“Doug Wheeler: PSAD Synthetic Desert III” is an immersive, meditative wonderland (photo courtesy Guggenheim Museum)
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Friday – Wednesday through August 2, $18 – $25
Timed tickets through July 31 available June 1 at 10:00 am
212-423-3587
www.guggenheim.org
Don’t miss the special opportunity to experience the otherworldly “Doug Wheeler: PSAD Synthetic Desert III” at the Guggenheim, as timed tickets for twenty-minute visits go on sale June 1 at 10:00 am for the installation’s final month. The Arizona-born Light and Space artist, who lives and works in Santa Fe, has been creating immersive environments that affect visitors’ sense of equilibrium and relationship to reality for more than fifty years, in such installations as “Encasements” and “LC 71 NY DZ 13 DW.” Like fellow Light and Space artists James Turrell and Robert Irwin, Wheeler constructs rooms that stretch the imagination and challenge one’s perception of the world. Conceived in 1971, “PSAD Synthetic Desert III” is a fantastical realm in which no more than five people at a time can enter; the “semi-anechoic chamber” features a platform amid hundreds of gray foam cones spread out across a seemingly infinite landscape, on the floor and the back wall. Meanwhile, a minimized soundscape can be barely heard in the distance, with a drastic reduction in ambient noise. Visitors are strongly encouraged to be as silent as possible in order to best experience the meditative installation, with no cell phones, cameras, or even whispering. Wheeler, who was born in 1939, was inspired to create the work after flying over the Mojave Desert and landing on a dry lakebed, surrounded by emptiness in all directions. “When you’re in some place that has immensity, and it has power in that, and it’s, like, foreign, because there’s nothing human about it,” he says on the Guggenheim blog, “and there are places where I can go where there isn’t a single living thing that you can recognize, there’s not a green bud anywhere, there’s nothing moving on the ground, there’s nothing, and there’s nothing in the sky, and so when you’re in a place like that, and you become conscious of yourself, it changes a lot of your perspective of how we fit in to the mix of the whole universe, really, because we’re just so insignificant.”
Doug Wheeler oversees first realization of immersive environment at the Guggenheim (photo courtesy Guggenheim Museum)
To get the most out of “PSAD Synthetic Desert III,” you really need to give yourself over to the installation, blocking out all other sound and noise in your head, making room to explore its gentle pleasures and not worry about texting, taking photos, or posting on social media. You can walk around, lie on the floor, or sit while absorbing the unique space. I’m not embarrassed to admit that I was certain that the cones were moving ever so slightly, as if they were alive and softly breathing, but a Guggenheim staff member assured me that was not the case. I strongly recommend the twenty-minute experience, which requires advance tickets that include museum admission; the ten-minute experience is available every day on a first-come, first-served basis, and you will get the next open time instead of being able to choose your own. But no matter how long you’re in “PSAD Synthetic Desert III” for, just let your mind go and you’re in for a real treat, a respite from the madness of the crazy world outside. “It’s something I thought would be really great for New York, because you never escape noise here,” Wheeler continues on the blog. “Just walking down the street is like sixty-seven decibels constantly, and then it goes up from there. So this’ll be a place that you can go where there won’t be any noise. There won’t be anything in there. That’s a big motivation for me to do something in this town, because [for] a lot of people here, that would definitely be a first.”
MoMA’s eight-week tribute to one of Hollywood’s coolest cats, “Modern Matinees: Mr. Cary Grant,” concludes May 31 with the film in which the actor born Archibald Leach believed he gave his “worst performance,” Frank Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace. Grant, in a role meant for Bob Hope (and offered to Ronald Reagan and Jack Benny as well), stars as Mortimer Brewster, an affirmed bachelor and theater critic who has fallen in love with the preacher’s daughter, Elaine Harper (Priscilla Lane), who lives in the house next to the one where Mortimer grew up with his brother, Jonathan (Raymond Massey), who ultimately went bad and has not been seen for many years. Ominously, separating the two Brooklyn houses is a small graveyard. Mortimer and Elaine get married, and they arrive at his childhood home to celebrate with the two aunts who raised him, Abby (Josephine Hull) and Martha (Jean Adair), a pair of ever-so-kind spinsters who also happen to be poisoning old men and having Mortimer’s other brother, Teddy (John Alexander), who thinks he’s President Theodore Roosevelt, bury them in the basement, where he’s building the Panama Canal. Jonathan, on the lam from the law, shows up that night with his plastic surgeon, Dr. Herman Einstein (Peter Lorre), who keeps stitching him new faces; the latest makes him look like Boris Karloff, as several people notice. (Karloff played the role on Broadway, but his contract prevented him from leaving the stage to make the movie, which was filmed in 1941 but not released until 1944, when Joseph Kesselring’s play ended its successful run. Adair, Alexander, and Hull were all in the play but were allowed to take time off to make the film.) Meanwhile, Officer Patrick O’Hara (Jack Carson), the new cop on the beat, keeps hanging around, but he’s not exactly clued in to what is going on right under his nose.
Stephen Fingleton’s debut feature, The Survivalist, arrived at Tribeca in 2015 with the kind of expectations that are, well, tough to survive. The script was on both the 2012 Hollywood Black List (tied for fourteenth) and the 2013 Brit List (number one) of best unproduced screenplays; the self-taught Fingleton has been included in various names-to-watch, stars-of-tomorrow lists; and his twenty-three-minute 