Josephine Meckseper’s oil rigs drill, baby, drill in the Theater District (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Eighth Ave. at West 46th St.
Through May 6, free
artproductionfund.org
manhattan oil project slideshow
Born in Germany and based in New York City for many years, multimedia artist Josephine Meckseper examines consumer culture in her painting, photography, sculpture, video, and installation. Last year she turned the ninth floor of Chelsea’s FLAG Art Foundation into a kind of glitzy, high-end department store. Now she has installed two of her giant oil rigs on a vacant lot at the corner of Eighth Ave. and 46th St., where they apparently drill for buried treasure. The pair of red-and-black steel oil pumpjacks, which reach twenty-five feet high and weigh three tons each, have been placed within the caged-in area known as the Last Lot, a site the Art Production Fund and Times Square Alliance are using for public art projects in conjunction with owners the Shubert Organization. Inspired by abandoned old rigs Meckseper encountered in Electra, Texas, “Manhattan Oil Project” references politics and the state of the U.S. economy as it drills, baby, drills in the Theater District, an area where men, women, and children have been coming for more than a hundred years to be entertained as well as to strike it rich. As families lose their houses to the mortgage crisis as well as an increasing stream of natural disasters, there is more displacement than ever before across America, as well as an ever-widening gap between the wealthy and the poor, the one percent and the ninety-nine percent; Meckseper’s installation evokes this dichotomy while calling into question environmental concerns and, of course, the impossibility of it all, as no one is likely to find oil under Eighth Ave. Then again, miracles have been known to happen; shortly after “Manhattan Oil Project” was installed, a billboard for Jesus Christ Superstar rose over the lot, providing yet another angle through which to view the work.
Citizen Kane is the best-made film we have ever had the pleasure to watch — again and again and again — and it is even more brilliant on the big screen. A young, brash, determined Orson Welles created a masterpiece unlike anything seen before or since — a beautifully woven complex narrative with a stunning visual style (compliments of director of photography Gregg Toland) and a fabulous cast of veterans from his Mercury radio days, including Everett Sloane, Joseph Cotten, Ray Collins, Paul Stewart, and Agnes Moorehead. Each moment in the film is unforgettable, not a word or shot out of place as Welles details the rise and fall of a self-obsessed media mogul. The film is prophetic in many ways; at one point Kane utters, “The news goes on for twenty-four hours a day,” foreseeing today’s 24/7 news overload. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve never seen it and you know what Rosebud refers to; the film is about a whole lot more than just that minor mystery. Like every film Welles made, Citizen Kane was fraught with controversy, not the least of which was a very unhappy William Randolph Hearst seeking to destroy the negative of a film he thought ridiculed him. Kane won only one Oscar, for writing — which also resulted in controversy when Herman J. Mankiewicz claimed that he was the primary scribe, not Welles. The film lost the Oscar for Best Picture to John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, but it has topped nearly every greatest-films-of-all-time list ever since. Citizen Kane will be screening March 30 at 9:30 as part of the Rubin Museum series “You Must Remember This,” focusing on memory in conjunction with its current 
