Sarah Sze will discuss her LaGuardia installation, Shorter Than the Day, at special talk on April 25 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Who:Sarah Sze,Teju Cole What:Public Art Fund Talk Where:The Great Hall at the Cooper Union, 7 East Seventh St. at Third Ave. When: Thursday, April 25, free with advance RSVP, 6:30 Why: In the poem “Because I could not stop for Death —,” Emily Dickinson writes, “We paused before a House that seemed / A Swelling of the Ground – / The Roof was scarcely visible – The Cornice – in the Ground – / Since then – ’tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day / I first surmised the Horses’ Heads / Were toward Eternity –.” Those words about the cycle of life inspired the title of Sarah Sze’s largest monumental installation to date, the site-specific Shorter Than the Day. A joint venture from the Public Art Fund and LaGuardia Gateway Partners, the piece was installed in 2020 as part of a major renovation of LaGuardia Airport’s Terminal B, along with Jeppe Hein’s All Your Wishes, Sabine Hornig’s La Guardia Vistas, and Laura Owens’s I 🍕 NY.
Shorter Than the Day is a tenuous-looking sphere of aluminum and steel wiring holding hundreds of small photos of the New York City sky taken over the course of a single day, featuring shots of clouds, the sun, and the sky in white, blue, purple, yellow, orange, and red, evoking a constellation as well as the passage of time in a place where people tend to always be in a hurry, either to get home or to travel to another destination for work or pleasure. It dangles from the ceiling over an empty space above shops below. The Boston-born, New York City–based artist, whose “Timelapse” exhibit at the Guggenheim dazzled visitors last year with its fragile exploration of impermanence, will be at the Great Hall at the Cooper Union on April 25 at 6:30 to discuss Shorter Than the Day and more with Nigerian American writer and photographer Teju Cole, the award-winning Guggenheim Fellow and author of such books as Open City and Tremor. Admission is free with advance registration; the Public Art Fund talk will not be filmed, but an audio version will be available later.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
A pair of wonderful exhibits that contemplate time and space through striking, fragile visuals come to a close this weekend; be sure to make time to see them.
“Gego: Measuring Infinity” is a career retrospective of Hamburg-born Venezuelan artist Gertrud Goldschmidt, known as Gego. Nearly two hundred works are on view, arranged chronologically and thematically, dating from the early 1950s to the early 1990s; Gego died in 1994 at the age of eighty-two, leaving behind a plethora of sculptures, textiles, drawings, prints, sketches, watercolors, letters, artist’s books, and more. “To visualize a solution is what matters: to make visible that which still does not exist outside of me,” she said.
An architect and engineer who fled the Nazis, Gego used such materials as bronze, steel, aluminum, iron, nylon, copper, plastic, and lead to create three-dimensional structures that are like line drawings in space — she even calls some Drawing without Paper — appearing so delicate that you might think you can blow them apart (but please don’t try). On the floor, on tables, and hanging from the ceiling, the works evoke scientific helixes and nets, with titles that often explain what they are: Cube in Sphere,12 Concentric Circles,Four Red Planes,Eight Squares. Gego’s ink-on-paper pieces play with grids and offer optical illusions that delight the eye.
“Gego: Measuring Infinity” is brilliantly paired with “Sarah Sze: Timelapse,” in which the Boston-born, New York City–based Sze incorporates elements of the Guggenheim’s spiraling Frank Lloyd Wright building — both outside and inside — into complex, spirited installations that explore time and space while revealing much of her creative process. Combining cutting-edge digital technology with tireless handwork and large-scale paintings, Sze invites visitors to marvel at the nearly impossibly detailed works, which feature plants, a pendulum hovering over water, tools, clothespins, thread, ladders, writing implements, coffee cups, tape, lamps, salt, string, wood, cords, mirrors, fans, remote controls, books, dice, and live video feeds and projections. “I often use found objects because they are scaled to me, like a compass for my own body,” Sze says. Be careful where you step; it appears that the constructions can fall apart with one tiny misstep.
Sze’s imagination extends to the titles; works have such names as The Moon’s Gravity Causes the Oceans’ Tides,Travelers Among Streams and Cascades,Images that Images Beget,The Night Sky Is Dark Despite the Vast Number of Stars in the Universe, and Things Caused to Happen (Oculus). As Sze explains, her installations consider “how we mark and measure time — constructing our own personal timelines of memory through images and fragments of experiences that are constantly evolving.” Evoking Gego, Sze also notes, “There is fragility in drawing a line through space; with this one simple powerful gesture, you can occupy an entire space.”
The show concludes at the top tower with 2016’s Timekeeper, a multimedia marvel that gets its own room. Myriad objects and projections are on and surround a desk, offering a look inside the mind of this wildly talented artist, who calls the exhibition “a contemplation on how we mark time and how time marks us.” She adds, “Every exhibition is a timekeeper. Art is a way to have a conversation over time. The show becomes almost like a forensic site for an installation or an archaeology site for a series of works, so you see the process of making, the evidence of that process left over, live in the space.” Happy digging!
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
A masked Prometheus rules over flags at Rockefeller Center celebrating the resiliency of New York City (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The Rink at Rockefeller Center
Forty-Ninth to Fiftieth Sts. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Daily through August 16, free www.rockefellercenter.com
Flags are more political than ever these days, generating heated arguments about the meaning of Confederate symbols, kneeling during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at sports events, and even President Trump’s refusal to order flags to half-staff for coronavirus victims until the death toll headed toward one hundred thousand.
Ohio State University computer science student Henos Efrem depicts diversity and solidarity in his flag (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Rockefeller Center is using flags as a way to heal the city with “The Flag Project,” continuing through August 16 around the periphery of the skating rink, which is currently being used as a place of respite, offering delightful socially distant seating, drinks, and food from the Rainbow Room barbecue booth. (Make sure you wear your mask down there; even golden Prometheus’s face is covered.) Rock Center is usually surrounded by 193 flags, one for each member country in the United Nations. But for just more than two weeks, those have been replaced by flags designed by emerging and established artists, adults and children, to honor how New Yorkers have come together during the pandemic lockdown. Each eight-foot-by-five-foot flag boasts a design celebrating essential workers, the uniqueness of the Big Apple, and/or hope for a promising future. Many of the flags are accompanied by an artist statement you can find on this map.
“The Flag Project” continues at Rockefeller Center through August 16 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
“Flags are employed to guide people through uncertain or dangerous situations. They can be used as a means of communication, signaling, or a way to unite people, for better or for worse,” Marina Abramović says about her contribution, a staggered red line on a white background. “I created a flag which represents the echocardiography (EKG) line of the human heartbeat. . . . The EKG line of my flag represents the resilience of the human spirit in the color red, which symbolizes our blood and is a color I often surround myself with when I need to feel strong. This red line beats across the white flag, which symbolizes surrender. In this moment in human history, I believe we as a society must conduct ourselves with a balance of strength and surrender. We must be strong in the face of the unknown and at the same time we must surrender to changes demanded of society, our politics, and our planet.”
Other commissioned artists include Carmen Herrera, Christian Siriano, Hank Willis Thomas, Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, KAWS, Laurie Anderson, Sanford Biggers, Sarah Sze, Shantell Martin, Steve Powers, and Faith Ringgold, who pays homage to “the life & Breath of Freedom” in her red, white, and blue quiltlike creation.
The flags are, of course, more impressive when there’s some wind blowing them around, allowing them to unfurl; be on the lookout for Ien Boodan’s Henri Matisse- and Keith Haring-inspired design based on “La danse” (“My wish is to have other queer brown boys and girls see this flag waving in public space so that they may know that their bodies are worthy of representation, pleasure, and celebration,” he notes), Karen Margolis’s tiny burned cells (“I explore the changing landscape of both our physical and internal worlds through the arbitrariness of destruction and loss”), Kate Matthiesen’s vivid abstract painting (her intensity takes on greater meaning since she hails from Portland, Oregon), Mario Milosevic’s repetitive half-circles, which support immigrants, language, and unity (“The gradient symbolizes skin tones and diversity, while five color stripes represent five boroughs”), Jonathan Rockefeller’s bright, shining cityscape, Courtney Heather’s group of sneakered feet on a subway near a plastic bag, and Vlad Zadneprianski’s NYC Strong flag, in which masked superheroes are joined by an essential healthcare worker. You’ll also find depictions of Coney Island, sports and cultural events, the Statue of Liberty, water towers, bridges, a salted pretzel, Broadway, mass transit, skyscrapers, a pigeon, and other familiar city sights.
“The Flag Project” features 193 specially designed flags temporarily replacing those of UN countries (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
“Our flag is not just one of many political points of view. Rather, the flag is a symbol of our national unity,” said U.S. Air Force Radio and Television Broadcasting Specialist Adrian Cronauer, best known as the man Robin Williams portrayed in the 1987 film Good Morning, Vietnam.
“A thoughtful mind, when it sees a Nation’s flag, sees not the flag only, but the Nation itself,” longtime Brooklynite Henry Ward Beecher proclaimed. In these flags, one can see the whole of New York as it rises yet again through unimaginable diversity and tragedy, once more a microcosm of America.
I have spent many an hour experiencing the unique work of sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard, walking around her dazzling large-scale wood sculptures at Galerie Lelong and art fairs, outside the Barclays Center, and in Madison Square Park. But it wasn’t until watching Daniel Traub’s hourlong documentary, Ursula von Rydingsvard: Into Her Own — which opens virtually May 29 on Film Forum’s website — that I have come to understand and appreciate her work that much more.
“She is using her own experiences to think about how abstract forms can be evocative and representative of what the human condition is,” arts writer Patricia C. Phillips says in the film. “It’s indisputable that there’s something about Ursula’s process that makes the work incredibly distinctive. And just continuing to pursue that with more and more depth and persistence over the years, it reveals some answers but always this feeling that there is also something being withheld.”
Von Rydingsvard was born in Germany in 1942 to a Polish mother and a severely abusive Ukrainian father; the large family lived in a displaced persons camp after the war, mired in poverty, struggling to survive in makeshift homes where everything was made from wood. “It was just the board between me and the outside world, and I recall my body being right next to the wall, and I could smell, I could feel,” von Rydingsvard remembers about the camp. “And there was a huge difference between what happened within this wooden structure and what happened outside of it, so that there was a kind of safety the wood gave me.”
The family immigrated to a blue-collar town in Connecticut in 1951, where she learned little about art and suffered severe emotional and physical abuse at the hands of her father. She married, moved to California, and had a daughter, Ursie, but left her abusive husband with help from her brother Staś Karoliszyn and moved to SoHo in 1975, determined to become an artist. “Going to New York City woke me up in a way that was jarring and marvelous,” she says. She eventually adopted a labor-intensive process of marking, cutting, and stacking cedar two-by-fours into masterful sculptures with a dedicated team of holders, runners, cutters, and fabricators, forming their own family; they even eat lunch together every day. Traub, who directed, produced, and photographed the film, speaks with such studio personnel as Ted Springer, Vivian Chiu, Morgan Daly, and Sean Weeks-Earp while showing the detailed, grueling yet clearly satisfying work they perform.
Ursula Von Rydingsvard has built her career primarily working with cedar via a laborious process
“Her process is almost medieval,” says Mary Sabbatino, owner of Galerie Lelong, von Rydingsvard’s longtime New York gallery. Traub traces von Rydingsvard’s career from St. Martin’s Dream in Battery Park and Song of a Saint (St. Eulalia) in Buffalo, both from 1980, through a recent Princeton University outdoor commission for which she would be using copper for the first time. She had seen Traub’s short film Xu Bing: Phoenix and so invited Traub to document her 2015 Venice Bienale installation, Giardino Della Marinaressa. That became a short film, and they then decided to collaborate again, documenting the making of the Princeton commission, which led to Into Her Own.
Such friends and colleagues as artists Elka Krajewska, Sarah Sze, and Judy Pfaff, patrons Agnes Gund and Lore Harp McGovern, and Whitney Museum director Adam Weinberg dig deep into von Rydingsvard’s almost proprietary use of materials, her distinction as a rare woman artist creating monumental sculpture, and the concept of time in her oeuvre. Touch is also key, from the many assistants who handle the wood, bronze, and copper in the construction of the work to the people who approach and feel the final product, something she encourages. There’s a wonderful scene in which von Rydingsvard speaks with her beloved second husband, Nobel Prize winner Paul Greengard, discussing nature, beauty, and her Polish heritage. Her daughter tells stories of growing up surrounded by her mother’s process and art, and Von Rydingsvard and Karoliszyn share intimate, frightening details of their father’s abuse as she explains how she was able to turn that pain around to figure out who she was and what she wanted out of life. “I knew I needed to do my work to live,” she says.
I can’t wait until I get outside and see von Rydingsvard’s work again, in person, with this newfound knowledge and understanding of an extraordinary artist. In the meantime, I’ve already watched the documentary twice, inspired by her continuing story.
Traub, a New York-based photographer who codirected the 2014 film The Barefoot Artist (about his mother, artist, activist, and teacher Lily Yeh), and von Rydingsvard will take part in a free, live Q&A with moderator Molly Donovan of the National Gallery of Art on May 31 at 5:00, hosted by Film Forum.
Sarah Sze’s Triple Point (Pendulum) is an architectural wonder (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, sixth floor
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through January 4, $14-$25 (sixteen and under free)
212-708-9400 www.moma.org
The new MoMA is all about making the most of its collection via diversity, which is just what it does with “Surrounds: 11 Installations,” ten key twenty-first-century architectural works, and one from 1998, that have never been displayed at the museum before. The show includes work by living artists from America, Cuba, Germany, Japan, India, Brazil, and the Netherlands, taking up all of the sixth floor. Inspired by her love of nature as a child, Sheila Hicks’s Pillar of Inquiry / Supple Column, which is outside the gallery space, is composed of lushly colored thick strands of acrylic fiber that pour down through the ceiling of MoMA’s top floor, evoking a kind of rainbow beanstalk reaching into the heavens. Hito Steyerl compares climate change to the 2008 financial crisis in Liquidity Inc. in telling the story of former financial analyst Jacob Wood, who became a mixed-martial-arts fighter; viewers sit on torn judo mats, which Steyerl describes as a storm-ravaged raft, while watching DIY-style news reports that are hijacked by masked anarchists. Arthur Jafa’s APEX features eight-plus minutes of 841 fast-moving images focusing on black culture, from Tupac and Miles Davis to Mickey Mouse and Mick Jagger, set to electronic club beats.
Sheila Hicks’s Pillar of Inquiry / Supple Column pours out from above — or reaches into the heavens (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Sou Fujimoto’s Architecture Is Everywhere comprises dozens of miniature constructions made of common objects on small plinths with tiny little white figures on them. Twigs with a woman sitting on a bench and a man standing nearby are accompanied by the statement “The forest is always to me the archetype of architecture.” Screws with figures relaxing on top of them are joined by the words “Different heights are in fact different worlds. A new set of relationships between people.” Visitors contribute to Rivane Neuenschwander’s Work of Days merely by walking through a room of transparent adhesive contact sheets from her studio that collect dust from each of us. Press the button to start Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s The Killing Machine, a kinetic sculpture, based in part on Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” that transforms a dentist visit into an execution, with multiple television screens and a disco ball but no apparent victim.
Two boy sopranos perform as part of Allora & Calzadilla’s Fault Lines in MoMA installation exhibition (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Every hour on the hour between eleven and four, two boy sopranos enter Allora & Calzadilla’s Fault Lines and perform beautiful choral music composed by Guarionex Morales-Matos with confrontational words taken from major literary sources as the singers make their way through a room filled with stone sculptures. The exhibition, which also includes works by Sadie Benning, Mark Manders, and Dayanita Singh, concludes with Sarah Sze’s crowd-pleasing Triple Point (Pendulum), a delicate large-scale intimate circular environment of hundreds of objects, from books, rocks, photographs, and styrofoam cups to water bottles, cracker boxes, lamps, and levels. A tenuously attached pendulum swings from above, in danger of bringing the whole thing down like a wrecking ball, but it never quite makes contact with any of the detritus, which also evokes Sze’s studio. There’s an inviting opening at one side, but viewers know not to step inside this intricately created world, the title of which refers to water’s ability to exist in three states: ice, liquid, and steam. “Surrounds: 11 Installations” bodes well for what the new MoMA has in store.
Sarah Sze has long been creating intricate, fragile ecosystems that feel like a complex construction made of giant toothpicks (and just about anything else she can find) that could come tumbling down with a mere touch. These installations have grown more detailed over time, incorporating high-tech electronic elements while expanding the breadth of its range. Her latest immersive exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar in Chelsea begins outside the gallery and continues in the hallways, large main space, back room, and upstairs, on the walls and the floors and the ceilings. There’s something everywhere, transforming parts of the gallery into her studio, revealing her extraordinary process. Originally a painter who now considers herself a sculptor, the Boston-born, New York-based artist centers the show with Crescent (Timekeeper), an exquisite work consisting of dozens of objects, from ladders, boxes, and rocks to plants, lamps, and bottles. Videos are projected onto torn pieces of paper, including a flying eagle, prowling wolves, the swirling ocean, and a burning fire, enhanced by sound as well, each open in its own internet browser, leaving it up to the viewer to make a narrative.
Sarah Sze reveals some of her methodology in Tanya Bonakdar back room (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
There are no barriers to prevent you from getting too close to the delicate piece; there’s a guard situated on the other side of the room, but Sze trusts us to not wreak havoc. She also shows us what she’s doing; the hallway is filled with her notes, some of the materials she uses (tape, paint, push pins, photographs, videos), while behind Crescent (Timekeeper) is a stack of slowly turning projectors, casting light and shadows everywhere. The back room is a cluttered studio setting with boxes, painted canvases with images stuck on, water bottles, paper towels, and other general detritus — the process has become the work.
A studio space offers viewers a look at Sarah Sze’s creative process (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Upstairs is a room of four gorgeous painting collages, streaks of white paint on the floor forming a half-moon around one, as if beaming in through the skylight. Be sure to get close to the works to experience their startling depth. In the smaller, dark room, Sze lays bare her process of projecting tiny images onto a wall, revealing how she first designs them on a computer, then projects them through a sculptural form and onto the far wall. It’s utterly ingenious and wholly captivating.
Sze’s works are particularly suited to our image-saturated urban life, and especially here in New York City: Her Triple Point (Pendulum) is part of MoMA’s “Surrounds: 11 Installations” exhibition opening next week, her Blueprint for a Landscape can be seen all over the 96th St. stop on the Second Ave. subway, and her birdhouse Still Life with Landscape (Model for a Habitat) was on the High Line in 2012. And in 2006, her partially submersive Corner Plot welcomed people to the Scholars’ Gate entrance to Central Park.
Paint forms a kind of floor sculpture in Sarah Sze show in Chelsea (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
In her 2018 essay “The Tattered Ruins of the Map: On Sarah Sze’s Centrifuge,” Sze’s friend, award-winning writer Zadie Smith, writes, “Like so much of Sarah Sze’s work, Centrifuge is a complex constellation of elements, in which all constituents present themselves simultaneously. . . . After the rupture, after the apocalypse, amid the ruin of cables and wires, someone might ask: what was the purpose of all of those images within and through which we lived?” This is true of her current Chelsea show, as Sze merges disparate components and artistic disciplines, both analog and digital, to forge a deep dive into the nature of time, space, and memory in a chaotic age.
The Frieze New York art fair takes place May 2-5 at Randall’s Island Park, where tickets run up to $85.50 with ferry service and a magazine subscription. But you can get a free taste at Rockefeller Center, where Frieze New York and Tishman Speyer have partnered for Frieze Sculpture, an exhibition of public works by fourteen artists, with pieces lining Rockefeller Plaza outside and a few hidden away in lobbies. The participating artists are Nick Cave, Aaron Curry, Jose Dávila, Walter De Maria, Rochelle Goldberg, Goshka Macuga, Ibrahim Mahama, Joan Miró, Paulo Nazareth, Jaume Plensa, Pedro Reyes, Kiki Smith, Sarah Sze, and Hank Willis Thomas. The display is curated by Brett Littman of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, whose choices were inspired by Noguchi’s 1940 News on the facade of the Associated Press building as well as the 1934 Diego Rivera mural that the Rockefellers destroyed because it included an image of Lenin.
Nick Cave, Untitled, 2018 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
One of the themes linking many of the works is that of protest, of speaking out to fight the status quo and to initiate change. Paulo Nazareth’s DRY CUT [from Blacks in the Pool — Tommie] depicts a larger-than-life cutout of Tommie Smith raising his gloved right hand while accepting his Olympic medal in 1968. An untitled piece by Nick Cave features an arm with a fist at the end emerging from an old gramophone speaker. Jaume Plensa’s monumental Behind the Walls is a huge white head with disembodied hands covering the eyes, as if refusing to see what is happening. Joan Miró’s Porte II consists of two slanted doors with a long chain dangling in between, as if a threat of punishment.
Goshka Macuga, International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, Configuration 25, First Man: Yuri Gagarin, 2016 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Rochelle Goldberg’s Cannibal Junkie and Kiki Smith’s Rest Upon are reminders of humanity’s connection to nature — and what might occur if we’re not more careful. Ibrahim Mahama has removed the nearly two hundred flags of UN countries that surround the skating rink and replaced them with fifty ratty flags made of jute in Ghana, evoking global poverty. Hank Willis Thomas’s Harriet and Annie (Capri) and Josephine and Kazumi (Real Red) offer passersby a public platform to share their thoughts. And Goshka Macuga’s Institute of Institutional Co-operation, seen below Dean Cromwell’s 1946 mural The Story of Transportation, shows just what we are capable of.
Paulo Nazareth, DRY CUT [from Blacks in the Pool — Tommie], (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
There will be several family programs, on alternate Sundays at 10:30 am, held in conjunction with the sculpture display. On May 12, Noguchi educators will lead a “3D: Build Up!” tour of the sculptures for four-year-olds (advance registration required). On May 26, “Your Neighborhood: Public Art” offers a guided tour for five- and six-year-olds, followed by a model-making workshop (advance registration required). On June 9, “Figures: Strike a Pose” consists of a tour and a workshop for children ages seven to eleven with advance RSVP. And on June 23, the drop-in “Get the Scoop: Stories and Art” offers children two to eleven the opportunity to explore the exhibit and make art in response to what they experience.
