Tag Archives: lever house

PETER HALLEY: NEW YORK, NEW YORK

Peter Halley’s “New York, New York” offers a soothing break from Midtown madness (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Lever House
390 Park Ave. at 54th St.
Through December 31, free
www.leverhouseartcollection.com
www.peterhalley.com

New York City native Peter Halley casts Lever House in a soft, soothing yellow glow in his site-specific installation, “New York, New York,” on view through the end of the year. “I grew up in Midtown, just a few blocks from Lever House,” he said in a statement. “It was constructed the year before I was born, so it was always part of the landscape of my childhood. The lobby is a classic Mies van der Rohe glass box. It provided an irresistible opportunity to create a postmodern intervention within this paradigmatic modernist space.”

A central architectural structure holds colorful surprises at Lever House (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

A Neo‐Conceptualist who was a key part of the downtown arts scene in the 1980s and later founded INDEX magazine, Halley surrounds a central architectural structure with Day-Glo paintings that incorporate his love of geometric patterns he calls “prisons,” “cells,” and “conduits,” relating to technological and social connections.

“Prisons,” “cells,” and “conduits” are a common theme of Peter Halley’s art (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Inside the structure is a series of rooms that change color with shifting lighting effects, revealing walls of cartoon explosions and dreamlike, diagrammed latticework, as if the spectator has entered deep into Halley’s paintings — and his mind. One experiences both confinement and escape in the work, shielded from the outside world until you have to again face the madness that is Midtown Manhattan.

ADAM PENDLETON: what a day was this

Adam Pendleton lays out his manifesto at Lever House gallery in midtown (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Lever House
390 Park Ave. at 54th St.
Through August 21, free
www.leverhouseartcollection.com
adampendleton.net

New York City–based multimedia conceptual artist Adam Pendleton makes his manifesto clear in “what a day was this,” an immersive installation continuing at Lever House through August 28. The thirty-four-year-old Pendleton has combined black-and-white text and visuals and mirrors from his series “OK DADA OK BLACK DADA OK” and “System of Display” along with silkscreen works on Mylar. Words such as naive, function, and if can barely be read through redacted-like black blotches on several canvases. Large-scale spiral notebooks contain quotes from W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, which declares, “The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land,” and Hugo Ball’s Dada Manifesto, which explains, “The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance.” A wall of masklike portraits of black faces, newspaper clippings (about the 1930 Congo Crisis and other events), and abstract geometric shapes looks out onto Park Ave. An unfinished question asks, “What is the bla?”

Adam Pendleton’s “what a day was this” confronts visitors inside and outside on Park Ave. (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Pendleton, whose “Black Dada Flag (Black Lives Matter)” recently flew over Scylla Point, previously known as Negro Point, as part of the Frieze art fair on Randall’s Island, started writing poetry as a young boy in Richmond, Virginia. His mother was an elementary school teacher and his father a contractor and a musician. Pendleton, who lives in Brooklyn and Germantown with his husband, Yumami Food Company cofounder Karsten Ch’ien, and works in two studios in Sunset Park, has had such previous one-man and group shows as “shot him in the face; “I am you, you are too”; “Becoming Imperceptible”; and “How to Live Together” around the world. The site-specific “what a day was this” also includes excerpts from Du Bois’s “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” and Pendleton’s Black Dada Reader as well as an interview with choreographer Trajal Harrell. While the mirrors implicate the viewer, Lever House’s glass walls dare people outside to confront the systemic racism staring right at them. “Black Dada is a way to talk about the future while talking about the past. It is our present moment,” Pendleton says.

BRUCE HIGH QUALITY FOUNDATION: ART HISTORY WITH LABOR / OPEN HOUSE

Bronze rat watches over Bruce High Quality Foundation installation in Lever House (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Lever House
390 Park Ave. at 54th St.
Through October 1
Admission: free
www.leverhouseartcollection.com

When we were photographing the latest display in the Lever House lobby a few days before the official opening, a young man in a suit, seemingly on his way to lunch, stopped us and asked, “What is this?” When we told him it was an art installation by the Bruce High Quality Foundation, he just looked blankly around and said, “Is it finished?” We said that we thought it was probably pretty close to completion, if not done yet, and he sneered. “What the hell! I gotta walk through this every day?” And he stormed off, shaking his head. An arts collaborative formed eight years ago and named for a fictional character, Bruce High Quality, who supposedly died in the September 11 terrorist attacks, BHQF creates multimedia installations and performances that comment on the state of art, politics, and the world. Indeed, “Art History with Labor” at first appears unfinished, with working materials all around the lobby, including a bucket with a mop, a wheelbarrow with a bag of soil, a floor polisher, a ladder, a trash can, and other elements that make it look like a construction site. Meanwhile, outside in the plaza, a giant rat faces the gallery, growling, but instead of his being another blow-up Scabby the Rat seen at so many city construction sites that employ nonunion workers, this twelve-foot-high bronze casting is called “The New Colossus,” directly evoking the 1883 Emma Lazarus poem that is on a plaque within the Statue of Liberty (“‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’”).

The Bruce High Quality Foundation reimagines Martin Luther’s 95 Theses for the modern age (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

But everything is part of the exhibition, along with a lone briefcase, an old watercooler, and a knocked-over filing cabinet spilling out printouts of “Art History with Labor: 95 Theses.” Free for the taking, the stapled-together four pages mimic Martin Luther’s 1517 document, a major force in the arrival of the Protestant Reformation, with quotes from Luther as well as Jean-Luc Godard, Roland Barthes, Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Oscar Wilde, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jamie Dimon, Thomas Edison, and Sun Tzu in addition to facts about Ayn Rand, the Art Workers Guild, Auschwitz, Nikola Tesla, Paul Robeson, Iwo Jima, and the Lever Brothers, who built the company town Port Sunlight in 1888 for the men and women working in their soap factory. Each object in the lobby is equipped with a speaker pronouncing the theses, accompanied by a video, examining the nature of art and labor and how they have intertwined through the ages. The exhibit also includes “Double Iwo Jima,” a two-panel painting that raises questions about art, truth, propaganda, and labor by re-creating multiple images of Joe Rosenthal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph. So, is the installation actually finished? One could argue that it’s only a start to further investigation on the part of the visitor. You can find out more about the Bruce High Quality Foundation and their unaccredited art university (a self-described “‘fuck you’ to the hegemony of critical solemnity and market-mediocre despair”) on Sunday, September 9, when they host an open house at their headquarters at 34 Ave. A, and there will be a closing reception for “Art History with Labor” at Lever House on October 1.

PAULA HAYES: LAND MIND

Paula Hayes’s “Land Mind” provides a beautiful oasis in Midtown Manhattan (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Lever House
390 Park Ave. at 54th St.
Through January 27
Admission: free
www.leverhouseartcollection.com
www.paulahayes.com
land mind slideshow

Last winter, New York-based environmental artist and landscape designer Paula Hayes installed “Nocturne of the Limax maximus” in MoMA’s lobby, a pair of terrariums — the horizontal, biomorphic “Slug” and the vertical “Egg” — that brought colorful life to the space. This winter the Massachusetts-born Hayes, who was raised on a farm in upstate New York, has done the same in the Lever House lobby gallery just a few blocks east of MoMA with “Land Mind.” On view through January 27 in the large, glassed-in lobby, “Land Mind” consists of cast silicone and EPDM rubber planters, some in the shape of dumplings, that hold tropical trees and plants; “Slug,” which is filled with succulents; and “Aquarium,” a gorgeous 240-gallon, nearly six-foot-high cast acrylic saltwater tank that is home to such fish as Bartlett’s Anthias, Black Ocellaris Clownfish, Green Chromis, Sixline Wrasse, and Yellow Coris Wrasse, such invertebrates as Blood Red Shrimp, Cleaner Shrimp, Blue Linchia Starfish, and Banded Serpent Starfish, and such corals as Neon Green Toadstool Leather Coral, Yellow Leather Coral, and Rose Bubble Tip Anemone, surrounded by a beaded “Garden Necklace” and with a “Lighting Hood” dangling above it. Hayes has installed the ecosystem so that the working parts that keep pumping clean, fresh water and shining lights into the aquarium are visible, emphasizing the living aspects of the piece while making clear how its survival requires mechanical intervention, a delicate balance between nature and humans. “Land Mind” is an oasis in Midtown Manhattan, a charming, beautiful respite that will make you forget about the concrete and asphalt madness around you. And Lever House is the perfect place for it, as the glass building is somewhat of a terrarium itself, just filled with people instead of plants and aquatic creatures.

DAVID LaCHAPELLE AND JOHN BYRNE — DARKNESS TO LIGHT: FACILITY OF MOVEMENT

John Byrne’s “Facility of Movement” takes place Wednesday afternoons at 1:00 in conjunction with David LaChapelle’s installation in Lever House (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

David LaChapelle: “From Darkness to Light”
Lever House Art Collection, 390 Park Ave. at 54th St.
Exhibition continues through September 2, with free performances Wednesdays at 1:00 through July 13
John Byrne: Transcending Form
Theatre 80, 80 St. Marks Pl. at First Ave.
Wednesdays through August 24, $15, 8:00
212-388-0388
www.theatre80.net
www.leverhouseartcollection.com
facility of movement slideshow

Introduced by nightclub fixture Amanda Lepore, photographer and director David LaChapelle and dancer-choreographer John Byrne dated for three years in the mid-2000s and, remaining close friends, are now collaborating in a different way. LaChapelle recently installed “From Darkness to Light” in the glassed-in Lever House lobby gallery, a combination of photographs and collage that references life and death, from Théodore Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa” to the creation of humankind. The display features “Chain of Life,” a series of hundreds of connected photographs of nude men and women, dangling from the ceiling and nearly reaching the floor; “Adam Swimming Under a Microscope” and “Eve Swimming Under a Microscope,” intensely colorful circular configurations of waterborne nudes placed directly on the walls as if stained-glass rose windows in a house of worship; and “Raft of Illusion,” which re-imagines “Raft of the Medusa” as a swarm of swirling naked bodies battling the elements. Every Wednesday afternoon at 1:00 through July 13, Byrne, who has performed with such companies as Paul Taylor, Corbin Dance, and Erick Hawkins, is presenting “Darkness to Light: Facility of Movement,” an evolving site-specific piece in which Debra Zalkind, Ryan Braun, Christine Gerena, Vincent Marra, Farrah Olieri, Lior Shneior, Rob Laqui, and Kimberly Mhoon interact with LaChapelle’s installation, making their way through the Lever House lobby as well as the outside courtyard. Dressed like workers from all walks of life on their lunch hour, wearing suits or uniforms that instantly identify them, the dancers weave in around themselves, the works, and random New Yorkers on their own lunch breaks sitting outside, all set to live classical music (including the Jewish prayer “Kol Nidre”) on cello and violin. Admission is free to this wonderful reason to get away from the office for a little while.

John Byrne’s TRANSCENDING FORM takes place Wednesday nights at 8:00 at Theatre 80 in conjunction with David LaChapelle’s installation in Lever House (photo by David LaChapelle)

Byrne and LaChapelle are also collaborating on Transcending Form, Byrne’s first evening-length dance piece. Held Wednesday night through August 24 at Theatre 80 on St. Marks Pl., where LaChapelle had his first studio back in the 1980s, the seventy-minute work features the “Facility of Movement” performers along with Byrne, singer Gina Figueroa, guitarist Juancho Herrera, and the James Solomon Benn Choir. The disjointed, overly feel-good work, which is ostensibly about the creation of life and exploration of love, consists of such sections as “On Endeavor,” “Factory,” “Dysfunction,” “Before, Love,” “Ascend,” and “Compassion,” with music ranging from printer sound effects and Shirley Brown to Schubert and Elvis Presley. LaChapelle contributes art to the piece, photographic fabric images of each of the characters displayed on a clothing line at the back of the ramshackle set. The community-theater-like production, which focuses on Marra as Bambini and Olieri as the Holy Spirit, has a suggested admission of $15 but you can pay what you wish, will all proceeds going to Education in Dance and the Related Arts, which brings the arts to students in more than sixty metropolitan-area public and private high schools.

RACHEL FEINSTEIN: THE SNOW QUEEN

Rachel Feinstein’s “The Snow Queen” fairy-tale installation is on view through Friday (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Lever House
390 Park Ave. at 54th St.
Through April 22
Admission: free
www.leverhouseartcollection.com
the snow queen slideshow

This is the last week to see Rachel Feinstein’s inventive reimagining of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” on view at the glassed-in Lever House lobby gallery through Friday. Feinstein divides her sculptural representation of the 1845 classic fairy tale of good and evil into five distinct elements: “The Soldiers,” a group of nutcracker soldiers in the middle of the space (the smallest one looks a lot like Rudy Giuliani); the elegant “Snow Queen’s Room,” a dramatic white space that can only be seen in its entirety from out on the street and that includes the classical sculptures “Goblin and Children” and “Goblin and Mirror”; “The Mirror Room,” a two-walled mirrored area with the abstract sculpture “Girl and Reindeer” and the painted mural “Ruins,” covered with animals, houses, and, well, ruins; the colorful, Play-Doh-like “Flower Girl,” who is picking roses from the planter, surrounded by birds; and “Golden Carriage,” an upended vehicle in the outside plaza, with a flickering eternal light. “One day, when he was in a merry mood, he made a looking-glass which had the power of making everything good or beautiful that was reflected in it almost shrink to nothing, while everything that was worthless and bad looked increased in size and worse than ever,” Andersen’s story begins. “The most lovely landscapes appeared like boiled spinach, and the people became hideous, and looked as if they stood on their heads and had no bodies. Their countenances were so distorted that no one could recognize them, and even one freckle on the face appeared to spread over the whole of the nose and mouth. The demon said this was very amusing.” Although the Arizona-born Feinstein includes no boiled spinach, she does make great use of of looking-glasses, lovely landscapes, demons, and distortions, mixing childlike wonder with Baroque finery.

RICHARD WOODS: PORT SUNLIGHT

Richard Woods has wrapped up Lever House for the holiday season (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Richard Woods has wrapped up Lever House in Victorian splendor (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Lever House
390 Park Ave. at 54th St.
Through January 30 (extended into February)
Admission: free
www.leverhouseartcollection.com
flickr slideshow

Last year, British artist Richard Woods papered two City Hall security booths in a white-and-redbrick design that made them look like they were toys; he also covered a City Hall lobby door in a graphic representation of itself, turning it into a cartoon in an otherwise formal lobby. Now Woods has taken over the inside and outside of Lever House, designing all of the posts and Noguchi benches in a series of nine decorative patterns inspired by the legacy of nineteenth-century socialist designer William Morris. Using woodblock prints, Woods packages up Gordon Bunshaft’s minimalist building in Victorian splendor, even adding two aluminum “rugs” that people can walk on in the lobby. Lever House comes alive with colorful flowers, leaves, and birds as well as black-and-white geometric shapes, repeated over and over again. The two floor pieces take Carl Andre to the next level, almost too captivating to walk on, but it’s rather thrilling to trod upon them as you watch others passing by on the concrete and asphalt of Park Ave. By titling the site-specific installation “Port Sunlight,” Woods reaches into the past of both Lever House and his childhood. When he was a small boy, the first art institution he ever visited was the Lady Lever Gallery, which was in the model village known as Port Sunlight, built by William Lever as a home for the employees of his soap factory, where their first cleaning product was Sunlight. And so Woods’s “Port Sunlight” offers a sweet respite in the middle of swirling Midtown Manhattan