Billboard series, presented on a 25-by-75-foot billboard next to the park on Tenth Avenue at West 18th Street, and films and videos in the High Line Channel series, an outdoor program featuring projections on a building to the east of the High Line at West 22nd Street after dark.
Also in the spring, High Line Art will present performance art pieces by Alison Knowles (April 22, Earth Day), Channa Horwitz (May 17) and Simone Forti (May 24), on and around the High Line. And the park’s first group exhibition,“Lilliput,” inspired by Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” will assemble sculptures of diminutive scale by various artists, scattered along the High Line.
On Friday, High Line Art, the public art program of the New York park built on a historic elevated rail line, announced its plans for its spring 2012 season. Work on view will include, in April, a new contribution by the Scottish artist David Shrigley to the High Line Billboard series, presented on a 25-by-75-foot billboard next to the park on Tenth Avenue at West 18th Street, and films and videos in the High Line Channel series, an outdoor program featuring projections on a building to the east of the High Line at West 22nd Street after dark.
Also in the spring, High Line Art will present performance art pieces by Alison Knowles (April 22, Earth Day), Channa Horwitz (May 17) and Simone Forti (May 24), on and around the High Line. And the park’s first group exhibition,“Lilliput,” inspired by Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” will assemble sculptures of diminutive scale by various artists, scattered along the High Line.