Tag Archives: olafur eliasson

HANS HAACKE: ALL CONNECTED

Hans Haacke’s 2014 Gift Horse is centerpiece of first museum survey in more than thirty years (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Tuesday through Sunday through January 26, $12-$18
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org

In 1986, the New Museum held the survey “Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business”; more than thirty-three years later, its follow-up, “Hans Haacke: All Connected,” which runs through January 26, reveals that the German-born longtime New Yorker is still hard at work with lots on his mind. “‘Artists,’ as much as their supporters and their enemies, no matter of what ideological coloration, are unwitting partners in the art-syndrome and relate to each other dialectically,” Haacke wrote in 1974. “They participate jointly in the maintenance and/or development of the ideological make-up of their society. They work within that frame, set the frame and are being framed.” The retrospective takes up nearly the entire museum, long since moved from its much smaller 1980s Bowery location, from the lobby to the fifth floor, and comes along at just the right moment; several artists recently threatened to refuse to allow their work to appear in the Whitney Biennial due to the corporate activity of a member of its board of directors, while other artists will not participate in arts institutions that accept money from the Sacklers and other billionaire families who made their fortune in controversial industries. The now-eighty-three-year-old Haacke was well ahead of them; in 1971, his solo show at the Guggenheim was canceled because it revealed questionable financial ties between museum trustees and the art world. One of those works, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, which uses text and images to document the holdings of a slum landlord, is part of “All Connected,” which is populated by works Haacke has created for more than a half a century, pieces that uncover sociopolitical links between art and commerce, class, corporations, and the environment through photography, sculpture, and installation.

State of the Union, A Breed Apart, and News explore ideas of systems, organizations, and information (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1 tracks where visitors to his November 1969 exhibit at Howard Wise Gallery resided; attendees of “All Connected” can share some of their personal data in New Museum Visitors Poll on the fifth floor. Politics takes center stage in works depicting Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, the American flag, George H. W. and Barbara Bush, and the Bundestag. A Breed Apart consists of Leyland Vehicles ads for Jaguar and Land-Rover with photos and statements that raise issues of racism and colonialism. In a similar vein, Thank You, Paine Webber uses the broker’s catchphrase to go inside the company’s business culture. “After thirty years, Thank You, Paine Webber gained an unfortunate new topicality,” Haacke writes on the accompanying label. “While much had changed, we were rudely reminded that much is still the way it was then. The exploitation of people’s misery — in this particular case, for PR purposes, but indicative of corporate attitudes and behavior more generally — continues unabated.” Seurat’s “Les Poseuses” (small version) traces the ownership of Georges-Pierre Seurat’s 1888 painting Les Poseuses, which started out as a gift and eventually was sold at auction for more than a million dollars in 1970. And On Social Grease comprises six photo-engraved magnesium plates that display quotes about corporate art ownership from a media executive, bank chairmen, and a politician. “From an economic standpoint, such involvement in the arts can mean direct and tangible benefits,” David Rockefeller is quoted on one of the plaques. “It can provide a company with extensive publicity and advertising, a brighter public reputation, and an improved corporate image.”

The second floor is an environmental wonderland of kinetic sculpture involving earth, air, fire, and water. Condensation Cube creates its own liquid ecosystem, complete with rainbows. Fans propel Blue Sail, White Waving Line, and Sphere in Oblique Air Jet. A small spark makes its way down High Voltage Discharge Traveling. Water sloshes in Large Water Level and Wave and freezes in Floating Ice Ring and Ice Stick. And Grass Grows is a large clump of dirt, right on the floor, that indeed has grass growing on it. In a catalog interview, Haacke talks about a shift that occurred in 1968. “I realized that my work did not address the fraught social and political world in which we lived. It was an incident that made me understand that, in addition to what I had called physical and biological systems, there are also social systems and that art is an integral part of the universe of social systems. The present debate over climate change is a perfect example of the interconnectedness of the physical, biological, and social.”

Detail, On Social Grease, six photo-engraved magnesium plates mounted on aluminum, 1975 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The showpiece of the exhibit is Haacke’s 2014 Gift Horse, a large-scale sculpture, designed for Trafalgar Square, of the skeleton of a horse mounted on a plinth. An electronic bow around its frontal thighbone transmits a live digital printout of the FTSE 100 ticker of the New York Stock Exchange. In the catalog, which includes contributions from Olafur Eliasson, Carsten Höller, Park McArthur, Sharon Hayes, Daniel Buren, Andrea Fraser, Thomas Hirschhorn, Walid Raad, Tania Bruguera, and others, Haacke talks about Boris Johnson’s reaction to Gift Horse. “I heard him say that the skeleton of the horse reminded him of the London subway system’s need for urgent repair. People were rolling their eyes,” he tells exhibition curators Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni. “I was standing behind him when he was spouting these lines and took a close-up photograph of his hair. The Brexiteer’s hair matches that of Donald Trump.” And let’s leave it at that.

TICKET ALERT — ÓLAFUR ELIASSON: ARCTIC IMAGINATION

olafur nypl

Who: Ólafur Eliasson
What: LIVE from the NYPL
Where: Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Celeste Bartos Forum, 476 Fifth Ave. at 42nd St., 917-275-6975
When: Thursday, September 21, $40, 7:00
Why: Danish-born Icelandic artist Ólafur Eliasson has presented environmentally related projects around the world, including here in New York, in such exhibitions and installations as “Volcanoes and Shelters” at Tanya Bonakdar in Chelsea, “The New York City Waterfalls” along the East River, and the career-defining “Take Your Time” at MoMA PS1. Eliasson, who lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin, will be at the New York Public Library on September 21 to participate in “Arctic Imagination” as part of the “Live from the NYPL” series. “Arctic Imagination” is a library initiative involving speakers in the United States and Northern Europe sharing their thoughts on climate change and melting Arctic ice. “In just one hundred years, the Arctic and the North Pole have been transformed from extremely dangerous, mysterious peripheral areas to regions which, in the race against climate change, are now in need of our protection and sense of responsibility,” the project explains in its mission statement. “In 2017 the libraries will be focusing on this theme in ‘Arctic Imagination’ — a series of events, readings, and live conversations in New York, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, and Nuuk.” Eliasson will be in conversation with the NYPL’s Paul Holdengräber. If you are unable to attend the event, which is copresented with the Royal Danish Library and the Consulate General of Denmark in New York, you can follow the livestream here.

OLAFUR ELIASSON: THE LISTENING DIMENSION

Olafur Eliasson, “Rainbow bridge,” twelve partially painted and silvered glass spheres, steel, paint, 2017 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
521 West 21st St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through April 22, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-414-4144
www.tanyabonakdargallery.com
listening dimension slideshow

In describing “The listening dimension (orbit 1, orbit 2, and orbit 3),” part of Olafur Eliasson’s first solo show in New York in five years, continuing at Tanya Bonakdar through April 22, the press release explains that “the installation reinforces Eliasson’s insistence on actively engaging the viewer in the artwork.” Unfortunately, on a recent Saturday afternoon, that engagement became far too active, as a visitor to the gallery, mesmerized by the illusion created by the three-part work, poked at it, leaving a pretty serious mark that affected the power of the piece. For more than twenty years, Eliasson, who was born in Copenhagen, raised in Iceland and Denmark, and lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin, has been creating mind-blowing works using various combinations of glass, refracted light, mirrors, and metal. “The listening dimension (orbit 1, orbit 2, and orbit 3)” consists of three large, rectangular sheets of silver Mylar from which emerge semicircles of tubes that jut out like rings around Saturn; the arcs are completed in the reflection, making them appear as full circles. Placed on three sides of the room, the work immerses the viewer into a series of repeated, neverending reflections that shimmer far off into the distance. “The listening dimension emerged against the backdrop of the 2016 US elections,” Eliasson says about the installation. “At a time when oversimplification is everywhere, I believe that art can play an important role in creating aesthetic experiences that are both open and complex. Today, in politics, we are bombarded with emotional appeals, often linked to simplistic, polarizing, populist ideas. The arts and culture, on the other hand, provide spaces in which people can disagree and still be together, where they can share individual and collective experiences that are ambiguous and negotiable. At its best, art is an exercise in democracy; it trains our critical capacities for perceiving and interpreting the world. Yet art does not tell us what to do or how to feel, but rather empowers us to find out for ourselves.” (That is true, except when it involves touching something that signs clearly say not to touch.)

Olafur Eliasson’s “The listening dimension (orbit 1, orbit 2, and orbit 3)” creates a striking illusion at Tanya Bonakdar (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Eliasson also melds art and science with “Rainbow bridge,” a row of a dozen globes on stands that seem to change color as you walk past them; depending on your angle of perception, they appear as all black, all silver, all clear, or organized in the colors of the rainbow, from red to orange to yellow to green to blue to indigo to violet. The globes also function as lenses, inverting the reflection of the person on the other side, distorting reality in humorous ways. Once again, do not touch.

“Space resonates regardless of our presence” offers visitors a chance to reflect on their place in the universe (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Eliasson continues his exploration of light and color, gravity and orientation, natural and technological phenomenon upstairs, where a driftwood compass called “Rouge navigator” leads you to “Midnight sun,” a slightly concave mirror behind which a monofrequency lamp casts a glow that makes it appear that the disc is surrounded by a beautiful, fiery halo. Off in a room by itself, “Colour experiment no. 78” is a grid of seventy-two circular paintings that change color when you turn a light on or off. (This is the only thing in the exhibition that you are actually supposed to touch in order to activate the experience.) The exhibition concludes with “Space resonates regardless of our presence,” a trio of ghostly wall projections made by sending pinpoints of light through a glass lens; the resultant images include multiple colors and an intensely pleasing circularity. In 2008, Eliasson dazzled New York with the wide-ranging “Take Your Time” dual exhibition at MoMA and PS1 as well as “The New York City Waterfalls,” set up along the East River. You should certainly take your time when experiencing “The listening dimension,” which offers visitors a chance to reflect on their place in the universe. Just keep your hands to yourself.

WAYNE McGREGOR, OLAFUR ELIASSON, AND JAMIE xx: TREE OF CODES

Wayne McGregor’s movement, Jamie xx’s music, and Olafur Eliasson’s visual concept come together to reimagine Jonathan Safran Foer’s TREE OF CODES, which reimagines Bruno Schulz’s STREET OF CROCODILES (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Park Ave. Armory
643 Park Ave. between 66th & 67th Sts.
Through September 21, $30-$90
212-933-5812
armoryonpark.org

Choreographer Wayne McGregor, composer Jamie xx, and artist Olafur Eliasson have created quite an audiovisual spectacle with Tree of Codes, their sparkling adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2010 book of the same name, which used die cuts to repurpose Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles. As ticket holders enter the vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall, they encounter large screens to the north and south on which their elongated silhouettes are projected in different colors, reminiscent of Nam June Paik’s “Three Camera Participation / Participation TV,” welcoming them to the show while letting them know they are part of it. The performance itself takes place in the center of the vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall, the audience sitting in rising rows on the east side. Over the course of seventy-five dazzling minutes, various mirrored, translucent, and transparent walls descend from above, altering the perception of the highly athletic dancers, who move about virtually nonstop in an impressive array of solos, duets, and trios, set to a multilayered score that ranges from choral singing to soul, from pulsating dance beats to indie pop, sometimes all at the same time. Just as Safran Foer cut into Schulz’s story, Eliasson’s props cut into themselves, altering space and time, with refracted sections, orbiting circles, and spotlights that wander over the audience, and Jamie xx’s diverse score does the same to itself, coming up with new sounds as the music forms a kind of aural palimpsest. The dancers, meanwhile — consisting of Jérémie Bélingard, Julien Meyzindi, Sébastien Bertaud, Lydie Vareilhes, Lucie Fenwick, and the extraordinary Marie-Agnès Gillot from the Paris Opera Ballet and Louis McMiller, Daniela Neugebauer, Anna Nowak, James Pett, Fukiko Takase, and Jessica Wright from Company Wayne McGregor — are reflected multiple times in the mirrors, or fade away in ghostly images. At times, dancers in front of a see-through partition interact with dancers on the other side as if they are physically together; at other times, they appear to be dancing with multiple versions of themselves. The experience changes depending on where you sit, as the reflections and colors shift based on your angle of vision — and you might even get to see yourself in the background mirror as the spotlight hits you. It never gets very deep, but you can’t stop immersing yourself in its splendor. The performance actually begins with some cool but gimmicky Pilobolus-like moments, but don’t let that worry you. It quickly evolves into a beautifully rendered treat.

TREE OF CODES

Park Ave. Armory
643 Park Ave. between 66th & 67th Sts.
September 14-21, $30-$90
212-933-5812
armoryonpark.org

Codes are one-to-one correspondences, messages that have been transformed from one communication into another. Tree of Codes, originally presented earlier this summer at the Manchester International Festival, is a seventy-five-minute contemporary ballet that uses light, sound, color, mirrors, and movement in unique ways, transforming Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2010 book, Tree of Codes, into something entirely other. Foer’s book is a work of art that is both a literary narrative and sculptural object; every page of the paperback boasts a different die-cut as surprising word combinations continually reveal themselves. Foer’s three-dimensional story begins with Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles — which has previously been adapted by the Quay Brothers into a classically creepy stop-motion animation film — and Foer then cut out words to create a whole new tale. British choreographer Wayne McGregor (Infra, Chroma), London-born DJ and music producer Jamie xx (We’re New Here, In Colour), and Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson (“The Collectivity Project” on the High Line, “NYC Waterfalls”) have turned Tree of Codes into a site-specific multidisciplinary performance piece, featuring members of the Paris Opera Ballet and McGregor’s company, that will take place in New York City’s most creative space, the Wade Thompson Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory, from September 14 to 21. “At the armory, we are always encouraging artists to push the limits of their specific disciplines. Wayne McGregor, Olafur Eliasson, and Jaime xx are each pioneers in their respective fields, and their collective vision for Tree of Codes asks us to bend our preconceived notions of traditional ballet and also the world around us,” armory president and executive producer Rebecca Robertson said in a statement. The armory has previously hosted work by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the Trisha Brown Dance Company, Shen Wei Dance Arts, STREB Extreme Action, Massive Attack, Christian Boltanski, Ann Hamilton, Tom Sachs, Paul McCarthy, Ryoji Ikeda, and many others, who have taken great advantage of the fifty-five-thousand square-foot space. Tree of Codes is likely to do the same.

HIGH LINE ART: SUMMER 2015

New book looks at history of art and performance on the High Line

New book HIGH ART: PUBLIC ART ON THE HIGH LINE looks at history of art and performance on repurposed elevated railway

The High Line
Eleventh Ave. from 34th St. to Gansevoort St.
Open daily, free, 7:00 am – 11:00 pm
www.thehighline.org
a walk across the high line, summer 2015

The High Line itself is a glorious work of art. The transformation of the abandoned West Side elevated railway into a public park thirty feet aboveground, weaving from Thirty-Fourth St. and the West Side Highway to Gansevoort St. by near the entrance to the new Whitney, has led to what has deservedly become one of the city’s must-see, most picturesque locations, a place for plants and trees, food and drink, rest and relaxation, and site-specific public art. In her opening essay in the lovely book High Art: Public Art on the High Line (Skira Rizzoli, May 2015, $45), High Line Art curator and director Cecilia Alemani describes the values she has instilled in the art program: “a dedication to bringing important contemporary art to a wide and diverse audience; a desire to surprise viewers with artworks that utilize public channels of communication in new and challenging ways, prompting them to question the role and function of images in public space; and a conviction that artworks are first and foremost sites of encounter and exchange of opinions and experiences.” The full-color book details the history of art on the High Line, which continues to thrillingly achieve Alemani’s goals, from group shows and film screenings to live performances and participatory events — many of which have been covered here on twi-ny — from Sara Sze’s “Still Life with Landscape (Model for a Habitat)” and Stephen Vitiello’s “A Bell for Every Minute” to Trisha Brown Dance Company’s Roof Piece and Alison Knowles’s “Make a Salad.” The large-size paperback also includes a round-table discussion between Alemani and several other curators of public art that takes a fascinating view of how the discipline is changing and how the art is commissioned and perceived. “We want to bring museum-quality works to the High Line and to make them available to our visitors, free of charge,” Alemani tells fellow curators Nicholas Baume, Sara Reisman, Manon Slome, Nato Thompson, and moderator Renaud Proch. “As simple as it sounds, this is a vision that usually resonates with many supporters who share with us a belief in art not only as a form of civic responsibility but also as a basic right that should be equally available to anyone.”

Visitors are invited to contribute to Olafur Eliasson’s “collectivity project” on the High Line (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The current art on the High Line is representative of Alemani’s mission. Starting on the north side, Adrián Villar Rojas’s “The Evolution of God” (through July 31) comprises thirteen cement and clay blocks that have been slowly breaking apart and disintegrating since September 2014. Embedded at different levels in the blocks, which are just to the inside of the walking path, are such artifacts as sneakers, bones, and clothing, mimicking an architectural dig that is evolving; meanwhile, new growth is popping up in the blocks’ crevices, signaling life among death, like the High Line itself. “Panorama” (through March 2016) consists of works by a dozen artists that meld into and comment on the High Line’s natural and constructed environment. While “The Evolution of God” falls apart, Olafur Eliasson’s “The collectivity project” (through September 30) rises up, two tons of white Lego bricks that visitors are invited to play with, building imaginary cityscapes amid an area that is seeing actual heavy construction all around its perimeters. Gabriel Sierra’s “Untitled (All Branches Are Firewood)” summarizes the growth of the High Line both physically and in the popular aesthetic, comprising bright yellow measuring sticks that could be seen easily in May but have now been nearly completely overgrown by plants and trees. Kris Martin’s “Altar” turns Jan and Hubert van Eyck’s Ghent altarpiece “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb” into a celebration of New York City as a religion unto itself. Ryan Gander’s “To employ the mistress . . . It’s a French toff thing” is a classical-style bust of his wife’s body and upper torso that doubles as a water fountain in which visitors have to try to catch the water as it streams through the air. (Also watch out for Gander’s bronze wallet and cell phone that were left on a bench, as well as a sound piece, “Zooming Out / Toodaloo.”) Damián Ortega’s “Physical Graffiti” is a trio of tags made out of rebar that use the open air, instead of a city train or wall, as a canvas. Andro Wekua’s arched “Window” overlooking Chelsea Piers has now virtually disappeared behind rising plants. You should be able to find your building in Yutaka Sone’s dazzlingly intricate “Little Manhattan New York, New York,” carved in marble. The hardest piece to locate is Katrín Sigurðardóttir’s ecologically minded “Bouvetoya,” a white blob hanging underneath the High Line as you exit by the Whitney, reminiscent of all sorts of things, natural and unnatural, that grow on the undersides of New York structures.

Trisha Brown Dance Company’s “Roof Piece” has been a highlight of the High Line’s innovative performance art programming (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The High Line has also become home to exciting live performances. Last week, Francisca Benitez’s “As you lean on me and I lean on you, we move forward” combined sign language and improvisation in three chapters in three locations on three different nights. This week Aki Sasamoto’s Food Rental moves into the elevated park, taking place July 21-23 at 7:00 at the Rail Yards by the Thirtieth St. & Eleventh Ave. side. The Japan-born, New York City-based Sasamoto, whose theatrical installation “Strange Attractors” was presented at the 2010 Whitney Biennial, will be serving “micro performances and playful narrative demonstrations” from a specially built food cart, doling out unusual little plays with unexpected sets and props. Admission is free, and no RSVP is required. Afterward, you should check out the latest film screening at High Line Channel 14 in the Fourteenth St. Passage, “Before the GIF,” a series of old-style animation works by Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg (I’m a Wild Animal, I’m Saving This Egg for Later), Kota Ezawa (Take Off), Lauren Kelley (True Falsetto), Allison Schulnik (Eager), SUN Hun (Shock of Time, People’s Republic of Zoo), and Keiichi Tanaami (OH! YOKO!). In her High Art essay, “The Seriousness of Play: Performance on the High Line,” Adrienne Edwards writes, “Performance on the High Line is an aleatory collision of chance and unanticipated experiences that is the very pulse of the art form itself. Artists and audiences alike are immersed in the unknown possibilities of the bucolic park and its circumferential stages, which enable encounters in the realm of the swerve, which is to say that performance in this particular vector has a unique, more experimental valence, one in which the artists realize a space of the commons through fleeting structures of social choreography.” Yes, a walk across the High Line itself is like performance art, a social choreography unlike any other in this city filled with public art and social choreography.

ROCKAWAY!

Visitors are encouraged to move around rocks in Patti Smith installation in Rockaway Beach (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

MoMA PS1
Fort Tilden and Rockaway Beach
Thursday – Sunday through September 1, free, 12 noon – 6:00 pm
www.momaps1.org
rockaway! slideshow

Both MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach and multidisciplinary artist Patti Smith had close ties to the Rockaways prior to the destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, each having homes there that were affected by the disaster. As part of the continuing recovery effort, the two have teamed up with the Jamaica Bay-Rockaway Parks Conservancy, the Rockaway Artists Alliance, and the National Park Service for the free public arts festival “Rockaway!” Held in conjunction with the reopening of Fort Tilden, a former U.S. Army Coast Artillery Post established nearly a century ago and a place that Smith visited often with Robert Mapplethorpe back in the 1970s, “Rockaway!” consists of several projects spread throughout the vast acreage. In the military chapel, which is undergoing restoration, Janet Cardiff has installed her delightful audio piece “The Forty Part Motet,” which has previously been shown at MoMA PS1’s home base in Long Island City and at the Cloisters, the first contemporary artwork ever presented at the Met’s medieval-themed outpost in Fort Tryon Park. “The Forty Part Motet” consists of forty speakers on stands arranged in a circle, each speaker playing the voice of one of the forty members of the Salisbury Cathedral Choir as they perform Thomas Tallis’s sixteenth-century choral composition “Spem in Alium Nunquam habui,” the English translation of which is “In no other is my hope,” a title that is particularly appropriate given the location. First walk around to hear each unique voice, then sit in the middle and let the glorious full music envelop you. “The Forty Part Motet” is on view through August 17; the rest of the show is up through September 1.

Patti Smith’s “Resilience of the Dreamer” creates a kind of fairy tale in middle of decimated building (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

In another building, Smith and her daughter, Jesse, pay tribute to one of Patti’s heroes, Walt Whitman, with the short film The Good Gray Poet, in which Patti reads the New York-born writer’s “Country Days and Nights,” “Mannahatta,” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (“Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face! . . . On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose”) while wandering through the Camden cemetery where he is buried. The film also includes shots of other places related to Whitman’s life, and there are various historical items in a display case and a bookshelf where visitors are invited to read more by and about the Bard of Democracy.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Smith’s “Resilience of the Dreamer,” a gilded four-poster canopy bed positioned in the middle of building T9, a former locomotive repair facility that has been filled with junk and detritus since Sandy. The piece, which calls to mind the destruction of so many homes along the beach, their facades ripped away during the storm, exposing people’s lives, has been decaying since its installation in June; the canopy is ripping, the sheets turning yellow, dirt collecting on the bed as the elements lay waste to it through the broken windows and battered roof. In a heavily graffitied side room, Smith has collected white stones and placed them in a large birdbath, where people are encouraged to pick one out and place it somewhere else — there are rocks in virtually every nook and cranny, from light switches and windowsills to holes in the wall and floor — or even take one home as a memory. In addition, in the sTudio 7 Gallery, Smith is displaying more than one hundred small-scale black-and-white photos primarily of possessions of friends, colleagues, and influences as well as gravesites. Among the images are Robert Graves’s hat, William Burroughs’s bandanna, Virginia Woolf’s cane, Mapplethorpe’s star mirror, and the Rimbaud family atlas, as well as beds belonging to Woolf, Victor Hugo, John Keats, Vanessa Bell, and Maynard Keynes and the tombs and headstones of Susan Sontag, Herman Hesse, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Jim Morrison. There is also a stage in the room where musical performances are held on Sunday nights; the next one will be the Jammin Jon Birthday Concert Bash on August 17 at 6:00, with fusion trio Dream Speed and experimental guitarist and Brooklyn native Jammin Jon Kiebon.

Granite cubes throughout Fort Tilden are part of Patti Smith tribute to Walt Whitman (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Scattered throughout Fort Tilden, which is part of the Gateway National Recreation Area, are five granite cubes on which Smith has put Whitman quotes (“O madly the sea pushes upon the land, with love, with love”; “Passing stranger! You do not know how longingly I look upon you”) in addition to a dozen small mud-and-straw nests from Adrián Villar Rojas’s “Brick Farm” series, which evoke both home and protection. There’s a map to help locate these objects; wear long pants and closed-toe shoes because several of the passageways are laden with poison ivy. And be sure to walk to the top of the battery for a spectacular view, then make your way down a winding path to the beach. “Rockaway!” is a not only an exciting artistic venture but a terrific exploration of the past, present, and future of the area, so decimated by Hurricane Sandy but even more determined to rebuild its way of life.

Janet Cardiff’s captivating sound installation continues through August 17 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

(The exhibition is supplemented by a satellite show of works by more than seventy artists — from Marina Abramović and Ryan McNamara to Michael Stipe and Laurie Simmons, from Doug Aitken and Olaf Breuning to Olafur Eliasson and Ugo Rondinone — at Rockaway Beach Surf Club. There are several ways to get to Fort Tilden, all of which involve multiple modes of transportation. You can take the $3.50 Rockaway ferry from Pier 11 downtown to Beach 108th St., then get on the Q22 bus, or take the A train to Broad Channel, switch for the shuttle, then get the Q22 at 116th St. None of the options are quick and easy, but the ferry ride does go past Coney Island and the Statue of Liberty and under the Verazzano-Narrows Bridge. Yes, it’s a hassle, but it’s well worth it.)